Victor de Laprade
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Pierre Martin Victor Richard de Laprade (January 13, 1812 - December 13, 1883), known as Victor de Laprade, was a French poet and critic.
He was born at Montbrison, in the département of the Loire, of a modest provincial family. After completing his studies at Lyons, he produced, in 1839, a small volume of religious verse, Les Parfums de Madeleine. This was followed in 1840 by La colère de Jesus, in 1841 by the religious fantasy of Psyche, and in 1844 by Odes et poèmes. In 1845 Laprade visited Italy on a mission of literary research, and in 1847 he was appointed professor of French literature at Lyons. The Académie française, by a single vote, preferred Émile Augier at the election in 1857, but in the following year Laprade was chosen to fill the place vacated by Alfred de Musset.
In 1861 Laprade was removed from his post at Lyons owing to the publication of a political satire in verse (Les Musées d'Etat), and in 1871 took his seat in the National Assembly on the benches of the Right. A statue was erected in his memory at Montbrison.
Besides those named above, Laprade's poetic works include Poèmes évangéliques (185 2), Idylles héroïques (1858), Les Voix du silence (1864), Pernette (1868), Poèmes civiles (1873), Le Livre d'un père (1877), Varia and Livre des adieux (1878-1879). In prose he published, in 1840, Des habitudes intellectuelles de l'avocat. Questions d'art et de morale appeared in 1861, succeeded by Le Sentiment de la nature, avant le Christianisme in 1866, and Chez les modernes in 1868, Education libérale in 1873.
The material for these prose works had in some cases been printed earlier, after delivery as a lecture. He also contributed articles to the Revue des deux mondes and the Revue de Paris. No writer represents more perfectly than Laprade the spirit of French provincial life, its homely simplicity, its culture, its piety and its sober patriotism. As a poet he belongs to the school of Chateaubriand and Alphonse de Lamartine. Devoted to the best classical models, inspired by a sense of the ideal, and by worship of nature as revealing the divinegifted, too, with a full faculty of expression--he lacked only fire and passion in the equipment of a romantic poet. The absence of these prevented him from reaching the first rank, or from even attaining any great level of popularity.
Only in his patriotic verse did he free himself from these restrictions. He possessed some of the qualities, and many of the defects, of the English Lake School. Laprade's prose criticisms must be ranked high. Apart from his classical and metaphysical studies, he was widely read in the literatures of Europe, and built upon the groundwork of a naturally correct taste. His dislike of irony and scepticism probably led him to underrate the product of the 18th century, and there are signs of a too fastidious dread of Philistinism.
| Preceded by: Alfred de Musset | Seat 10 Académie française | Succeeded by: François Coppée |