Béranger, Pierre-Jean de (1780-1857). Poet and songwriter. The son of a fairly humble Parisian family, he worked as a printer before obtaining a pension from Lucien Bonaparte and a clerical post in the University. He lost his post and was twice imprisoned under the Restoration on account of his songs. His first publication was Chansons morales et autres (1815), containing the anti-Napeolonic ‘Le Roi d'Yvetot’; this was followed by several more collections, the last being Chansons nouvelles et dernières (1833), with an important preface.

Béranger, who was much admired by Stendhal and Goethe, was honoured at his death as a national poet. His witty, good-humoured poems and songs crystallized myths of the French rural past, of French popular mentality, and of Bonapartism and spoke to the needs and aspirations of a wide range of readers at specific moments in history. His anticlericalism and anti-royalism placed him in the central tradition of liberal republicanism and made of him an exemplary opponent of the Restoration, his imprisonment further serving to enhance his legendary status.

It is generally accepted that his songs played a significant part in the 1830 Revolution [see July Monarchy], and they continued to have a stirring effect on working-class republicans throughout the century. However, in the eyes of avant-garde writers such as Baudelaire or Flaubert—those committed to the quest for formal perfection and the exposure of hypocrisies and pieties of all factions—Béranger was worthy only of contempt. Baudelaire poured scorn on the easy sentimentality and hearty bawdiness of his songs. The same view has generally prevailed in literary circles; Thibaudet even found Béranger indistinguishable from Flaubert's Homais. Robert Louis Stevenson has a good and much more sympathetic piece about him in the Encyclopedia Britannica (11th edn.).

[Brian Rigby]

(pyĕr zhäN də bāräNzhā') , 1780–1857, French lyric poet. He was a protégé of Lucien Bonaparte and a friend of some of the most eminent men of his day. His first collection of songs, published in 1815, was immediately popular. He fitted his verse to popular melodies, and he used his poems largely to express republican and Bonapartist ideas, for which he was twice imprisoned.