ALEXANDRE VINET - his life & work

Donald Kennedy. Very Good. 1997. Card Cover. 8vo Privately published by Donald Kennedy, Belfast. 167pp. Inscribed "Greetings fron Donald". Translated by Donald Kennedy. To inhabitants of the off-shore islands of Great Britain and Ireland, Alexandre Vinet (1797-1847) is now largely unknown. This is even more true of his biographer, Eugene Rambert (1830-86). But Rambert was a personality in his own right. Born near Clarens, north of Lausanne, on the shore of beautiful Lac Leman, he came from a respectable but by no means wealthy family, he was one of five children. His father was a village school master, but when Eugene was seven years old, the family moved to Lausanne, his father having become Headmaster of the Model school attached to the Ecole Normale in that city. His upbringing was in an atmosphere of austere old-fashioned morality and rigid piety, not unlike that of Alexandre Vinet himself a generation earlier. When he was about eleven years old he had a severe illness, followed by convalescence in an Alpine valley. From then onwards he was passionately devoted to the Alps, and to the exploration of all that they stood for. As a student of the Academie (later University) of Lausanne in the period before the 1845 revolution in the Canton of Vaud, he had distinguished teachers - Professors like Vinet and visiting Professors like Sainte-Beuve. At his father's wish, he then enrolled in the new Free Church Faculty of Theology in Lausanne. But discontent with traditional theological doctrines led him to discontinue his theological studies, and at the early age of 24 he applied for and was appointed to the post of Professor of (French) Literature in the Academie, being confirmed in the position in 1855. In his autobiography, he noted that the main reason for his later departure to Zurich was the "doctrinaire pietism" of Lausanne. His early days in Lausanne were marked by studies of Calvin and Pascal and of more modern French writers including Michelet and Victor Hugo - most of these being published by the rather grandly named Bibliotheque universelle of Lausanne to which he became a regular contributor. Towards the end of his time in Lausanne he delivered a notable series of lectures on Corneille, Racine and Moliere, published in 1861. At the beginning of 1860, Rambert was appointed to the chair of French Literature in the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, where he remained for 20 years (1860-1880) Understandably, the bias of the Polytechnic was towards the natural sciences and the majority of the students were German - speaking of foreigners and therefore not greatly interested in French Literature of any kind. But in addition to the appreciation of a largely French-speaking elite at the Polytechnic, Rambert had the stimulus of the many-sided life of Zurich city as a whole, which at the period was greatly enriched by the presence of refugee scholars exiled from Italy and Germany by reactionary regimes. .