He was the chief theoretical influence on French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism.

In 1841, Taine, then aged 13, lost his father[2] and was sent to a boarding school in Paris, in the Institution Mathé, whose classes were conducted in the Collège Bourbon, located in the Batignolles district.

[2] Among the 24 students in the letters section, he is the classmate of Francisque Sarcey (who, in his Souvenirs de jeunesse ("Memories of Youth") painted a portrait of young Hippolyte at the Rue d'Ulm campus) and Edmond About.

But his attitude—he had a reputation for stubbornness—and his intellectual independence from then fashionable ideas— embodied by Victor Cousin—caused him to fail the examination for the national Concours d'Agrégation in philosophy in 1851.

Conceived by Taine with the aim of understanding the France of his day, the six-volume work analysed the causes of the French Revolution from an original, long-term perspective.

In particular, Taine denounced the artificiality of the revolution's political constructions (the excessively abstract and rational ideas of Robespierre, for example), which, in his mind, violently contradicted the natural and slow growth of the institutions of a State.

In 1885, while visiting the Hospital de la Salpêtrière, Taine and Joseph Delboeuf attended a session of hypnotism in which Jean-Martin Charcot induced vesications (blistering) by suggestion.

[10] Taine had bought the Boringes property in Menthon-Saint-Bernard (in Haute-Savoie), in order to work there every summer, and had served as councillor of the commune.

While admired by liberals like Anatole France, it has served to inform the conservative view of the Revolution, since Taine rejected its principles[11][12] as well as the French Constitution of 1793, on account of their being dishonestly presented to the people.

In his other writings Taine is known for his attempt to provide a scientific account of literature, a project that has linked him to sociological positivists, although there were important differences.

[18][19] Armin Koller has written that in this Taine drew heavily from the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, although this has been insufficiently recognised,[20] while the Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazán has suggested that a crucial predecessor to Taine's idea was Germaine de Staël's work on the relationship between art and society.

Taine was criticised, including by Émile Zola who owed a great deal to him, for not taking sufficiently into account the individuality of the artist.