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interest in the causes of crimes, which, in turn, brought him in contact with the work of Italian<br />
criminologists. The success of racial and geographic theories which Lombroso, Garofalo, Ferri and<br />
others had developed led Tarde to publish a series of articles criticizing the “new Italian school” and<br />
emphasizing the preponderance of social factors—especially socialization and imitation—behind<br />
crime. Several articles were collected for his first book, La criminalité comparée, which soon<br />
established him as a leading criminologist and a leading spokesman of what later came to be referred<br />
to as the “French school.” He collaborated regularly with the Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle,<br />
founded in 1886 by Dr. Lacassagne, and in 1893 he became codirector of the journal. His last major<br />
statement on criminology, however, was La philosophie pénale, and after it appeared in 1890 he<br />
published practically nothing in this area although he continued to attend criminological congresses<br />
and to serve as codirector of the Archives until his death in 1904.<br />
Also in 1890 appeared what was to become his most famous sociological work, Les lois de<br />
l’imitation, sections of which had already circulated in the Revue Philosophique in the 1880’s. In<br />
1893 he brought out a short work, Les transformations du droit, examining general legal questions<br />
from a sociological perspective. Thus, by the 1890’s Tarde was reasonably well established as a<br />
criminologist and sociologist, and as a “mere provincial magistrate” he stimulated numerous<br />
favorable comments on the quality of personnel in the French judicial system. He had made no efforts<br />
to advance his legal career—which would necessitate leaving Sarlat—so long as his mother was<br />
alive, but after her death in 1891 he began to consider moving. Two years later, the Minister of<br />
Justice, Antonin Dubost, invited Tarde to prepare a report on the organization of criminal statistics,<br />
and in 1894 Tarde was named director of criminal statistics at the Ministry of Justice in Paris. As in<br />
his positions at Sarlat, Tarde was not obliged to spend more than a limited portion of his time at the<br />
Ministry. He drafted annual reports for the government and served as the official representative to<br />
congresses of the International Statistical Institute in Saint Petersburg and Copenhagen, but in this last<br />
decade of his life, spent in Paris, he became involved in a wide range of other activities. 4<br />
No sociology was taught in Paris inside the official university system until Durkheim was called<br />
from Bordeaux in 1902, but social questions drew enormous public attention throughout the 1890’s.<br />
As perhaps the most eminent representative of the new science in the capital, Tarde was in constant<br />
demand to lecture—never at the university, for reasons that we shall examine presently, but in a<br />
whole array of newly created teaching and research institutions. 5 Initially, for such lectures, he drew<br />
on sections of two major volumes that filled out his general conceptual framework: La logique<br />
sociale (1894), and L’opposition universelle (1896). In the first he dealt more systematically with<br />
social institutions (especially religion and the economy) than he had in his Laws of Imitation, and in<br />
the second he developed more completely than in any other work the role of conflict as both a<br />
creative and a destructive social force. The Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques asked him to present<br />
a course every two years, and in 1896 he applied his sociological perspective to political matters.<br />
The materials he presented there, combined with those for another course at the Collège Libre des<br />
Sciences Sociales, were later published as Les transformations du pouvoir (1899). He presented a<br />
summary outline of his general framework at the Collège Libre the following year, published in 1898<br />
as Les lois sociales. 6 He offered a course at the Ecole Russe des Hautes Etudes Sociales, presented<br />
papers at the Société de Sociologie de Paris and the Institut International de Sociologie, and<br />
continued to publish widely in philosophical, sociological, and general intellectual journals. Two<br />
volumes of collected essays were also brought out in these same years, Essais et mélanges<br />
sociologiques (1895), and Etudes de psychologie sociale (1898).<br />
Then, in 1899, when the chair in modern philosophy at the Collège de France was vacated with the