René Noël Théophile Girard (; French: [ʁəne nɔɛl teɔfil ʒiʁaʁ]; 25 December 1923 – 4 November 2015) was a French academic best known for developing mimetic theory, which posits that human desire is fundamentally imitative, leading to rivalry, violence and the scapegoat mechanism as foundations of religion and culture. Holding academic appointments primarily in literature departments in the United States, his interdisciplinary work influenced fields ranging from theology to economics to psychology and cultural studies.
Girard first outlined the foundations of mimetic theory in his debut book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), a work of literary criticism, and extended it to anthropology in Violence and the Sacred (1972). Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), considered his magnum opus, synthesized these ideas while applying them to a reinterpretation of Christian scriptures. Later accessible works, such as The Scapegoat (1982) and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999) further elaborated his biblical insights.
In 2005, he was elected to the Académie Française, one of its 40 "immortals".
Girard was born in Avignon on 25 December 1923. René Girard was the second son of historian Joseph Girard.
He studied medieval history at the École des Chartes, Paris, where the subject of his thesis was "Private life in Avignon in the second half of the 15th century" ("La vie privée à Avignon dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle").
In 1947, Girard went to Indiana University Bloomington on a one-year fellowship. He received his PhD in 1950 on the subject "American Opinion of France, 1940–1943". He stayed at Indiana University until 1953.
Although his research was in history, he was also assigned to teach French literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation as a literary critic by publishing influential essays on such authors as Albert Camus and Marcel Proust.
Girard occupied positions at Duke University and Bryn Mawr College from 1953 to 1957, after which he moved to Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he became a full professor in 1961. In that year, he also published his first book: Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 1966). For several years, he moved back and forth between the State University of New York at Buffalo and Johns Hopkins University. Books he published in this period include La Violence et le sacré (1972; Violence and the Sacred, 1977) and Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (1978; Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 1987).
In 1966, as the Chair of the Romance Languages Department at Johns Hopkins, Girard helped Richard A. Macksey, the Director of the newly founded Humanities Center, to organize a colloquium on French thought. The event was titled "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" and was held from 18 to 21 October 1966. Featuring prominent French academics such as Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida, it is often credited with having launched the post-structuralist movement.
In 1981, Girard became Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1995. During this period, he published Le Bouc émissaire (1982), La route antique des hommes pervers (1985), A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (1991) and Quand ces choses commenceront ... (1994).
In 1985, he received his first honorary degree from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands; several others followed.
In 1990, a group of scholars founded the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) with the goal to "explore, criticize, and develop the mimetic model of the relationship between violence and religion in the genesis and maintenance of culture." This organization organizes a yearly conference devoted to topics related to mimetic theory, scapegoating, violence, and religion. Girard was Honorary Chair of COV&R. Co-founder and first president of the COV&R was the Roman Catholic theologian Raymund Schwager.
René Girard's work has inspired interdisciplinary research projects and experimental research such as the Mimetic Theory project sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.
On 17 March 2005, Girard was elected to the Académie française, taking the seat left vacant by Dominican priest Ambroise-Marie Carré.
René Girard's wife, Martha (née McCullough), was American; they were married from 1952 until his death. They had two sons, Martin Girard (born 1955) and Daniel Girard (born 1957), and a daughter, Mary Brown-Girard (born 1960).
Girard converted from agnosticism to Christianity while reading Dostoevsky, in preparation for his first book in 1961. For the rest of his life, he was a practising Catholic.
On 4 November 2015, Girard died at his residence in Stanford, California, at the age of 91.
Girard's first main contribution is in the psychology of desire. Girard claimed that human desire functions imitatively, or mimetically, rather than arising as the spontaneous byproduct of human individuality, as much of theoretical psychology had assumed. Girard proposed that human development proceeds triangularly from a model of desire that indicates some object of desire as desirable by desiring it themselves. We copy this desire for the object of the model and appropriate it as our own, most often without recognizing that the source of this desire comes from another apart from ourselves completing the triangle of mimetic desire. This process of appropriation of desire includes (but is not limited to) identity formation, the transmission of knowledge and social norms, and material aspirations which all have their origin in copying the desires of others who we take, consciously or unconsciously, as models for desire.