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Edgar Quinet (February 1803–March 1875) was a
French poet, historian, and political philosopher who made a significant
contribution to the developing tradition of liberalism in
France.
 Early
years - Born at Bourg-en-Bresse, in the département of Ain. His
father, Jérôme Quinet, had been a commissary in the army, but being a strong
republican and disgusted with Napoleon's 18 Brumaire coup, he gave up his
post and devoted himself to scientific and mathematical study. Edgar, who was
an only child, was usually alone, but his mother (Eugénie Rozat Lagis, who
was an educated person with strong, albeit original, Protestant religious
views) exercised great influence over him.
He was sent to school first in Bourg and then in Lyon. His
father wished him on leaving school to go into the army, and then enter a
business career. However, Quinet was determined to engage in literature, and
after a time got his way when he moved to Paris in 1820.
His first publication, the Tablettes du juif errant ("Tablets
of the Wandering Jew") ,which appeared in 1823, symbolized the progress of
humanity. He became impressed with German intellectual writing and undertook
translating Johann Gottfried Herder's Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte
der Menschheit ("Outlines of Philosophy of the History of Man") learnt German
for the purpose, and published his work in 1827, and obtained through it
considerable credit.
Early
writings - At this time he was introduced to Victor Cousin, and made the
acquaintance of Jules Michelet. He had visited Germany and the United Kingdom
before the appearance of his book. Cousin obtained for him a position on a
government mission to the Morea, in the Ottoman Empire, in 1829 (during the
Greek War of Independence), and on his return he published in 1830 a book on
La Grèce moderne ("Modern Greece"). With Michelet he published a volume of
works denouncing Jesuits and blaming them for religious, political and social
troubles in 1843. He also became acquainted with and a lover of the works of
Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1838. Quinet wrote several lectures praising Emerson’s
works which were published with the title of “Le Christianisme et la
Revolution Francaise” in 1945.
Hopes of employment which he had after the July Revolution
were frustrated by his reputation as a speculative republican. Nonetheless,
he joined the staff of the Revue des deux mondes, and for some years
contributed to it numerous essays, the most remarkable of which was that on
Les Épopées françaises du XIIème siècle, an early, although not the earliest,
appreciation of the long-neglected chansons de geste. Ahasverus, his first
major original work, appeared in 1833 - it is a singular prose
poem.
Shortly afterwards he married Minna More, a German girl with
whom he had fallen in love some years before. Growing disillusioned with
German thought due to the Prussian aggressive tactics, he visited Italy, and,
besides writing many essays, produced two poems, Napoléon (1835) and
Prométhée (1838), both written in verse and seen as inferior to Ahasverus
published in 1833. In 1838 he published a strong reply to David Strauss'
Leben Jesu, and in that year he received the Legion of Honour. In 1839 he was
appointed professor of foreign literature at Lyon, where he began the highly
influential course of lectures which formed the basis for his Génie des
religions. Two years later he was transferred to the Collège de France, and
the Génie des religions, published (1842), he sympathized with all religions
but did not favor one above all.
Professorship
- Quinet's Parisian professorship, which began in 1842, was
notorious as the subject of polemics. His chair was that of Southern
Literature, but, neglecting his proper subject, he chose, in conjunction with
Michelet, to engage in a violent polemic with the Jesuits and with
Ultramontanism. Two books bearing exactly these titles appeared in 1843 and
1844, and contained, as was usual with Quinet, the substance of his
lectures.
These lectures excited great debate and the author obstinately
refused to return to literature-proper; consequently, in 1846, the government
put an end to the lectures, a measure which was arguably approved by the
majority of his colleagues. He was dismissed in 1846 by the Collège de France
due to his adamant attacks on the Roman Catholic Church, exhalation of the
revolution, and support for the oppressed nationalities of France and for
supporting the theory that religion is a determining force in
societieS.
1848
Revolution - By this time Quinet was a pronounced republican, and something
of a revolutionary. He joined the rioters during the 1848 Revolution which
overthrew King Louis-Philippe of France, and was elected by the département
of Ain to the Constituent and then to the Legislative Assembly, where he
affiliated with the extreme radical party.
He had published in 1848 Les Révolutions d'Italie ("The
Revolutions of Italy"), one of his main works. He wrote numerous pamphlets
during the short-lived Second French Republic, attacked the Roman expedition
with all his strength and was from the first an uncompromising opponent of
Prince Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (Napoleon III).
Exile
- Quinet fled Louis Napoléon’s 1851 coup d’état to Brussels
until 1858 and then fled to Veytaux, Switzerland until 1870 [8] . His wife
had died some time previously, and he now married Hermione Asachi (or Asaky),
the daughter of Gheorghe Asachi, a Moldavian poet. In Brussels, Quinet lived
for some seven years, during which he published Les Esclaves ("The Slaves",
1853), a dramatic poem, Marnix de Sainte-Aldégonde (1854), a study of the
Reformer in which he emphasizes Sainte-Aldégonde's literary merit, and some
other books.
In Veytaux, his literary output was greater than ever. In
1860, he published a unique volume, partly reflecting the style of Ahasverus,
and entitled Merlin l'enchanteur (Merlin the Enchanter); in 1862, a Histoire
de la campagne de 1815 ("History of the Campaign of 1815"), in 1865 an
elaborate book on the French Revolution, in which the author depicts
atrocities carried out by revolutionary forces (causing his rejection by many
other partisans of republican ideas). Many pamphlets date from this period,
as does La Création (1870), a third book of the genre of Ahasverus and
Merlin, but even vaguer - dealing with physical science rather than history,
legend, or philosophy for the most part.
Return and
final years - Quinet had refused to return to France to join the liberal
opposition against Napoleon III, but returned immediately after the Battle of
Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War. He was then restored to his professorship,
and during the siege of Paris wrote vehemently against the Germans. He was
elected deputy to the National Assembly by the département of the Seine in
1871, and was one of the most obstinate opponents of the terms of peace
between France and Germany. He continued to write till his death, which
occurred at Versailles in 1875.
Le Siège de Paris et la défense nationale ("The Siege of Paris
and the National Defence") appeared in 1871, La République ("The Republic")
in 1872, Le Livre de l'exilé ("The Book of Exile") in the year of its
author's death and after it. This was followed by three volumes of letters
and some other work. Quinet had already in 1858 published a
semi-autobiographical book called Histoire de mes idées ("History of My
Ideas").
Personality
- The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica on Quinet:
"His character was extremely amiable, and his letters to his
mother, his accounts of his early life, and so forth, are likely always to
make him interesting. He was also a man of great moral conscientiousness, and
as far as intention went perfectly disinterested. As a writer, his chief
fault is want of concentration; as a thinker and politician, vagueness and
want of practical determination. His historical and philosophical works,
though showing much reading, fertile thought, abundant facility of
expression, and occasionally, where prejudice does not come in, acute
judgment, are rather (as not a few of them were in fact) reported lectures
than formal treatises. His rhetorical power was altogether superior to his
logical power, and the natural consequence is that his work is full of
contradictions. These contradictions were, moreover, due, not merely to an
incapacity or an unwillingness to argue strictly, but also to the presence in
his mind of a large number of inconsistent tastes and prejudices which he
either could not or would not co-ordinate into an intelligible creed. Thus he
has the strongest attraction for the picturesque side of medievalism and
catholicity, the strongest repulsion for the restrictions which medieval and
Catholic institutions imposed on individual liberty. He refused to submit
himself to any form of positive orthodoxy, yet when a man like Strauss pushed
unorthodoxy to its extreme limits Quinet revolted.
As a politician he acted with the extreme radicals, yet
universal suffrage disgusted him as unreasonable in its principle and
dangerous in its results. His pervading characteristic, therefore, is that of
an eloquent vagueness, very stimulating and touching at times, but as
deficient in coercive force of matter as it is in lasting precision and
elegance of form. He is less inaccurate in fact than Michelet, but he is also
much less absorbed by a single idea at a time, and the result is that he
seldom attains to the vivid representation of which Michelet was a
master."
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from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Edgar
Quinet - Manifesting Generator - Biography
