AUBIGNÉ, JEAN-HENRY MERLE d'. – Born in Geneva in 1794, died there in 1872. Son of the merchant L. Merle. The name d'A. was added to that of the Merle family by Jean’s paternal grandmother, Elisabetta, in whom the direct line of descent of the celebrated Huguenot Agrippa d'A. had died out.
To complete his studies he went to Berlin, where he had as professor of ecclesiastical history the famous Giov. Aug. Guglielmo Neander. From 1818 he was pastor of the French Protestant church in Hamburg, and from 1823 to 1830 of that in Brussels, from which he had to withdraw 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 when forming that canton by annexing several Catholic villages to the city had undermined its rigid Calvinist government; the influence of the Scottish missionary Roberto Haldane had aroused a kind of religious “Awakening,” though not entirely Calvinist; Methodist, Pietist, and even Socinian doctrines had infiltrated the ranks of the pastors themselves, giving rise to disputes between ministers and the faithful and among the ministers themselves, nor was the appeal for peace by the Council of State, together with its exhortations to silence on controversial points, sufficient to calm them. A pasquinade affixed to the doors of a church read: “By order of the Company of Pastors, it is forbidden in this temple to speak of Jesus Christ, whether for good or for ill.” To free themselves from this state of affairs, d'A. and several 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, thereby breaking the religious inflexibility of old Geneva; it also maintained relations with foreign Protestant associations, deriving from them the spirit of the missions, and promoted religious gatherings (meetings), foreign to Calvinist exclusiveness; finally, it founded the College of Geneva to counterbalance Calvin’s Academy. D'A. was president and professor of ecclesiastical history at this college.
From 1831 until his death, d'A., in addition to teaching, devoted himself to writing books, among which should 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), whose idea he apparently 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, the last three of which were not revised by the author. These are celebrated works, especially the first, translated into various languages and highly praised and esteemed by Protestants, but excessively 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 by the author himself is reproduced in which, responding to certain observations, he not only accepts some phrases of the translation that are more markedly anti-Catholic than in the French text, but concludes with an expression that seems to anticipate the present-day Protestant ecumenical movement: “all together, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, etc., constitute not merely a plurality but also, and principally, a living and organic unity.”