[1] Desiring a teaching career, he entered for examination at the École Normale Supérieure, but failed, and the outbreak of war in 1870 prevented him trying again.

[2] In 1886 Brunetière was appointed professor of French language and literature at the École Normale,[1] a singular honour for one who had not passed through the academic mill; and later he presided with distinction over various conferences at the Sorbonne and elsewhere.

[2] The published works of Brunetière consist largely of reprinted papers and lectures.

The first volume of L'Évolution de genres dans l'histoire de la littérature, lectures in which a formal classification, founded on Darwinism, is applied to the phenomena of literature, appeared in 1890; and his later works include a series of studies (2 vols, 1894) on the evolution of French lyrical poetry during the 10th century, a history of French classic literature begun in 1904, a monograph on Honoré de Balzac (1906), and various pamphlets of a polemical nature dealing with questions of education, science and religion.

That year, however, he published an article, "Après une visite au Vatican" (After a Visit to the Vatican), in which he argued that science was incapable of providing a convincing social morality and that faith alone could achieve that result.