Abel-François Villemain

Villemain, portrayed by Ary Scheffer in 1855

Abel-François Villemain (born June 9, 1790 in Paris , † May 8, 1870 ibid) was a French scholar and politician.

Parentage, Youth, and Early Career

Abel-François Villemain was the son of the stable master and silk merchant Ignace Jean Villemain and the Parisian bourgeois daughter Anne Geneviève Laumier. He received his first lessons in boarding school with M. Planche and played at the age of twelve in the Greek tragedy Philoctetes , where he took on the role of Odysseus , about whom he had already read a lot. Then he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand as an excellent student . His talent earned him a lot of prestige early on and even his rhetoric teacher Luce de Lancival had him represent him during his temporary illness.

After Villemain had left grammar school, Jean-Pierre Louis de Fontanes appointed the brilliant school leaver in 1810 as deputy rhetoric teacher at the Lycée Charlemagne , then as a lecturer in French literature and Latin metrics at the École normal supérieure in Paris. In 1812 he was allowed to give a speech in Latin on the occasion of the award ceremony of the Concours général (annual competition at French grammar schools), the use of which had just been reintroduced. His speech impressed the audience with its perfect Latin style and the high level of thought. On March 23, 1812, he received a prize from the Académie française for his Eloge on Michel de Montaigne 1812 (also on August 25, 1816 for his Eloge on Montesquieu ). That is why he was supported by Jean Baptiste Antoine Suard , the Count of Narbonne and the Princess of Vaudemont and, despite his unattractive appearance and sloppy clothing, was a valued guest in literary salons, especially that of Madame de Broglie, because of his witty entertainment talent Daughter of the well-known writer Madame Anne Louise Germaine de Staël . He triumphed in two other academic competitions with the same skill.

Career during the restoration

Abel-François Villemain

On April 21, 1814, Villemain was allowed to read his treatise Avantages et inconvénients de la critique in front of the Prussian king and the Russian emperor with an exceptional permit in the Académie française and complimented the foreign monarch for which he was sharply criticized by the liberals. At the end of May 1814 he was appointed deputy professor of modern history in place of François Pierre Guillaume Guizot and, in November 1816, as the successor to Pierre Paul Royer-Collard professor of French rhetoric at the Sorbonne . In the latter position, apart from brief interruptions, he was the first to hold lectures on the history of French literature from 1816 to 1832, which were very well attended and enthusiastically received, so that he had a great influence on his students. Without giving up his teaching post, Villemain became director of the book trade ( Chef de l'imprimerie et de la librairie ) in the Ministry of the Interior under Minister Decazes in December 1815 and was also responsible for censoring the press on November 4, 1818 Appointed Maître des requêtes in the State Council. This administrative activity was soon no longer enough for him and he strove for a member of parliament. He joined the doctrinal party and attacked the monarchist-minded politician Jean-Baptiste de Villèle . On April 25, 1821, Villemain succeeded Fontanes as a member of the Académie française.

Enthusiastic about the Greek struggle for freedom against the centuries-long occupation by the Ottoman Empire, Villemain wrote two papers on this subject in 1825 ( Lascaris ou les Grecs du XVe siècle and Essai sur l'état des Grecs depuis la conquête musulmane ).

Villèle had the lectures of Guizot, Victor Cousin and Villemain at the Sorbonne temporarily suspended because they were too successful for him. In 1827, Villemain was the only State Councilor to object to the planned reintroduction of censorship. The Académie française commissioned him, Charles de Lacretelle and François-René de Chateaubriand to compose a petition to King Charles X against the censorship law. Villemain did this job so perfectly that Villèle removed him from his post on the Council of State on the same day. In his lectures on the writers of the 18th century he alluded to their great ideas about freedom and made hidden and caustic remarks against the government, which his audience immediately understood and welcomed.

At the beginning of 1828 Villèle himself was dismissed and Villemain was given back his function in the Council of State under the Martignac Ministry , which he resigned in 1829 when the Ministry Jules de Polignac took office. On July 19, 1830, he was elected deputy for the Eure Department .

The high point of his political career during the July monarchy

Villemain was one of those deputies who wrote a letter of protest against the Juliordonnanzen on July 26, 1830 . After the July Revolution he became a member of the royal council for public education on August 13, 1830, and was also a member of a body that was supposed to reform the education laws. As a member of the Commission for the Revision of the Constitution, he called for the abolition of the law that declared Catholicism the state religion. Although Villemain supported the new government, he by no means agreed to all of its laws. Until his entry into the cabinet (1839) he belonged to the royalist center-right opposition. He spoke out in favor of the parliamentarians being irremovable and against the death penalty in political matters. Because of his too revolutionary ideas he was not re-elected as a deputy in 1831.

Villemain married on January 30, 1832 in Dreux Louise Desmousseaux de Givré, whose father had been elected deputy in 1815.

The "citizen king" Louis Philippe appointed Villemain on October 11, 1832 a pair . At the time, major problems in France caused unrest in Paris and elsewhere, and Villemain agreed on February 15, 1833, the government to place the capital under siege, which had already taken place the previous June. But he also rebuked the custom of bringing numerous political processes before the Chamber of Peers, which were repeated over and over again and which, through the hatred of the parties to the dispute, violated the dignity of this assembly. On December 11, 1834, he was elected permanent secretary of the Académie française for life. He made several brilliant speeches; B. 1835 against the September laws restricting the freedom of the press, and unsuccessfully demanded that the press should only be subject to common law.

Villemain did not join the coalition against the Ministry of Molé, but became Minister of Public Education on May 12, 1839 under the second ministry of Nicolas-Jean de Dieu Soult . He initiated a reorganization of the public libraries and promoted historical studies with a new impulse for the publication of the Documents inédits sur l'histoire de France . With Minoides Mynas he sent a Greek who had settled in Paris to Greece and Asia Minor to track down further manuscripts by ancient Greek authors. On March 1, 1840, he resigned from his ministerial post when the deputies unexpectedly rejected the proposed donation from the Count of Nemours, Ludwig von Orléans, without discussion. On October 29, 1840, under Guizot, he was again headed the Ministry of Education and, after several attempts and revisions, passed a law on freedom of teaching, which, however, did not satisfy either the church or the universities. In 1844 he had the Jesuits expelled. Although Villemain was rarely a competent minister, he was not a radical reformer and therefore did not leave much of a mark on his work. He shrewdly recognized mostly the smallest details, but also the often contradicting pros and cons of planned changes in his area of ​​competence and therefore often hesitated to carry out his reform projects.

On February 12, 1841, Villemain was admitted to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres and on October 29, 1843 appointed Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor.

Eventually Villemain grew tired of strong criticism, his health deteriorated and he also had great domestic worries, so that for some time he went through a state of desperation close to madness. He also felt persecuted by the Jesuits. Although his constitution improved, he remained rather gloomy. Therefore, on December 30, 1844, he resigned his office as Minister of Education and turned down a pension of 15,000 francs that had been offered to him. After his recovery, he resumed his position as permanent secretary of the Académie française in 1845 and appeared again in 1846 as a speaker in the Chamber of Pairs, where he had a say on the issue of political refugees or medical classes.

Throughout the July Monarchy, Villemain was an important patron of literature in France.

Private life since 1848

After the February Revolution of 1848 , Villemain withdrew completely from politics. He also no longer took up his lectures at the Sorbonne, although he was State Councilor from January to May 1852, but after the establishment of the Second Empire renounced all offices with the exception of his seat in the Académie française. In 1852 he also resigned his professorial title and devoted himself exclusively to the publication of new and the new edition of his older works. In his 1860 book La France, l'Empire et la Papauté , which caused a sensation, he defended the secular power of the Pope. After his death (1870) his excellent work Histoire de Grégoire VII appeared.

Literary activity

Villemain had learned from Napoleon that one could not separate a person's writing activity from the rest of his life; therefore, in his literary criticism, too, he tried to never analyze the authors' works in isolation from their general biography. He took an eclectic point of view in literature. That is why, in two aesthetic-critical writings ( Mélanges , 1823 and Nouveaux mélanges , 1827), he took a mediating position between the extreme positions of supporters of romanticism on the one hand and those of classicism on the other, and the former liked his honest understanding of the beauty of English, Italian and Spanish poetry, while the latter valued his equally great respect for the classics of ancient Greco-Roman and French literature. While he was particularly fond of classical English literature, he was rather hostile to German dramas and philosophers and had no understanding of the admiration of German literature by some of his contemporaries.

Through the introduction and methodical use of comparative literature , Villemain sought to shed light on points of contact and analogies of European national literature . Unfortunately, all of his lectures from 1816–1826 have been lost except for two opening addresses. It was not until 1827, when he had arrived at the history of French literature in the second half of the 18th century, that he began to publish his university courses in writing and later supplemented them with the courses he held in 1826, which covered the first half of the 18th century. His Cours de littérature française (2nd edition 1864 in 6 volumes), which covers the lectures from 1827 to 1830, is his main work and is still important today.

Less important than Villemain's works on the literary history of France are his works on late antique literature and history (e.g. his biography of Oliver Cromwell , published in 1819 , who is compared to Napoléon Bonaparte ). In 1823 he published the De republica by Marcus Tullius Cicero , discovered by Angelo Mai , with a French translation, an introduction and scientific notes.

Works

• Discours sur les avantages et les inconvénients de la critique , 1814 (price publication )

• Le Roi, la charte et la monarchie , Paris 1816

• Histoire de Cromwell , 2 vols., Paris 1819, Ger. Von Berly, Leipzig 1830

• Discours et mélanges littéraires , 2 vols., Paris 1823 (therein Villemain's eulogy of Montaigne and Montesquieu etc.)

• Lascaris, ou les Grecs du XVe siècle , Paris 1825 (historical novel), German Strasbourg 1825

• Essai sur l'état des Grecs depuis la conquête musulmane , Paris 1825

• Nouveaux mélanges historiques et littéraires , Paris 1827

• Cours de l'éloquence , Paris 1827

• Cours de littérature française (5 vols., Paris 1828–1829, new edition 6 vols., 1864), consisting of: Tableau de la littérature française au moyen âge en France, en Italie, en Espagne et en Angleterre (2 vols., 1846) and Tableau de la littérature française au 18e siècle (4 vols., 1864)

• Considérations sur la langue française , Paris 1835 (preface to the 6th edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française )

• Études de littérature ancienne et étrangère , Paris 1846 (including studies on Herodotus, Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, Lucan, Tiberius, Greek novels and comments on Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wicherley, Young and Byron)

• Tableau de l'éloquence chrétienne au IVe siècle , Paris 1846, German Regensburg 1855

• Souvenirs contemporains d'histoire et de littérature , Paris 1853, German Leipzig 1854

• Choix d'études sur la littérature contemporaine , Paris 1857

• La tribune modern : Vol. 1: Chateaubriand , Paris 1857; Vol. 2, from the estate, 1882

• Essais sur le génie de Pindare et sur la poésie lyrique , Paris 1859

• Histoire de Grégoire VII , 2 vols., Paris 1873

Villemain also wrote numerous articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes , Biographie universelle , in the Journal des Savants , etc.

literature

• Pierre Moreau: Villemain, Abel François. In: Dictionnaire des lettres françaises au XIXe siècle . P. 511ff.
• Villemain, Abel François. In: Meyers Konversationslexikon . 4th edition 1885-92, Vol. 16, p. 210.
• Villemain, Abel François. In: Nouvelle biography générale . Vol. 46, 1865, Col. 193-199.

Web links

Commons : Abel-François Villemain  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Short biography and list of works of the Académie française (French)
• Works by and about Abel-François Villemain  in the German Digital Library