Vinet, ALEXANDRE RODOLPHE, Swiss divine and critic, was born at Ouchy near Lausanne, June 17, 1797, studied there, was appointed at twenty to the chair of French Language and Literature in the gymnasium of Basel, in 1835 in the university itself. He had been ordained in 1819, and in 1837 he accepted the chair of Practical Theology at Lausanne. His attitude to the question of the relation between church and state was shown already in his prize essay for the Paris Société de la Morale Chrétienne, Mémoire en Faveur de la Liberté des Cultes (1826), and he soon found himself involved in the struggle against state interference. He withdrew from the Vaud canton association of clergy (1840), but after the democratic attack of 1845 upon the 'fanatics' without, and the Evangelicals within, the state church, resigned his chair, and at the close of the year joined the newly-formed Free Church of Vaud. Meantime he had been appointed professor of French Literature in the Lausanne Academy, but this office he was compelled to resign in 1846. He died at Clarens, 4th May 1847. Vinet was an eloquent and earnest preacher, clear and brilliant, evangelical and orthodox, yet an advocate of the utmost liberty and toleration of opinion and practice in matters of religion, with separation from the state. He possessed fine critical insight and a profound knowledge of French literature, and his Chrestomathie Française (1829), his study of Pascal (1848), his Études on the literature of the 19th century (3 vols. 1849-51), his Histoire of 18th-century literature (2 vols. 1853), the Moralistes des XVI. et XVII. Siècles (1859), and his Poètes du Siècle de Louis XIV. (1862) take rank with the best contemporary work of their kind. It was at his initiative that Sainte-Beuve came to Lausanne to deliver his famous lectures on Port-Royal. In ethics Vinet owned Pascal and Kant as his masters.
The chief of his books that have been translated into English are Christian Philosophy (1846), Vital Christianity (1846), Gospel Studies (1851), Pastoral Theology (1852), Homiletics (1853), Studies in Pascal (1859), Outlines of Philosophy and Literature (1865). See the studies by E. Scherer (1853), Chavannes (Leyden, 1883), the Lives by E. Rambert (1875), Louis Moline (1890), and Laura M. Lane (in English, 1890), and his Letters, edited by C. Secretan and E. Rambert (2 vols. 1882), and by E. de Pressensé (1890).