Gabriel Tarde-Biography

AKA Jean-Gabriel de Tarde
Occupation: Sociologist
Executive summary: Group mind, Theory of Imitation

1843
Gabriel Tarde was born in the small town of Sarlat, about one hundred miles east of Bordeaux. His father’s family own aristocratic particle.

He attened a school operated by Jesuit priests, who offered a rigorous classical training built largely on Latin, Greek, history, and mathematics. While always the first student in his classes, the sensitive young Tarde was pained by the Jesuit discipline, so much so that during his last three years, while a boarder at the school, he once even scaled the wall to escape temporarily. Although Tarde never failed to praise the classical training for binding together the leaders of nation with a common set of values, he retained a permanent distaste for socially imposed discipline whenever it limited individual freedom. The scholastic training also moved him toward a strong emphasis on the role of the intellect as well as an even more hierarchical conception of society than was held by many of his contemporaries.

1860
He left school. He first tried his hand at verse and dramatic pieces and then forsook. He was also fascinated by mathematics and considered attending the Ecole Polytechnique. The applied, ordered training, combined with its regimented social life in Ecole made him shun.

From 1862 to 1868
Tarde suffered from an eye disease which severely limited his reading. Together with the above-mentioned reasons, thus, he settled on the less demanding study of law.

From 1869 to 1894
He held a series of regional court posts in and around Sarlat because his many free hours could be spent at independent study and writing. Tarde developed the habit of walking the banks of the nearby Dordogne river, meditating about the works which he had read and elaborating his own thoughts. By the time of his thirty, he had drafted a series of notes to himself containing the essentials of his “law of imitation” as well as the outlines of the conceptual framework elaborated in his many later works.

1877
He married Mlle Marthe Bardy-Delisle, daughter of a magistrate.

1890
He published his most famous sociological work, The law of imitation.

1893
He became codirector of the Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle journal, until his death in 1904.

1894
He was named director of criminal statistics at the Ministry of Justice in Paris.

1896
He applied his sociological perspective to political matters.

1898
He published Les lois sociales.

1899
He published Les transformations du pouvoir.

1902-1904
He was in a debate with Durkheim.

1904
He planned to undertake a series of empirical social psychological studies on school children with Alfred Binet, but the eye disease of his youth returned once again. He died in this year.