Short answers, pulled from the story.
Hippolyte Taine (the 21st of April 1828 - the 5th of March 1893) was a French historian, critic, and philosopher regarded as the chief theoretical influence on French naturalism and one of the founding practitioners of historicist literary criticism. His method of analyzing literature through the categories of nation, environment, and time shaped writers including Zola, Maupassant, and Bourget.
Taine argued that a literary work is the product of its author's environment, not the spontaneous expression of individual genius. He analyzed literature using three categories: nation, environment or situation, and time. His framework linked him to sociological positivism and founded what became known as literary historicism as a critical movement.
The Origins of Contemporary France is a six-volume historical work Taine began in 1875 and continued until his death in 1893. It analyzes the causes of the French Revolution and argues that the revolution's political constructions were artificially abstract, violating the natural growth of state institutions. The work shaped conservative historiography of the Revolution and was called "a brilliant polemic" by the revisionist historian Alfred Cobban.
Taine was the major theoretical influence behind Zola's naturalist fiction. Critic Philip Walker wrote that page after page of Zola's most memorable writing enacts a mimesis of the interplay between sensation and imagination that Taine had theorized at length. Zola nonetheless criticized Taine for underestimating the individuality of the artist, citing Edouard Manet as his principal example.
Nietzsche referred to Taine in Beyond Good and Evil as "the first of living historians." Taine also shared a correspondence with Nietzsche, making their intellectual relationship one of the notable cross-cultural exchanges in 19th-century European thought.
Taine was buried in the Roc de Chère National Nature Reserve in Talloires, on the shores of Lake Annecy. He had owned the Boringes property in the nearby commune of Menthon-Saint-Bernard in Haute-Savoie, where he spent his summers and served as a local councillor.