Alfred de Vigny

Alfred de Vigny (Loches, 1797 – Paris, 1863) was one of the first French Romantic poets. He also wrote novels, plays and translations of Shakespeare, and his work in French stands at the point where classicism gave way to Romanticism.

He was born into an aristocratic family whose fortunes had been badly reduced by the Revolution. His father, a veteran of the Seven Years' War, died when Vigny was still young, and his strong-willed mother, who admired Rousseau, took charge of his education herself. Vigny grew up in Paris, where he studied French history and the Bible, and he developed an intense admiration for military glory. After Napoleon's defeat and the return of the Bourbons, he joined the king's guard and rose to the rank of captain. Peacetime garrison life bored him, and around 1827 he left the army, carrying a frustration that never fully left him.

His literary reputation grew with the narrative poem Éloa (1824), about the redemption of Satan, and with his collected poems of 1826. That same year he published Cinq-Mars, a historical novel set under Louis XIII that is often counted among the first of its kind in French. The success briefly made him a leading figure of the Romantic movement, but his friend Victor Hugo soon overshadowed him. In politics he was more moderate than many of his contemporaries: he accepted the July Monarchy, turned against the Second Republic and ended up supporting Napoleon III.

His private life was harder than his career. His marriage to the English-born Lydia Bunbury was unhappy, and his relationship with the actress Marie Dorval, whom he met when his first original play, La Maréchale d'Ancre, was staged in 1831, was stormy and full of jealousy. For Dorval he wrote the drama Chatterton (1835), based on the life of the young English poet Thomas Chatterton, which is still performed regularly. His philosophical novel Stello (1832) argues that the poet, viewed with suspicion by every social order, must stand apart from it, an idea he developed further in Servitude and Grandeur militaires (1835), a meditation on the soldier's condition.

After his mother died in 1838 he withdrew to the estate of Maine-Giraud, near Angoulême, where he wrote poems such as La Mort du loup and La Maison du berger. In 1845 he was elected to the Académie française. In his last years he stopped publishing, but he kept writing a journal that is now valued as a work in its own right. He saw himself as a philosopher as much as a man of letters, and he is counted among the first French writers to take a serious interest in Buddhism. His pessimistic, stoical outlook still upheld human fraternity and the pursuit of knowledge. Much of this thinking appears in Les Destinées, the posthumous collection he spent years preparing. He died in Paris in 1863, a few months after his wife, and was buried beside her in the Montmartre Cemetery. His legacy is that of a writer who linked the artist's place in society to a deeply personal Romantic sensibility.