Faguet, Émile
Faguet, Émile
(āmēl` fägā`), 1847–1916, French literary critic and historian. His prolific studies stimulated interest in French intellectual history of the 17th, 18th, and 19th cent. His major work is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (5 vol., 1911–13).Faguet, Émile
Born Sept. 17, 1847, in La Roche-sur-Yon, department of Vendée; died June 7, 1916, in Paris. French literary historian. Member of the Académie Française from 1900.
A follower of H. Taine, Faguet specialized in the literary portrait (Voltaire, 1894) and studies of individual writers (Flaubert, 1899). He focussed on isolated aspects of literary works in books such as Rousseau Versus Molière (1912). The series The Sixteenth Century (1894), The Seventeenth Century (1885), and A History of French Literature (1900–01) are noted for their conservatism and their depreciation of social criticism of the arts.