Paul Hazard

He received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1910 and became famous for his Ph.D. dissertation La Révolution française et les lettres italiennes (1910).

In 1925 Hazard was appointed to the chair of comparative literature at the Collège de France in Paris.

After finishing his semester of teaching at Columbia in 1940, Hazard voluntarily returned to Nazi occupied France in January 1941.

Later that same year Hazard was nominated to the rectorship of the University of Paris, but was rejected by the Nazis as unacceptable.

Some of his important writings are Histoire illustrée de la littérature française (comp.

This work examined the conflict between 17th-century Neoclassicism and its ideals of order and perfection and the ideas of the Enlightenment.