Laprade, Victor Richard de (1812-87). French poet, critic, and professor of French literature at Lyon. A Catholic poet with a strong sense of the power of external nature, Laprade combined a Romantic sensibility with classical influences to produce one major poem, Psyché (1841), and a considerable quantity of verse of a rather mediocre quality. As a young man he was an enthusiast for the ideas of Ballanche and Quinet. After 1848 his conservatism increased. He concluded that the crisis of the present sprang from three main causes: the egalitarianism of the Revolution, the spread of industrialism, and the rehabilitation of the flesh proclaimed by the Utopian socialists.

[Ceri Crossley]

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.