Poet, historian, and politician, born in Bourg-en-Bresse, E France. He studied at Strasbourg, Geneva, Paris, and Heidelberg. His first major work was a translation of Herder's Philosophy of History (1825), and his reputation was established with the epic poem Ahasvérus (1833). Appointed professor of foreign literature at Lyon (1839), his lectures caused so much excitement that the government suppressed them in 1846, and after the coup of February 1848 he was exiled. His historical works include La Révolution religieuse au XIXe siècle (1857, The Religious Revolution in the 19th-c), Histoire de la campagne de 1815 (1862, History of the 1815 Campaign), and La Révolution (1865).
Edgar Quinet (February 17, 1803–March 27, 1875) was a French historian and intellectual.
Biography
Early years
Born at Bourg-en-Bresse, in the département of the Ain. His father, Jerome Quinet, had been a commissary in the army, but being a strong republican and disgusted with Napoleon's 18 Brumaire coup, he gave up his post and devoted himself to scientific and mathematical study.
He was sent to school first in Bourg and then in Lyon. However, Quinet was determined to engage in literature, and after a time got his way.
His first publication, the Tablettes du juif errant ("Tablets of the Wandering Jew") appeared in 1823.
Early writings
At this time he was introduced to Victor Cousin, and made the acquaintance of Jules Michelet. Cousin obtained for him a position on a government mission to the Morea, in the Ottoman Empire, in 1829 (during the Greek War of Independence), and on his return he published in 1830 a book on La Grèce moderne ("Modern Greece").
Hopes of employment which he had after the July Revolution were frustrated by his reputation as a speculative republican. Nonetheless, he joined the staff of the Revue des deux mondes, and for some years contributed to it numerous essays, the most remarkable of which was that on Les Épopées françaises du XIIème siècle, an early, although not the earliest, appreciation of the long-neglected chansons de geste.
Shortly afterwards he married Minna More, a German girl with whom he had fallen in love some years before. In 1838 he published a strong reply to David Strauss' Leben Jesu, and in that year he received the Legion of Honour. Two years later he was transferred to the Collège de France, and the Génie des religions itself was published (1842).
Professorship
Quinet's Parisian professorship was notorious as the subject of polemics. Two books bearing exactly these titles appeared in 1843 and 1844, and contained, as was usual with Quinet, the substance of his lectures.
These lectures excited disturbance, and the author obstinately refused to return to literature-proper;
1848 Revolution
By this time Quinet was a pronounced republican, and something of a revolutionary.
He had published in 1848 Les Révolutions d'Italie ("The Revolutions of Italy"), one of his main works. He wrote numerous pamphlets during the short-lived Second French Republic, attacked the Roman expedition with all his strength and was from the first an uncompromising opponent of Prince Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (Napoleon III).
Exile
He was banished from France after Louis-Napoléon's anti-Republican 1851 coup, and settled in Brussels. In Brussels, Quinet lived for some seven years, during which he published Les Esclaves ("The Slaves", 1853), a dramatic poem, Marnix de Sainte-Aldégonde (1854), a study of the Reformer in which he emphasizes Sainte-Aldégonde's literary merit, and some other books.
He then moved to Veytaux, on the shore of Lake Geneva, where he continued to reside till the fall of the Second French Empire. In 1860, he published a unique volume, partly reflecting the style of Ahasverus, and entitled Merlin l'enchanteur (Merlin the Enchanter); in 1862, a Histoire de la campagne de 1815 ("History of the Campaign of 1815"), in 1865 an elaborate book on the French Revolution, in which the author depicts atrocities carried out by revolutionary forces (causing his rejection by many other partisans of republican ideas).
Return and final years
Quinet had refused to return to France to join the liberal opposition against Napoleon III, but returned immediately after the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War.
Le Siège de Paris et la défense nationale ("The Siege of Paris and the National Defence") appeared in 1871, La République ("The Republic") in 1872, Le Livre de l'exilé ("The Book of Exile") in the year of its author's death and after it. Quinet had already in 1858 published a semi-autobiographical book called Histoire de mes idées ("History of My Ideas").
Personality
The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica on Quinet:
"His character was extremely amiable, and his letters to his mother, his accounts of his early life, and so forth, are likely always to make him interesting. He refused to submit himself to any form of positive orthodoxy, yet when a man like Strauss pushed unorthodoxy to its extreme limits Quinet revolted.
As a politician he acted with the extreme radicals, yet universal suffrage disgusted him as unreasonable in its principle and dangerous in its results. He is less inaccurate in fact than Michelet, but he is also much less absorbed by a single idea at a time, and the result is that he seldom attains to the vivid representation of which Michelet was a master."
Early editions
His numerous works appeared in a uniform edition of twenty-eight volumes (1877-79). His second wife, in 1870, published certain Mémoires d'exil, and Lettres d'exil followed in 1885.
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