VIGNY, ALFRED de. — French poet, born at Loches on 27 March 1797 into a noble family, died at Maine-Guiraud on 17 September 1863. He belonged to the army for a decade (1816–27), but he was drawn less by the monotony of garrison life than by the literary circles that gathered in Paris around V. Hugo and Ch. Nodier, and he acquired singular fame and prominence during the first phase of the vogue for Romanticism in France.
Alongside reminiscences of Chénier in the early Poèmes (1822), a composite collection of poems inspired by biblical and contemporary subjects (the three cantos of Féléna, too, refer to the Greek war of independence), those of Byron and Moore in Eloa ou la soeur des anges (1824), and those of Walter Scott in the novel Cinq Mars (1826), there developed a poetic flowering tinged at once with pessimism and religious torment, whose finest fruit is gathered in the Poèmes critiques et modernes (1826). To his historical novel V. added in 1827 a sort of aesthetic theorization, in the Réflexions sur la vérité dans l'art, asserting the artist’s right to subordinate historical truth to his own idea; and he took part in the Romantic battles for the theatre with Shakespearean translations (Roméo et Juliette, 1827; Othello, and Shylock ou le marchand de Venise, 1829), and by bringing to the stage the disgrace and death of Concini in La maréchale d'Ancre (1831), the protest against marriages of convenience (Quitte pour la peur, 1833), and the condition of the poet isolated and overwhelmed amid the indifference of bourgeois society (Chatterton, 1835). He had long since broken with his youthful legitimist sympathies, while remaining faithful to an aristocratic conception of life, expressed precisely in these reflections on the artist in relation to society, already recounted together with other examples (Gilbert, Chénier) in the novel Stello (1832), the first consultation of the mysterious Docteur noir, continued later by a seconde consultation, left unfinished at the episode of Daphné, centered on the story of Julian the Apostate (1836–37). Less exalted and more sincerely moving are the examples related in Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835).
The same years saw V.’s violent passion for the actress Maria Dorval, and a little later his greatest lyrical production, published nevertheless with some delay and far less followed and successful than his youthful work: La mort du loup (1838), La colère de Samson, Le mont des Oliviers (1839, permeated by an entirely symbolic and human conception of Christianity), La flûte, (1840), La sauvage (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 work precisely insofar as it possesses what is elevated and opposed to brutality). The greatest resonance of this work, and in general of all V.’s poetry, came late, and perhaps more abroad—especially in Italy—than in France.