VILLEMAIN, Abel François (1790-1867), historian of French literature, was born at Paris on 11th June 1790. He was educated at the lycée Louis-le-Grand, and was only twenty when he was appointed to an assistantmastership at the lycée Charlemagne. This appointment was shortly exchanged for a post at the Ecole Normale. He early devoted himself to the composition of the Academic prize essays which have founded the fortune of so many French men of letters, and in 1812 he gained the prize with an éloge on Montaigne, which was followed by other successful attempts. His second successful essay, On Criticism, had the honour of being read by the author before the Academy and the allied sovereigns who were then (April 1814) in Paris. Under the restoration he was appointed, first, assistant professor of modern history and then professor of French eloquence at the Sorbonne. Here he began and continued for about ten years a series of literary lectures which had an extraordinary effect on his younger contemporaries. The secret indeed of Villemain’s great popularity and immense influence is only to be understood by exact observation of the time at which he came. He had no very extraordinary gift of style, nor was he a very original thinker. But he had the great advantage of coming just before the Romantic movement, of having a wide and catholic love of literature, and, at the same time, of not being an extremist. All, or almost all, the clever young men of the brilliant generation of 1830 passed under his influence; and, while he enchanted those of Romantic tendency by his constant reference to, and his frank appreciation of, the beauties of English, German, Italian, and Spanish poetry, he had not the least inclination to decry the classics —either the classics proper of Greece ...and Rome or the so-called classics of France. In 1819 he published a book on Cromwell, remarkable for a Frenchman of his day, and two years later he was elected to the Academy. The time was more favourable than any previous time had been to literary men with political inclinations, and Villemain was appointed by the restoration Government “chef de l’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. Like others, however, Villemain became more and more Liberal, and before the revolution of July he had been deprived of his office and had been elected deputy for Evreux. This secured his fortune under Louis Philippe’s reign, and, though he did not long sit in the lower chamber, he received a peerage in 1832. He was a very important member of the council of public instruction, and was twice minister of that department, while at the same time with his elevation to the upper chamber he was made secretary of the Academy. This combination made him during the whole of the July monarchy one of the chief dispensers of literary patronage in France; and, though he never drew on himself the personal ill-will which his friend and colleague Cousin attracted, it was almost inevitable that he should displease many for every one that he gratified. Villemain’s literary position had moreover been somewhat left behind by the course of events, and in politics he was something of a doctrinaire. For more than the last twenty years of his life he took no open part in public affairs, though his literary activity continued to be considerable, the books which he published being in part workings-up of his brilliant Sorbonne courses. Although he still retained a great name and an important Academic position, his later years are supposed to have been somewhat saddened by the difference of his employments and consideration, as compared with those of his middle age. Villemain, in fact, was a man who had at one time, chiefly by accident and coincidence, acquired a position to which he was not quite equal. Some reflexions on him in the “Notes et Pensées” to be found in Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries du Lundi, vol. xi., are, as is too often the case in that collection when it refers to contemporaries, harsh. But it is certain that he had little originality of thought or definiteness of literary theory, that he was rather a clever exponent of ideas which happened to be popular than a convinced reasoner, and that he had an undue admiration of success. His death took place at Paris on 8th May 1867.
Villemain’s chief work is his Cours de la Littérature Française, in 6 volumes, printed soon after he ceased lecturing, and reprinted long afterwards in 1864. It is a very discursive book, containing literary judgments on all sorts of subjects, and illustrating very well the fashion in which Villemain satisfied and stimulated a generation which had just become aware that literature was not limited to the productions of the men of the grand siècle. Almost all his later works, which are numerous, consist of collections of Academic éloges, lectures, and literary and historical essays. As, however, he began with a substantive historical work so did he end with one, the posthumous History of Gregory VIL, on which he had been known to be engaged for many years, and the long delay of which had been the cause of not a few sarcasms. Although a book of merit, it will hardly supplant Villemain’s early Academic lectures as his title to remembrance and fame—such fame as is due to a teacher who succeeds in stirring up the literary faculties of men more highly gifted than himself.
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