FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE. - French literary critic, b. Toulon 19 July 1849, d. Paris 9 Dec. 1906. He began collaborating with the *Revue des Deux Mondes* in 1875, becoming its director in 1895. In 1886 he was appointed *maître de conférences* at the École normale supérieure in Paris. A member of the Académie française from 1895.
A profound connoisseur of 17th-century French literature, possessed of wide philosophical and scientific reading, which (rather than elaborating with independent thought) he asserted in his constant polemical effort, Brunetière repeatedly sought to reconcile Darwin and Spencer with the history of literary genres, arriving at bold but poorly founded inferences. His critical methodology was empirical, more than anything bound to an eminently classicist, anti-decadent, anti-impressionist evaluation of literature, increasingly aligning with the poetic and cultural taste of the French Renaissance (see the 9 vols. of *Études critiques sur l'histoire de la littérature française* [Paris 1880-1925]; *Le roman naturaliste* [ibid. 1883]; *Histoire de la littérature française classique* [ibid. 1904]).
Of great importance for the history of French Catholic thought and culture is his return to religion, whose ideal stages are documented in *La science et la religion* [ibid. 1895]. Skillfully bending and resolving within Christian thought the conclusions of Comte’s positivism, he waged a finely honed battle against Renan (v. *Cinq lettres sur E. R.* [ibid. 1903], and *Pages sur E. R.* [ibid. 1924]), in favour of the Catholic bourgeois social tradition of France (cf. his “social and political *raisons*” in *Discours de combat* [ibid. 1900-1907]), in favour of a “classico-Catholic restoration” of the French spirit.