Background
Gustave Belot was born 7 August 1859 at Strasbourg, the son of a professor in the faculty of letters at Lyons.
Gustave Belot was born 7 August 1859 at Strasbourg, the son of a professor in the faculty of letters at Lyons.
He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1878, taking the philosophy agrégation in 1881, and becoming a provincial philosophy instructor at Brest and elsewhere. In 1899 he succeeded Lucien Lévy-Bruhl as professor of philosophy at the lycée Louis-le-Grand. In 1911 he was appointed Inspector of the Paris Academy, and in 1913 he became Inspector-General of Secondary Instruction.
He died in Paris on 21 December 1929.
Informed by Durkheimian sociology, he was a theorist of collectively-held "lay morality", which was rational and based upon general interest.