Étienne Arago
Étienne Arago (born February 9, 1802 in Perpignan , Département Pyrénées-Orientales , † March 7, 1892 in Paris ) was a French writer .
Live and act
Arago was the fourth and youngest son of Bonaventure Arago and his wife. His father ran the Perpignan Mint ; his brothers were Jacques , Jean and François .
Arago a. a. at the Collège of Sorèze . During the restoration he got a job as a preparateur chimiste (chemical laboratory technician ) at the École polytechnique in Paris . Politically interested, he was very close to carbonarism . However, he soon gave up his position in order to be able to succeed as a writer.
Together with others - u. a. with Honoré de Balzac - he wrote vaudevilles and comedies and founded several, mostly very short-lived, literary magazines. He was also able to make a name for himself under the pseudonym Jules Ferney in the features section of Le siècle magazine .
In the July Revolution of 1830 , Arago was involved in overthrowing the Bourbons . Pictorial evidence of this fact is Arago's image as one of the central figures in Eugène Delacroix's famous picture Freedom leads the people . He had previously taken over the management of the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris and had to file for bankruptcy ten years later due to a lack of business acumen with a debt of around 250,000 francs. Until 1872 he had to pay off it. In the following year, 1831, he was instrumental in founding the newspaper La Réforme and during the February Revolution of 1848 he was entrusted with the management of the same as editor-in-chief.
As a member of the Pyrénées-Orientales department , he represented his homeland in the National Assembly ; but could hardly achieve success there. After the February Revolution of 1848, after the elections to the National Assembly in May 1848, the situation escalated and the June uprising broke out. Arago sympathized with the rebels and could only avoid his arrest by cursing to Belgium. There he wrote Spa in 1851 , a poem in seven parts that is considered one of his best works.
When, on December 2, 1851, the last French Emperor, Napoléon III. , came to power through a coup d'état , he successfully expelled Aragos from the Belgian King Leopold I. This settled down to Great Britain , from where he later went to the Netherlands . Eventually Arago settled in Turin , where he lived until his pardon in 1859.
In the autumn of 1859, Arago returned to France and settled in Paris. From Easter 1862 his historical novel Les Bleus et les Blancs, in which he discussed wars in the Vendée , was controversial . The discussions about Arago became even bigger when he left the Parisian Writers' Association in August of the same year .
When on September 5, 1870 Emperor Napoléon III. had been overthrown, appointed the provisional government (beginning of the Third French Republic ) mayor of the city of Paris. Arago accepted this office and immediately promised elections for a new city council. Because he did not keep this promise, unrest broke out again on October 31, and he resigned.
He also gave up his seat in the National Assembly, into which he was elected on February 8, 1871, after a few days and retired into private life. It was not until 1878 that he went public again, when he took over the office of archivist at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris and held it until the end of his life.
Four weeks after his 90th birthday, Étienne Arago died on March 7, 1892 in Paris, where he found his final resting place.
Works (selection)
- Spa. Son origine, son histoire, ses eaux minérales, ses environs et ses jeux . Brussels 1851.
- Une voix de l'exil. Poemes . Geneva 1860.
- Les Bleus et les Blancs . Paris 1862.
- L'hôtel de ville de Paris on 4 septembre et pendant le siège . Paris 1874 (describes his time as Mayor of Paris).
literature
- Marc Vuilleumier / BE: Arago, Étienne. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
Web links
- Publications by and about Étienne Arago in the Helveticat catalog of the Swiss National Library
- Literature by and about Étienne Arago in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Arago, Etienne |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French writer and traveler |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 9, 1802 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Perpignan |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 7, 1892 |
| Place of death | Paris |