AUBIGNÉ, JEAN-HENRI MERLE D'. - Born in Geneva in 1794, died there in 1872. Son of the merchant L. Merle. The name d'Aubigné was added to that of the Merle family through Jean's paternal grandmother, Elisabeth, in whom the direct line of the famous Huguenot Agrippa d'Aubigné had died out.
To complete his studies he went to Berlin, where he had as professor of ecclesiastical history the famous Johann August Wilhelm Neander. From 1818 he was pastor of the French Protestant church of Hamburg, and from 1823 to 1830 of that of Brussels, from which he had to separate because of the Belgian revolution against Holland, retiring to his native city, where he remained until his death. He found Geneva in a period of political and religious upheaval. The freedom of worship imposed by the Holy Alliance in forming that canton by annexing to the city certain Catholic villages had unsettled its rigid Calvinist government; the influence of the Scottish missionary Robert Haldane had stirred up a kind of religious "Awakening," but not an entirely Calvinist one; Methodist, Pietist and even Socinian doctrines had infiltrated among the pastors themselves, giving rise to disputes between ministers and faithful and among the ministers themselves, nor was the appeal to peace of the Council of State and its exhortations to silence on points of controversy enough to calm them. A pasquinade posted on the doors of a church read: "By order of the Company of Pastors it is forbidden in this temple to speak of Jesus Christ either in praise or in blame." To free himself from this state of affairs, d'Aubigné and certain other pastors founded the "Evangelical Society of Geneva." This society, Calvinist in doctrine but opposed to any union between Church and State, maintained relations with other churches, though not Calvinist, thus breaking the inflexibility of the old Geneva; it also kept up relations with foreign Protestant associations, deriving from them the spirit of missions, and promoted religious meetings (meeting), alien to Calvinist exclusiveness; finally it founded the College of Geneva to counterbalance Calvin's Academy. Of this college d'Aubigné was president and professor of ecclesiastical history.
From 1831 until his death, d'Aubigné, in addition to teaching, devoted himself to writing books, among which are to be noted not only homiletic, religious and exegetical pamphlets, but also a historical monograph on Cromwell, one on the religious struggles in Scotland, and others. His principal works, however, are the Histoire de la Réformation au XVIᵉ siècle (5 vols., Paris 1835-63), the idea for which he seems to have conceived at Eisenach in 1817, during the centenary celebrations of Luther, and the Histoire de la Réformation en Europe au temps de Calvin (Paris 1862-78), in 8 volumes, of which the last three were not revised by the author. These are celebrated works, the first especially, translated into various languages, much praised and appreciated by Protestants, but too one-sided, almost fanatically anti-Catholic and marked by a sectarian fetishism that greatly diminishes their importance. In the second edition of the English translation of the first work, a letter of the author himself is reproduced in which, replying to certain observations, he not only accepts some phrases of the translation, more markedly anti-Catholic than in the French text, but ends with an expression that seems to foresee the future Protestant ecumenical movement of the present time: "all together, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists etc. constitute not merely a plurality but also and principally a living and organic unity."