Comte, Auguste (1798–1857)

Auguste Comte named sociology and established the French realist approach to the subject. He was born Isidore Auguste Marie François‐Xavier Comte on January 19, 1798 in the French Mediterranean city of Montpellier during the aftermath of the great French Revolution. In his early teens he rejected the conservative Roman Catholic monarchist views of his parents and declared himself a republican and a free thinker. A prodigy in mathematics, at 15 he passed the nationally competitive entrance exams for the prestigious École Polytechnique, but had to wait a year until he met the minimum age of admission. A charismatic student leader, in April 1816 Comte was expelled from that school and Paris when a student demonstration was used as an excuse to purge anti‐monarchist students. Dropping his first name, he returned to Paris as Auguste Comte in July.