Maine De Biran(1766–1824)
Maine de Biran, the French statesman and philosopher, was born Marie François Pierre Gonthier de Biran, receiving the name "Maine" from the name of his family's property (le Maine). He attended the collège at Périgueux, dominated by the secular, moderate constitutional Royalists called Doctrinaires, and excelled there in mathematics. In 1784 he joined the king's guard and in 1789 was wounded defending Louis XVI in a mob uprising. To escape the Reign of Terror, he retired to his estate in 1793 and began intensive psychological and philosophical investigations. In 1797 he was elected to the Council of Five Hundred, and this election of a moderate royalist was a symptom of the beginning of the end of the Reign of Terror. This post and other public duties did not keep him from reaping the fruits of his earlier meditations. He became acquainted with the Idéologues Pierre-Jean Georges Cabanis and Comte Destutt de Tracy by winning first prize in an essay contest sponsored by the Institute of France with the essay L'influence de l'habitude sur la faculté de penser (The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking). He won membership in the institute in 1805 by gaining another first prize, for Mémoire sur la décomposition de la penser (The Analysis of Thought).
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