Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri (1737-1814). Novelist and naturalist. Born in Le Havre, he took a delight even as a child in romantic day-dreaming, and after reading Robinson Crusoe set sail for Martinique at the age of 12. On his return he studied under the Jesuits, became a military engineer, took part in the Seven Years War in Germany, and was punished by the army for indiscipline. Subsequent years were nomadic, filled with failed projects and disappointment: he became a geographer in Malta, a journalist in Holland, an engineer in Russia; in Warsaw and Vienna he lived by his wits; in Mauritius he appears to have lived as something of an opportunist. On his return to Paris, he became the friend of J.-J. Rousseau, whose personality and philosophy were to have a profound influence on him. His Voyage à l'Île de France (1773) was not the success he had hoped; in great financial difficulty, he continued to write and at length published the Études de la nature (1784), which were enormously popular, especially with women, and which freed him at last from debt. His novel Paul et Virginie first appeared in volume 4 of the third edition of the Études de la nature (1788), and in the following year was published in a separate edition; this pastorale ensured his lasting fame and was followed in 1791 by La Chaumière indienne. He was eventually made Intendant of the Jardin des Plantes and Cabinet d'Histoire Naturelle in 1792, Professeur de Morale at the École Normale Supérieure in 1794, and a member of the Institut in 1798. His support for Napoleon gained him an imperial pension.

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's work has often suffered from his reputation as a man—quarrelsome, misanthropic, vain, greedy for money and honours. Though he could be confused in his thinking, excessively didactic and verbose, he nevertheless had an exceptional gift for poetic as well as accurate description of exotic settings which makes him an important precursor of Chateaubriand. A disciple of Fénelon and Rousseau, he was filled with humanitarian zeal and a wish to reveal God through the wonders of nature. He looked not only back to a lost golden age of human happiness, which he had sought on his travels to distant lands, but also forward to a society purged of corruption, an ideal republic of justice and equality. Paul et Virginie, for which he is now primarily remembered, derives some of its lasting appeal from each of these aspects of his thought.

[Dennis Wood]

Bibliography

• Études sur Paul et Virginie et l'œuvre de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (ed. J.-M. Racault, 1986)

Jacques-Henri Bernardin

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Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (also called Bernardin de St. Pierre) (January 19, 1737 Le Havre – January 21, 1814 Éragny, Val-d'Oise) was a French writer and botanist. He is best known for his 1787 novel Paul et Virginie. In 1795 he was elected to the Institut de France, and in 1803 to the Académie Française.

From Antoine-Louis Barye: Sculptor of Romantic Realism by Glenn F. Benge, p.8:

"Bayre's predators devouring their living prey indulge the emotions in a Romantic way of course, but they also embody a romantically moralizing point of view like those held by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Mme de Staël, and Victor Hugo. The Oeuvres complètes of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre appeared in Paris in 1834 and was surely known to Bayre, for the author was the former director of the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes and one of the "masters of genuine poetry" for the archromantic Mme de Staël. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre maintained that a carnivorous animal in devouring its prey alive committed a sin against the laws of its own nature."

External links

• Works by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre at Project Gutenberg

Cultural offices
Preceded by Antoine-Louis Séguier	Seat 27 Académie française 1803–1814	Succeeded by Étienne Aignan

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