Alfred de Vigny

Biography

Alfred de Vigny came from an aristocratic family and was born in Loches, though he never went back there. His father, a veteran of the Seven Years' War who was sixty years old when Vigny was born, died before his son turned twenty. His mother, twenty years younger than her husband, was a determined woman influenced by Rousseau and took charge of Vigny's early schooling. On his mother's side, his grandfather the Marquis de Baraudin had been a commodore in the royal navy.

Vigny grew up in Paris and studied at the Lycée Bonaparte, preparing for the École Polytechnique, where he gained a strong grounding in French history and the Bible before developing what was described as an excessive love for military glory. Like all noble families, the French Revolution had sharply reduced their wealth. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, Louis XVIII was restored to the throne, and in 1814 Vigny joined one of the privileged aristocratic companies of the king's guard as a second lieutenant.

He was promoted to first lieutenant in 1822 and to captain the next year, but peacetime military life bored him. After taking several leaves, he left the army for good in 1827, having already published his first poem Le Bal in 1820 and a longer narrative poem Éloa in 1824, which dealt with the popular Romantic theme of Satan's redemption. While prolonging his leaves from the army, he settled in Paris with his young English wife Lydia Bunbury, whom he had married in Pau in 1825.

In January 1826 he gathered his recent work into Poèmes antiques et modernes. Three months later he brought out Cinq-Mars, the first important historical novel in French, based on the life of Louis XIII's favorite the Marquis of Cinq-Mars, who conspired against Cardinal Richelieu. The success of these two books made Vigny look like a rising Romantic celebrity, though his friend Victor Hugo soon became far more famous. Vigny remarked about 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."

Unlike Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine, who moved gradually toward liberal and then radical views during the 1830s, Vigny stayed pliantly centrist in his politics. He accepted the July Monarchy, initially welcomed then rejected the Second French Republic, and later endorsed Napoleon III.