Edgar Quinet (Bourg-en-Bresse 1803 – Versailles 1875), pursued, after his schooling in Lyon, a literary career in Paris. He gained fame with his translation of Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1827); his stance, combining Romanticism with republicanism and a liberationist view of human progress, soon brought him close to Jules Michelet and to Victor Cousin, through whose influence he joined the archeological expedition to the Peloponnese as a philologist (1829); the journey resulted in his Philhellenic book La Grèce moderne (1830).
Quinet obtained great influence as a public intellectual owing to his association with the Revue des Deux Mondes, where he drew attention to medieval chivalric epic. His Rapport sur les épopées françaises du XIIe siècle restées jusqu’à ce jour en manuscrits dans les bibliothèques du Roi et de l’Arsenal was itself inspired by the “discovery” of the Bohemian Manuscripts (later exposed as a forgery) by Václav Hanka, which he presented in a lengthy article “De l’épopée des Bohèmes” (1831); in turn, his medievalism prepared the ground for the editorial work of Paulin Paris. Quinet also used the form of the chanson de geste for his verse epic Napoléon (1836); and his medievalism would resurface as late as 1860 in his Arthurian romance Merlin l’Enchanteur.
From the mid-1830s onwards, Quinet’s writing was dominated by a growing disenchantment with post-Romantic Germany (culminating in, but persisting well beyond, the notorious “Rhine crisis” of 1840); by a continuing democratic republicanism (expressing itself in writings in support of Poland, Romania, and the early beginnings of the Dutch Republic); and by an increasing interest in comparative religion. As a mystically inclined Romantic and Freemason, Quinet, while sympathetic to the religious spirit, was intensely critical of Roman Catholicism and a staunch proponent of secularism. He broadcast these ideals both in his writings and at the Collège de France, where he had been appointed professor of South-European languages and literatures in 1841 (and where he was a colleague of his soulmate Michelet).
Quinet supported the republican revolution of 1848 and in the Second Republic became a parliamentary delegate; deeply disappointed by the coup d’état of 1851, he was dismissed from his chair at the Collège de France in 1852, and went into exile: first in Belgium, then (1858) in Switzerland, where he married Hermione Asachi, daughter of the Romanian poet Gheorghe Asachi. The University of Geneva offered him a professorship in moral philosophy in 1868.
From his exile, Quinet, who continued to write visionary poems and historical studies, remained an inspiring force for the Left in France. He returned to Paris in 1870, and, following the disastrous events of 1870-71, vehemently opposed ceding Alsace-Lorraine to Germany.
