Taine was born into a professional middle-class family; his father was a lawyer. He was educated privately at home until shortly after his father's death; thereafter, he went with his mother to live in Paris and became an outstanding pupil at the Collège Bourbon and then at the highly prestigious École Normale. He gained his licenceès-lettres (preliminary degree) in 1848 and began to study for his agrégation (advanced degree) in philosophy, one of his dominant interests. He already held unorthodox intellectual views. He had apparently lost his Christian faith by the age of 15, and his youthful rationalist attitude led him to admire the ideas of the Idéologue (Ideology) philosophers who held that all knowledge must be based on sense experience, on observation, and on controlled experiment; this overriding conviction guided his later career. He was also already attracted by the metaphysical ideas of Hegel and Spinoza, which inspired in him a desire to find a total explanation of the causal forces of life and the universe.

In contrast to these views, his new teachers of philosophy in Paris held the prevailing philosophical doctrine of eclecticism; consequently—and not without creating some scandal in academic circles—Taine's agrégation jury failed him in 1851. He then taught for brief periods at Nevers and Poitiers but in 1852 applied for leave of absence. Returning to Paris, he devoted himself to preparing his two dissertations for the doctorate in literature: De Personis Platonicis (“Concerning Plato's Characters”) and his first well-known work, a study of La Fontaine (1853; revised and published in 1861 as La Fontaine et ses fables 【“La Fontaine and His Fables”】).

He gained his doctoral degree in May 1853 and began an essay on Livy, Essai sur Tite-Live (1856), which, despite further criticism of his philosophical outlook, won a prize from the Académie Française. During this period he was also attending lectures in science and gathering the knowledge of physiology that he utilized later in his work on psychology. Reluctant to return to full-time teaching, he lived by private tutoring and as a man of letters. Even a holiday in 1854, necessitated by ill health, was turned to advantage: in 1855 he published a literary guidebook based on his travels, Voyage aux eaux des Pyrénées (“Voyage to the Waters of the Pyrenees”).

More important for his own development, he contributed frequent literary and historical articles to such leading journals as the Revue des Deux Mondes, the Revue de l'Instruction Publique, and the Journal des Débats, articles that provided the basis for three books further enhancing the reputation he had gained by his works on La Fontaine and Livy. These were Les Philosophes français du XIX^e siècle (1857; “The French Philosophers of the 19th Century”), a critical polemic against the prevailing eclectic philosophy of Victor Cousin and his group, which also provides in its later chapters a lucid exposition of his own Positivist theory of knowledge; a first collection of Essais de critique et d'histoire (1858; “Essays of Criticism and History”); and his notable Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 4 vols. (1863–64; History of English Literature, 1871).

The celebrated “Introduction” to the Histoire gives a succinct statement of Taine's approach to literary and cultural history and a basic text for the understanding of his scientific attitude to literary criticism. The same great causal factors underlie any cultural artifact of a given age and society, he claims. By studying the literary documents one may understand the psychology of their author, and this, complemented by scrutiny of the facts of his life and personality, illuminates the “faculté maîtresse,” the predominant characteristic that determines his work; this, in turn, can then be “explained” by reference to three great conditioning facts (race, milieu, and moment), “la race,” “le milieu,” and “le moment”; i.e., the writer's inherited personality, his social, political, and geographical background, and the historical situation in which he writes. It is evident that Taine's interest here is less in literature itself than in historical causation and psychology, and his method may well be thought to have encouraged in his admirers an excessive preoccupation with biography and literary history at the expense of critical judgment, though Taine's own abilities as a critic were considerable.

Throughout the 1860s Taine continued indefatigably his researches and his writing. Even his travels (to England, Italy, Germany, and The Netherlands) were utilized to gather notes for future work—for example, his closely observed if simplifying Notes sur l'Angleterre (1872; Notes on England, 1872); and even his life in Paris led to his Notes sur Paris: Vie et opinions de M. Frédéric-Thomas Graindorge (1867; Notes and Opinions of Mr. Frédérick-Graindorge, 1875), perhaps the most personal and entertaining of his books.

In 1864, by a happy decision of Napoleon III, he was appointed to succeed Viollet-le-Duc, the architect, as professor of aesthetics and of the history of art at the École des Beaux-Arts (Beaux-Arts, École des) in Paris, where he lectured for 20 years. The lecture courses, which he eventually published, include Philosophie de l'art (1865; The Philosophy of Art, 1865), De l'idéal dans l'art (1867; “On the Ideal in Art”), and those on the philosophy of art in Italy (1866), The Netherlands (1868), and Greece (1869).

This post also gave him a security that favoured his more protracted scientific studies and helped make the later 1860s a happy and fertile period in his life. He published, in addition to the works named, his second volume of essays, Nouveaux essais de critique et d'histoire (1865; “New Essays of Criticism and History”), including his perceptive articles on Racine, Balzac, and Stendhal (whose psychological acuity he was one of the first to admire). In 1868 he married Mlle Denuelle, the daughter of a well-known architect and artist, by whom he had a son and a daughter.

In 1870 he published the two volumes of De l'intelligence (On Intelligence, 1871), a major work in the discipline of psychology, which had interested him since his youth. His devotion to science is most fully illustrated here; he opposes the speculative and introspective approach of the eclectics and outlines a scientific methodology for the study of human personality that established him, alongside thinkers such as Théodule Ribot and Pierre Janet, as a founder of empirical psychology. Though much of the work is now outdated, in its day it helped to modify methods of research by its emphasis on experiment, the search for causes, the study of pathological cases, and the physiological basis of personality. It also intensified opposition to his ideas, and he was angrily accused of holding a strictly determinist and materialist view of man—not altogether unfairly, even though he claimed to reject materialism and argued that moral responsibility was compatible with determinism as he conceived it.

The work also develops his long-standing attempt to fuse Positivism and Hegelian Idealism and to provide a method for a scientific metaphysics. Through such a metaphysics, he maintained, the final causes of life itself might be discovered; its insights inspired him to an exalted pantheistic trust in nature that is movingly expressed in essays on Marcus Aurelius (in Nouveaux essais) and Iphigeneia (in Derniers essais).

Germany's invasion and defeat of France in 1870–71 had a profound impact upon Taine (already prepared in his mind by a visit in 1869 that had disabused him of his earlier enthusiasm for German civilization). The French defeat, in his view, sprang from a deep national sickness, and he determined to devote his final years to examining its causes. A shift of interest toward politics is illustrated by a brochure of 1872 on the problems and effects of universal suffrage, but, above all, his approach was historical: to seek the sources of the political instability that he held responsible for his country's plight.

This major reorientation of concern led to his great historical work, Les Origines de la France contemporaine (“The Origins of Contemporary France”), a monumental analysis, claiming scientific objectivity (although its factual and interpretative reliability have been challenged). It seeks to show that France's primary fault lay in excessive centralization, originating during the ancien régime, and intensified by the French Revolution, about which he shares and develops Edmund Burke's hostile view. Taine asserted that far from promoting liberty, as most of the French believe, the Revolution merely transferred absolute power to even more illiberal hands. A first volume, on L'Ancien Régime (“The Old Regime”), appeared in 1876, followed by three volumes on the Revolution (1878–85). In 1878 he was also elected to the Académie Française.

To have more time for his self-appointed task he withdrew increasingly from Paris and after 1883 even resigned his professorship. Only one volume of Le Régime moderne (“The Modern Regime”), however, was published in his lifetime (1891), the second volume coming out in November 1893. The entire work was reissued in 1899. There also appeared after his death his Derniers essais de critique et d'histoire (1894; “Last Essays of Criticism and History”) and an unfinished autobiographical and psychological novel, written about 1861, Étienne Mayran (1910). He died in Paris in 1893 and was buried at Menthon-Saint-Bernard.

Taine achieved fame over a wide range of disciplines—as a leading French thinker, as a literary and art critic, and as a historian. His greatest influence upon his contemporaries, however, was as an intellectual leader, one of the most esteemed exponents of 19th-century French positivism, the cult of science in its most devoted, high-minded, and rational form. His work represents a reaction against excessive emotionalism and spiritualist philosophy and was unified by his attempt to apply the scientific method to the study of literature and art, psychology, cultural history, and to ethics and metaphysics. Taine's ideas helped provide a theoretical basis for the literary movement of naturalism; the novel, he argued, should contribute to the scientific understanding of human nature, revealing, like the new scientific psychology he advocated, the physiological and psychological determinants of human behaviour.