VIGNY, ALFRED DE. — French poet, b. at Loches on 27 March 1797 into a noble family, d. at Maine-Guiraud on 17 September 1863. For a decade he belonged to the army (1816–27), but rather than by the monotony of garrison life he was drawn to the literary circles gathering in Paris around V. Hugo and Ch. Nodier, and he acquired singular fame and prominence in the first phase of the Romantic vogue in France.
To the reminiscences of Chénier in his early Poèmes (1822), a composite collection of poems inspired both by biblical and contemporary themes (even the three cantos of Hélène refer to the Greek war of independence), to those of Byron and Moore in Eloa ou la soeur des anges (1824), and of Walter Scott in the novel Cinq Mars (1826), there is joined a poetic flowering at once tinged with pessimism and religious torment, whose finest fruit is gathered in the Poèmes antiques et modernes (1826). To his historical novel V. added in ’27 a kind of aesthetic theorizing in the Réflexions sur la vérité dans l’art, claiming for the artist the right to subordinate historical truth to his own idea; and to the Romantic battles for the theatre he contributed with Shakespearean translations (Roméo et Juliette, 1827; Othello, and Shylock ou le marchand de Venise, 1829) and by bringing to the stage the downfall and death of Concini with La maréchale d’Ancre (1831), the protest against marriages of convenience (Quitte pour la peur, 1833), and the condition of the isolated poet crushed between the indifference of bourgeois society (Chatterton, 1835). Long since he had detached himself from his early legitimist sympathies, though remaining faithful to an aristocratic conception of life, expressed precisely in these reflections on the artist confronting society, already narrated along with other examples (Gilbert, Chénier) in the novel Stello (1832), the first consultation of the mysterious Docteur noir, later continued in a second consultation left unfinished at the episode of Daphné, inserted unexpectedly into the story of Julian the Apostate (1836–37). Less exalted and more sincerely moving are the examples recounted in Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835).
From the same years dates V.’s violent passion for the actress Marie Dorval, and shortly thereafter his major lyrical output, though published with some delay and far less followed and successful than his early work: La mort du loup (1838), La colère de Samson, Le mont des Oliviers (1839, steeped in a wholly symbolic and human conception of Christianity), La flûte (1840), La sonnette (1832), La maison du berger (1842–44), La bouteille à la mer (1847), Les destinées (1849), L’esprit pur (1863: a pessimistic recognition, on the eve of death, of the vanity of artistic endeavour precisely insofar as it is elevated and opposed to brutality). The greatest resonance of this and indeed of all V.’s poetry came belatedly, and perhaps more abroad, and especially in Italy, than in France.