Georges Palante - Life

Life

Palante was born in Blangy-les-Arras in the Pas-de-Calais, 20 November 1862. His father, Emile Palante, was an accountant from Liège. Palante's older brother, Emile, died when he was only five years old. He studied successively at the college of Arras, where he excelled in Latin, then at Lycée Louis-le-Grand where he earned his bachelor's degree.

He obtained a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Douai. In 1885, he began his career as professor of philosophy at Aurillac, where he met his future wife, Louise Genty, whom he married three years later. The couple had a daughter, Germaine, in 1890. Between 1886 and 1888, he studied in Châteauroux. In 1888 he received his Agrégation in philosophy.

He separated from his first wife in 1890 and was appointed to teach at the Lycée de Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, then in the following years at Valenciennes, La Rochelle and Niort. In 1893, he translated a work by Theobald Ziegler and began to publish articles. He returned in 1898 to the Lycée de Saint-Brieuc, at which he worked for the remainder of his teaching career. Meanwhile, he continued to work on his philosophical ideas, publishing articles and essays in journals. He published collections of his articles in various books, notably Combat pour l'individu (Fight for the Individual) (1904) and La Sensibilité individualiste (The Individualist Sensibility) (1909)

In 1907, he completed a draft doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, but it was never authorized. However, he published the draft under the title Antinomies entre l'individu et la société (Antinomies between the individual and society) in 1912, expanding it two years later under the title Pessimisme et individualisme (Pessimism and Individualism).

In 1908, he stood in municipal elections as a socialist candidate but was not elected. He took over from Jules de Gaultier at the philosophy journal Mercure de France, holding the position for 13 years. In 1916, he befriended the writer Louis Guilloux.

During this period he lived a bohemian lifestyle, drinking heavily and, notoriously, marking his students' essays in a local brothel. He married his second wife, Louise Pierre, in 1923 and retired from teaching a year later.

On 5 August 1925 he died from a self-inflicted bullet wound to the head. The reasons for Palante's suicide are not certain, but he is known to have been suffering from acromegaly, a condition diagnosed when he was a student. A severe degenerative disease, which had no cure at time, it was making his life more and more painful.