VILLEMAIN, ABEL FRANCOIS (179o-1867)

This article appears in Volume V28, Page 80 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: VAN-VIR

VILLEMAIN, ABEL FRANCOIS (179o-1867) , French politician and man of letters, was born in Paris on the qth of June 1790. He was educated at the lycee Louis-le-Grand, and became assistant master at the lycee Charlemagne, and subsequently at the ?tole Normale. In 1812 he gained a prize from the

Academy

ACADEMY, GREEK
ACADEMY, ROYAL

with an eioge on Montaigne. Under the restoration he was appointed, first, asistant professor of modern history, and then professor of French eloquence at the Sorbonne. Here he delivered a

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

of literary lectures which had an extra-

ordinary

ORDINARY (med. Lat. ordinarius, Fr. ordinaire)

effect on his younger contemporaries. Villemain had the

great

GREAT

advantage of coming just before the Romantic

movement

MOVEMENT

, of having a wide and catholic love of literature withoutbeing an extremist. All, or almost all, the clever

young

men of the brilliant generation of 1830 passed under his influence; and, while he pleased the Romanticists by his frank appreciation of the beauties of English, German, Italian and Spanish poetry, he had not the least inclination to decry the classicseither the classics proper of Greece and Rome or the so-called classics of France. In 1819 he published a book on Cromwell, and two years later he was elected to the

Academy

ACADEMY, GREEK
ACADEMY, ROYAL

. Ville-main was appointed by the restoration government " chef de 1'imprimerie et de la librairie," a post involving a kind of irregular censorship of the press, and afterwards to the office of master of requests. Before the revolution of July he had been deprived of his office for his liberal tendencies, and had been elected deputy for Evreux. Under Louis Philippe he received a peerage in 1832. He was a member of the council of public instruction, and was twice minister of that department, and he also became secretary of the Academy. During the whole of the July monarchy he was thus one of the

chief

CHIEF (from Fr. chef, head, Lat. caput)

dispensers of literary patronage in France, but in his later years his reputation declined. He died in Paris on the 8th of May 1867.
Villemain's

chief

CHIEF (from Fr. chef, head, Lat. caput)

work

WORK

is his Cosies de la litterature francaise (5 vols., 1828-29). Among his other works are : Tableau de la litterature du moyen dge (2 vols., 1846) ; Tableau de la litterature au X VIII siecle (4 vols., 1864) ; Souvenirs contemporains (2 vols., 1856) ; Histoire de Gregoire VII. (2 vols., 1873; Eng. trans., 1874).
Among notices on Villemain may be cited that of Louis de Lomenie (1841), E. Mirecourt (1858), J. L. Dubut (1875). See also Sainte-Beuve, Portraits (1841, vol. iii.), and Causeries du lundi (vol. xi. " Notes et pensees ").

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