Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné
born Feb. 8, 1552, Pons, Fr.
died April 29, 1630, Geneva
major late 16th-century poet,
renowned Huguenot captain, polemicist,
and historian of his own times. After
studies in Paris, Orléans, Geneva, and
Lyon, he joined the Huguenot forces and
served throughout the Wars of Religion
on the battlefield and in the council
chamber. He was écuyer (“master of
horse”) to Henry of Navarre. After
Henry’s accession to the French throne
as Henry IV (1589) and his abjuration of
Protestantism, Aubigné withdrew to his
estates in Poitou. Under the regency of
Marie de Médicis, his intransigence
estranged him from his Huguenot
brethren. Proscribed in 1620, he took
refuge in Geneva, where he remained
until his death. His closing years were
clouded by the disreputable conduct of
his son Constant—father of Madame de
Maintenon, second and secret wife of
Louis XIV.
Among Aubigné’s prose works, the
Confession catholique du sieur de Sancy,
first published in 1660, is a parody,
ironically dedicated to Cardinal
Duperron, of the tortuous explanations
offered by Protestants who followed
Henry IV’s example of abjuration. His
comment on life and manners ranges more
widely in the Adventures du baron de
Faeneste (1617), in which the Gascon
Faeneste represents attachment to
outward appearances (le paraître) while
honest squire Énay, embodying the
principle of true being (l’être), tries
to clear Faeneste’s mind of cant. The
Histoire universelle deals with the
period from 1553 to 1602, with an
appendix to cover the death of Henry IV
(1610); an unfinished supplement was
meant to bring the story up to 1622. The
chief interest of the Histoire lies in
its eyewitness accounts and in the
liveliness of Aubigné’s writing.
His major poem in seven cantos, the
Tragiques, begun in 1577 (published
1616), celebrates the justice of God,
who on the Day of Doom will gloriously
avenge his slaughtered saints. The
subject matter, the sectarian bias, and
the uneven composition and expression
are offset by many passages of great
poetic power, often lyrical in their
Biblical language and noble in the
despairing intensity of their invective.
The scope of the design confers epic
grandeur on the work. Modern research on
Baroque literature has awakened interest
in Aubigné’s youthful love poetry,
collected in the Printemps (1570–73,
unpublished). It remained in manuscript
until 1874. In these poems the stock
characters and phraseology, modelled on
Petrarch, are transmuted into a highly
personal style, full of tragic
resonances, by Aubigné’s characteristic
vehemence of passion and force of
imagination.
