Joseph Ernest Renan, the French critic and historian, was born in Tréguier, Brittany. He studied for the priesthood at seminaries in Paris but left the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in 1845 to devote himself to secular teaching and writing. He contributed to the Revue des deux mondes from 1851 and the Journal des débats from 1853. He received a docteur ès lettres in 1852, was elected a member of the Académie des Inscriptions in 1856, and was elected to the Académie Française in 1878. He was appointed professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France in 1862, but the course was then immediately suspended until 1870. In 1884 he became administrator of the Collège de France.

Renan's abandonment of his priestly calling was largely determined by the doubts engendered by his philological study of the Bible. After leaving the seminary, he was strongly influenced by...