Alphonse de Lamartine

Biography

Lamartine was born in Mâcon, Burgundy, into a family of the provincial nobility and spent his youth at the family estate. His early reading included Fénelon, Voltaire, Parny, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Racine, Tasso, Dante, Petrarch, Mme de Staël, Shakespeare, Chateaubriand, and Ossian. In 1820 he published Les Méditations Poétiques, which brought instant fame; one notable poem, Le Lac, was partly autobiographical and dedicated to Julie Charles. He was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1825 and worked for the French embassy in Italy from 1825 to 1828.

Elected to the Académie française in 1829, he entered the Chamber of Deputies in 1833. After publishing Voyage en Orient in 1835, an account of a journey during which his only daughter died, he confined himself to prose. Raised a devout Catholic, he became a pantheist, writing Jocelyn and La Chute d'un ange, and later returned to the Church in his older years.

Political career

Initially a monarchist, Lamartine shifted toward liberalism around 1830. His first run for Parliament in 1831 as a moderate royalist was unsuccessful, but he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1833, where he sat in the opposition and founded his own Social Party influenced by Saint-Simonian ideas. He became a prominent critic of the July Monarchy, denouncing the government's retreat during the Oriental Crisis of 1840 as 'the Waterloo of French diplomacy.

A follower of Lamennais, he advocated separation of church and state. By the end of the 1830s, the radical opposition considered him their leading spokesman against King Louis-Philippe and François Guizot. During the turbulence of 1848, he served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 24 February to 11 May, and due to Jacques-Charles Dupont de l'Eure's great age, Lamartine effectively took on many duties. He was instrumental in founding the Second Republic, meeting with republican deputies and journalists at the Hôtel de Ville to agree on the provisional government, and he declared the Republic from the balcony, ensuring the Tricolour remained the national flag.

Other interests

Lamartine was an Orientalist, using themes from the Levant and the Bible to create exotic landscapes and plotlines. He traveled to Lebanon, Syria, and the Holy Land in 1832–33; during this journey, his only remaining child, Julia, died at age ten in Beirut. He viewed the region as capable of bringing a rebirth of Christianity and spirituality to save Europe. In Lebanon he met Prince Bashir Shihab II and Prince Simon Karam, both poetry enthusiasts.

A valley in Lebanon is called the Valley of Lamartine, and the Lebanon cedar forest contains the 'Lamartine Cedar,' inscribed with his name by Marie-Joseph de Géramb in 1832 at Julia's request. His 1838 epic poem La Chute d'un ange was staged in Lebanon. Raised to respect animal life, he found meat eating repugnant, stating that one does not have one heart for humans and another for animals; his writings later supported vegetarianism.

Religious belief

Lamartine wrote that society, through the increase of general reason, philosophy, Christianity, and the progress of justice, charity, and fraternity, had broken down barriers of caste and injurious distinctions. He described society as composed of various conditions—proprietors, merchants, manufacturers, farmers, day-laborers, the rich, the poor, and those without personal possession but their hands—calling the last group improperly termed 'the People.' In a separate statement, he offered a view on Catholic priests, as quoted in a 1943 work by Robert Nash.