Georges Palante

Georges Toussaint Léon Palante (20 November 1862 – 5 August 1925) was a French philosopher and sociologist. He championed aristocratic individualist views akin to those of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, and stood against Émile Durkheim’s holism, arguing for methodological individualism.

Life

Born in Saint-Laurent-Blangy, Pas-de-Calais, Palante was the son of Émile Palante, an accountant from Liège. His older brother, Émile, died when Palante was five. He excelled in Latin at the college of Arras, then earned his bachelor’s degree at Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Douai.

In 1885, he began teaching philosophy in Aurillac, where he met Louise Genty, marrying her three years later; their daughter Germaine was born in 1890. He studied in Châteauroux from 1886 to 1888, earning his agrégation in philosophy in 1888. Separating from his first wife in 1890, he taught at the Lycée de Saint-Brieuc in Brittany, then in Valenciennes, La Rochelle, and Niort. In 1893, he translated a work by Theobald Ziegler and started publishing articles.

He returned to the Lycée de Saint-Brieuc in 1898, remaining there for the rest of his teaching career, while continuing to write articles and essays. He compiled these into books, including Combat pour l’individu (1904) and La Sensibilité individualiste (1909). In 1907, he drafted a doctoral thesis for the Sorbonne that was never approved; he published it as Antinomies entre l’individu et la société in 1912, expanding it into Pessimisme et individualisme in 1914.

In 1908, he ran unsuccessfully as a socialist candidate in municipal elections. He succeeded Jules de Gaultier at the philosophy journal Mercure de France, holding the post for thirteen years. In 1916, he befriended writer Louis Guilloux. Palante lived a bohemian life, drinking heavily and famously grading students’ essays in a local brothel.

He married his second wife, Louise Pierre, in 1923 and retired from teaching the following year. On 5 August 1925, he died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. The reasons are uncertain, but he had acromegaly, diagnosed in his student years, a painful degenerative disease with no cure at the time.

Philosophy

A thorough individualist, Palante admired Nietzsche and took early interest in Sigmund Freud’s work. He criticized the “herd instinct” of the masses, which he believed stifled individual development. Yet he did not oppose social networks, insisting his philosophy aimed not to destroy society for the individual but to build new forms of social interaction. In sociology, he rejected Émile Durkheim’s holistic model.

Political ideology

Politically, he was initially close to socialist ideas but grew critical of Marxist state socialism, though he still ran as a socialist candidate in 1908. He rejected the anarchist label, though his ideas are often seen as anarchist or libertarian. They share ground with classical liberalism in defining the individual and opposing trade barriers, but he diverged by arguing that individual being is not shaped by rational choice, as social determinism is always at work. Economically, he opposed capitalists profiting at the expense of the poor and advocated a “politics of the belly.”

Influence

Louis Guilloux wrote Souvenirs sur Georges Palante and modeled his character Cripure (short for Critique de la raison pure) in the novel Le Sang noir on Palante, also placing Palante’s ideas in other characters’ mouths. Palante is cited in a footnote of Albert Camus’ The Rebel. Jean Grenier, Camus’ philosophy teacher, met Palante and devoted a full chapter to him in Les Grèves.

André Gide quotes Palante on the first page of Lafcadio’s Adventures, a novel about the unmotivated crime; the quote, from a 1912 publication, reads: “Pour ma part, mon choix est fait. J’ai opté pour l’athéisme social. Cet athéisme, je l’ai ex-primé depuis une quinzaine d’années, dans une série d’ou-vrages...” Michel Onfray’s thesis and first book, Physiologie de Georges Palante, helped revive interest in his work; its 2002 and 2005 reprints were subtitled portrait d’un nietzschéen de gauche.

Palante’s writings include Précis de Sociologie (1901), Combat pour l’individu (1904), La Sensibilité individualiste (1909), Les Antinomies entre l’individu et la société (1912), La Philosophie du bovarysme (1912), Autour d’une thèse refusée en Sorbonne (1912), Pessimisme et individualisme (1914), and Du nouveau en politique ! Des problèmes nouveaux ! Des partis nouveaux.