·ideas

Race, milieu and moment

Taine is bestknown now for his attempt at a scientific account of literature, based on thecategories of race, milieu, and moment. Taine used these words in French (race,milieu et moment); the terms have become widespread in literary criticism inEnglish, but are used in this context in senses closer to the French meaningsof the words than the English meanings, which are, roughly, "nation","environment" or "situation", and "time".

Taine arguedthat literature was largely the product of the author's environment, and thatan analysis of that environment could yield a perfect understanding of the workof literature. In this sense he was a sociological positivist (see AugusteComte), though with important differences. Taine did not mean race in thespecific sense now common, but rather the collective cultural dispositions thatgovern everyone without their knowledge or consent. What differentiatesindividuals within this collective "race", for Taine, was milieu: theparticular circumstances that distorted or developed the dispositions of aparticular person. The "moment" is the accumulated experiences ofthat person, which Taine often expressed as momentum; to some later critics,however, Taine's conception of moment seemed to have more in common withZeitgeist.

Though Taine coined and popularized the phrase "race, milieu, etmoment," the theory itself has roots in earlier attempts to understand theaesthetic object as a social product rather than a spontaneous creation ofgenius. Taine seems to have drawn heavily on the philosopher Johann GottfriedHerder's ideas of volk (people) and nation in his own concept of race; theSpanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazán has suggested that a crucialpredecessor to Taine's idea was the work of Germaine de Staël on therelationship between art and society.

Politics

Taine wascriticized, in his own time and after, by both conservatives and liberals; hispolitics were idiosyncratic, but had a consistent streak of skepticism towardthe left; at the age of 20, he wrote that "the right of property isabsolute." Peter Gay describes Taine's reaction to the Jacobins asstigmatization, drawing on The French Revolution, in which Taine argues:

Some of theworkmen are shrewd Politicians whose sole object is to furnish the public withwords instead of things; others, ordinary scribblers of abstractions, or evenignoramuses, and unable to distinguish words from things; imagine that they areframing laws by stringing together a lot of phrases.

This reaction led Taine to reject the French Constitution of 1793 as aJacobin document, dishonestly presented to the French people. Taine rejectedthe principles of the Revolution in favor of the individualism of his conceptsof regionalism and race, to the point that one writer calls him one of"the most articulate exponents of both French nationalism andconservatism."

Other writers, however, have argued that, though Taine displayed increasingconservatism throughout his career, he also formulated an alternative torationalist liberalism that was influential for the social policies of theThird Republic. Taine's complex politics have remained hard to read; thoughadmired by liberals like Anatole France, he has been the object of considerabledisdain in the twentieth century, with a few historians working to revive hisreputation.