Alfred de Vigny
| Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny | |
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Vigny, by Félix Nadar.
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| Born | Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny 27 March 1797 Loches, France |
| Died | 17 September 1863 (aged 66) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Poet, translator, novelist |
| Literary movement | Romanticism |
Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny (27 March 1797 – 17 September 1863) was a French poet and early leader of French Romanticism. He also produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare. As an army officer with conservative and royalist views, Vigny differed sharply from most other French Romantics.
Vigny was born in Loches (a town to which he never returned) into an aristocratic family. His father was a 60-year-old veteran of the Seven Years' War who died before Vigny's 20th birthday; his mother, 20 years younger, was a strong-willed woman who was inspired by Rousseau and took personal responsibility for Vigny's early education. His maternal grandfather, the Marquis de Baraudin, had served as commodore in the royal navy.
Vigny grew up in Paris, and took preparatory studies for the École Polytechnique at the Lycée Bonaparte, obtaining a good knowledge of French history and the Bible before developing an “inordinate love for the glory of bearing arms”.
As was the case for every noble family, the French Revolution diminished the family's circumstances considerably. After Napoléon's defeat at Waterloo, a Bourbon, Louis XVIII, the brother of Louis XVI, was restored to power, and in 1814 Vigny enrolled in one of the privileged aristocratic companies of the Maison du Roi (king's guard) as a second lieutenant.
Though he was promoted to first lieutenant in 1822 and to captain the following year, the military profession in time of peace bored him. After taking several leaves of absence he abandoned military life in 1827, having already published his first poem Le Bal in 1820 and an ambitious narrative poem Éloa in 1824 on the popular romantic theme of the redemption of Satan.
Prolonging successive leaves from the army, he settled in Paris with his young English bride Lydia Bunbury, whom he married in Pau in 1825. He collected his recent works in January 1826 in Poèmes antiques et modernes. Three months later he published the first important historical novel in French, Cinq-Mars, based on the life of Louis XIII's favorite Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis of Cinq-Mars, who conspired against the Cardinal de Richelieu. With the success of these two volumes, Vigny seemed to be the rising star of the Romantic movement, though one of Vigny's best friends, Victor Hugo, soon usurped that role. Unlike Hugo, Vigny retained his Royalist sympathies in politics and wrote of Hugo: "The Victor I loved is no more... now he likes to make saucy remarks and is turning into a liberal, which does not suit him." Vigny later denounced members of his inner circle whom he suspected of republican sympathies to the imperial police.
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