Hazard was the son of a school teacher.

Starting in 1900, he attended the École Normale Supérieure in

Paris. He received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1910 and became famous for his Ph.D. dissertation
La Révolution française et les lettres italiennes (1910).[1]

Hazard began his career at the University of Lyon in 1910, teaching comparative literature. In 1919 he
began teaching also at the Sorbonne. In 1925 Hazard was appointed to the chair of comparative
literature at the Collège de France in Paris. In alternating years, from 1932 until 1940, he was a visiting
lecturer at Columbia University in New York. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hazard also lectured at other
American schools. He was elected to the Académie française in 1939.

After finishing his semester of teaching at Columbia in 1940, Hazard voluntarily returned to Nazi
occupied France in January 1941. He continued to teach, at Lyon and Paris, and to study. Later that same
year Hazard was nominated to the rectorship of the University of Paris, but was rejected by the Nazis as
unacceptable. Working under what have been described as cruel circumstances, he completed European
Thought in the Eighteenth Century. In the year of his death, an article, Pour que vive l'âme de la France
(So That the Soul of France May Live), appeared in the clandestine review France de demain.

Hazard died in Paris on 13 April 1944.