coldhearted scientist وداد

Nietzche did not get tenure, it is said, due to the committee’s disinterest in The Birth of Tragedy, his tenure book; he never got another academic job. Now it appears that Taine failed the agrégation. From the Johns Hopkins Guide:

Although he was clearly the outstanding student of his class, he failed his final examination for the agrégation because the conservative examiners disapproved of his lesson on Spinoza’s moral system. This episode would have a profound effect upon Taine’s career and on his attitude toward the dominant philosophers of his day. Forced to abandon his goal of university teaching, he taught secondary classes and gave private lessons, which allowed him time to produce … important works…. For all his influential work and his active entry into the social life of the Parisian intellectuals, Taine was mistrusted by positivists, naturalists, and Romantics alike. It was not until his election to the Académie Française in 1878, on his third attempt, that he was accepted by his contemporaries as a major force in nineteenth-century French thought. [W. VanderWolk]

Axé.