Author: LAMARTINE, Alphonse de
Biography:
LAMARTINE, Alphonse de (1790-1869: EB)
Lamartine was born in Macon, France, on 21 Oct. 1790; his birth name was Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine. His aristocrat father narrowly escaped the guillotine. After the Revolution they lived quietly; he was educated at home and at the Jesuit college of Belley. After he left the college in 1809 he travelled in Italy and Switzerland or stayed home with his books, confined by his uncertain health and the family’s royalist sympathies. With the restoration of the monarchy, he began to take a more public role. In 1820 he published his first collection of poetry, Méditations poétiques, which had an immediate success. In the same year he was appointed secretary to the French embassy at Naples. He then married an English heiress, Miss Birch (d 1863), whose forenames are given variously as Marianne, Maria Ann, Eliza Marianne, and Anna Eliza. Most sources give a date of 1820 but the 1911 Britannica maintains that the wedding took place in Geneva in 1823. Their son died in infancy and their daughter at Beirut, in her teens. More poetry appeared, notably “New Meditations” (1822), “The Last Canto of Harold’s Pilgrimage” (after Byron, 1825), and “Poetic and Religious Harmonies” (1830). In 1829 Lamartine was elected to the French Academy. His sympathies became increasingly democratic after he embarked on a political career in 1833 as a deputy in parliament, where he proved an effective orator. For three months following the 1848 Revolution he was a powerful member of the government with the official title of minister of foreign affairs, but in June he lost his post and in December when he stood as a candidate for president of the republic, he came last. He withdrew from public life and turned to writing prolifically—memoirs, histories, novels, etc.--in an attempt to find a way out of debt. He supervised an edition of his works in 41 volumes (1860-65). A government grant in 1867 eased his plight, but Lamartine died at Paris on 28 Feb. 1869. His named English translators, Harriet Cope and J. W. Lake, have separate headnotes. Internal evidence indicates that “J. C.” was born about 1804 (and therefore cannot be the John Churchill fl 1801). (EB 20 Apr. 2025; Encyclopaedia Britannica [1911] 16: 102-4; NBG 29, cols. 78-100; findmypast.com 20 Apr. 2025; British Ensign 27 May 1863) HJ
Other Names:
- A. de Lamartine
- Lamartine