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Tarde’s own father (1797–1850) served as a military officer until his two brothers were killed in
the wars of Napoleon, but then turned to law under family pressures and finished his life as a judge in
Sarlat. At forty-four he married the nineteen-year-old daughter of another established Sarlat family,
Anne-Aline Roux. Jean-Gabriel was their only child. His father died when he was only seven, and he
was raised by his mother, to whom he remained exceptionally close throughout her life.
Tarde attended a school in Sarlat 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.
Leaving school at seventeen, Tarde—like Karl Marx, Claude Bernard, and many other midnineteenth-century
youths—first tried his hand at verse and dramatic pieces. Despite the encomiums
of his sons, 3 however, it seems that the world did not lose a great poet when Tarde forsook his muse
for more prosaic activities. But, again like Marx, Tarde’s later works bore the stamp of these early
literary endeavors.
Tarde was also fascinated by mathematics in his early years, and at one point he considered
attending the Ecole Polytechnique. It was perhaps the applied, ordered training, combined with its
regimented social life, that made him shun the Ecole. From nineteen to twenty-five, however, he
suffered from an eye disease which severely limited his reading. For these several reasons Tarde
acceded to his mother’s wishes and settled on the less demanding study of law. He passed his first
law examinations at the nearby Toulouse Faculty of Law, and then spent one more year (1865) in
Paris—accompanied by his mother—completing his legal studies.
From 1869 to 1894 he held a series of regional court posts in and around Sarlat, but from the outset
he accepted these positions with the view that 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. Cournot’s many contributions,
but particularly his L’enchainement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et l’histoire (1861),
served as a major source of inspiration for Tarde’s thoughts on imitation. Here too, as in Spencer,
was found the analogical thinking which sought to discern general principles underlying physical,
biological, and social phenomena. From Hegel, particularly esteemed in France at this time, Tarde
learned how conflicts and oppositions could in turn create new syntheses. John Stuart Mill provided a
model of logic and science which Tarde always admired but which he felt compelled to transcend.
Tarde would interrupt his walks to jot down the essentials of an insight, and by the time he was thirty,
he had drafted a series of notes to himself containing the essentials of his “laws of imitation” as well
as the outlines of the conceptual framework elaborated in his many later works.
In 1877, Tarde married Mlle Marthe Bardy-Delisle, daughter of a magistrate, who gave him three
sons. They enjoyed the social life, such as existed, of the regional high society. As a recognized
leader in conversation and wit, as well as more serious thought, Tarde was called upon to prepare
poetry or comedies for various occasions. He thus penned some dozen comedies and vaudeville acts,
several of which even found their way into print.
Although he liked to minimize the importance of his professional activities, these led him to an