Charles Magnin

Charles Magnin (born November 4, 1793 in Paris , † October 8, 1862 ibid) was a French literary historian, theater critic and author.

life and work

Charles Magnin first attended the Collège Sainte-Barbe , then the Lycée Henri IV . In 1813 he was employed by the imperial library and later (1832) appointed one of its curators. He took part in several academic literary competitions and made himself known through some poetry ( Sur les derniers moments de Bayard , 1815; Entretien sur l'éloquence , 1820); He also had the short, one-act, prose comedy Racine, ou la troisième représentation des Plaideurs performed on March 16, 1826 at the Odéon Theater .

In 1824 Magnin had joined the journal Le Globe , where he emerged as an outstanding theater critic, especially of English stage performances given in Paris, in which several of the best English actors such as Kean , Macready and Miss Smithson took part for several years . Magnin also promoted attempts to innovate theater and was benevolent of the romantic movement.

When Le Globe ceased to appear in 1831, Magnin switched to the daily newspaper Le National as a theater critic and also worked on the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Journal des savants . However, he now devoted himself less to the profession of critic than to scholarly work, which earned him the praise of Sainte-Beuve and in 1838 his admission to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres . In 1834/35 he held lectures at the Sorbonne on behalf of Claude Fauriel and taught the origins of modern theater. He later published the material of his lectures as an, albeit unfinished, work under the title Les origines du théâtre modern (Paris 1838), in which he presented the history of dramatic art in the Middle Ages .

Magnin published a selection from his absent-minded papers in journals as Causeries et méditations historiques et littéraires (2 vols., Paris 1843). He also provided a translation of the dramas of Hrotsvit ( Théâtre de Hrotsvitha religieuse allemande du 10 ^e siècle , 1845, with text, introduction and notes). Finally he wrote a Histoire des marionnettes en Europe (1852; 2nd edition 1862). He died in Paris on October 8, 1862, at the age of 69.

literature

• Charles Magnin . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon . 4th edition. Volume 11, Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1885–1892, p. 93.
• Magnin (Charles) , in: Nouvelle biographie générale , vol. 32 (1860), col. 722f.