Jean-Baptiste Chassignet

Jean-Baptiste Chassignet (* 1571 in Besançon , † 1635 in Gray (Haute-Saône) ) was a French writer of the Baroque .

life and work

Chassignet was the son of a doctor. He studied at Dole and worked as a lawyer in Gray. At the age of 23 he published a collection of 434 sonnets in 1594 in which he developed a monumental memento mori under the title Le Mespris de la vie et consolation contre la mort (The contempt for life and consolation against death) , the key verse of which is: “ Our life is nothing but an eternal death ”( Notre vie n'est rien qu'une mort éternelle ). With great precision and powerful imagery, the author describes the misery and illnesses of human life in baroque style in order to encourage people to devote themselves exclusively to the acquisition of eternity. His poetry was rediscovered in the middle of the 20th century and has since been the subject of intensive literary research.

Excerpt from Sonnet 100

La mort n'est pas un mal, mais l'appréhension / Fait estimer la mort comme une passion, / De toutes passions la plus intolérable, / O salutaire Mort, le monde ne serait / Qu'un dolent Ixion , qui toujours tournerait / Si tu n'étais la fin de son mal incurable.

(Death is not an evil, but fear makes it appear as a path of suffering, the most unbearable of all. Oh, salutary death, the world would only be an eternally rotating torture wheel, if you weren't the end of its incurable evil.)

expenditure

• Le mespris de la vie et Consolation contre la mort , Besançon, N. de Moingesse, 1594.
  • Le Mespris de la vie et Consolation contre la mort. Cent sonnets réimprimés sur l'édition de 1594 , ed. by Hugues Vaganay , Lyon, Lardanchet, 1914 (partial edition).
  • Le mespris de la vie et Consolation contre la mort. Choix de sonnets , ed. by Armand-Léon Müller, Geneva, Droz, 1953 (partial edition).
  • Le Mespris de la vie et consolation contre la mort , critical ed. by Hans-Joachim Lope (* 1939), Geneva, Droz, 1967.
• Paraphrases sur les douze petits prophètes du Vieil Testament , Besançon, N. de Moingesse, 1601.
• Paraphrases sur les cent cinquante pseaumes de David , Lyon, Claude Morillon, 1613.

literature

• Armand-Léon Müller , Jean-Baptiste Chassignet, 1578 (?) - 1635 (?) Un poète religieux du XVIe siècle , Paris, Foulon, 1951.
• Raymond Ortali, Jean-Baptiste Chassignet. Un poète de la mort , Geneva, Droz, 1968 (research report).
• Heinz Wagner, The subject matter and style in "Mespris de la vie et consolation contre la mort" by Jean-Baptiste Chassignet , Frankfurt am Main, Lang, 1972.
• Michele Mastroianni, Jean-Baptiste Chassignet tra manierismo e barocco. Un'introduzione alla lettura del "Mespris de la vie et consolation contre la mort" , Paris / Fiesole, Honoré Champion / Cadmo, 1998.
• Jean-Baptiste Chassignet. Actes du Colloque du Center Jacques-Petit, Besançon, 4, 5 and 6 May 1999 , Paris, Honoré Champion, 2003.
• Michele Mastroianni, L'officina poetica di Jean-Baptiste Chassignet , Vercelli, Mercurio, 2010.

Manual information

• Jean-Charles Payen and Jean-Pierre Chauveau , La poésie des origines à 1715 , Paris, Armand Colin, 1968, pp. 119–120, 168–169 and 410–411.
• Kurt Reichenberger , in: Major works of French literature. Individual presentations and interpretations, ed. by Irene Schwendemann, Munich, Kindler, 1976, p. 84.
• Raymond Ortali, "Jean-Baptiste Chassignet", in: Laffont-Bompiani. Le nouveau dictionnaire des oeuvres de tous les temps et de tous les pays. Auteurs , Paris 1994, pp. 644-645 (Bouquins series).
• Frank Lestringant, "Chassignet", in: Dictionnaire des écrivains de langue française , ed. by Jean-Pierre Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty and Alain Rey, Paris, Larousse, 2001, pp. 330–331.

Web links

Wikisource: Jean-Baptiste Chassignet  - Sources and full texts (French)

• Literature by and about Jean-Baptiste Chassignet in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)