Béranger, PIERRE JEAN DE, the greatest songwriter of France, was born on the 19th August 1780, in the street of Montorgueil, in Paris. His father, a notary's clerk, had left his mother six months after their marriage, and Béranger was brought up by his grandfather, Champy, a tailor, until his ninth year, when he passed into the care of an aunt who kept an inn in the suburbs of Péronne. She was an ardent republican, and appears to have taken pains to imbue her nephew with her political principles. From his fourteenth to his seventeenth year Béranger worked as apprentice to a printer in Péronne. He afterwards acted as a clerk to his father, who about this time gained a fortune by financial enterprises, only to lose it, however, in 1798. Béranger then settled in Paris, and gave himself to literature, living in the garret of which he has sung so charmingly, planning the most ambitious works (among them an epic on Clovis), and making careful studies of French style, until in 1804 distress compelled him to ask aid from Lucien Bonaparte. The assistance sought was willingly given; and about three years later the poet Arnault found Béranger a clerkship in the office of the Imperial University, a post which he held until 1821. On the publication of the first collection of his songs in 1815, he was recognised as the lyrical champion of the opposition to the Bourbons. His popularity with the working-classes was immense. It was for them that he always wrote, and they repaid him with an ardour of gratitude and admiration such as no other poet has excited in modern times. The chanson, in which the 18th-century writers had tritled in praise of love and wine, became in his hands a trenchant political weapon.
His politics, a curious compound of republicanism and devotion to the Napoleonic legend, exactly hit the taste of the multitude. His songs passed from mouth to mouth before they were published; since the invention of printing he is the only poet, it has well been said, who might have dispensed with the services of the press. For a time the government did not interfere, but two volumes which he published in 1821 led to a trial, at the close of which he was fined 500 francs and sentenced to three months' imprisonment in St Pélagie. Another volume, issued in 1825, was the cause of a second prosecution. Béranger was on this occasion fined 10,000 francs and condemned to nine months' imprisonment in La Force, where he was visited by Hugo, Dumas, Sainte-Beuve, and others of the greatest men of the day. In 1830 he published Chansons Nouvelles, and in 1840 he wrote the story of his life. In 1848 he was elected, against his will, by more than 200,000 votes to represent the Department of the Seine in the Constituent Assembly. He took his seat, but a few days afterwards begged to be allowed to resign. He rejected sundry offers of advancement from Napoleon III., and lived in retirement during his last years. He died at Paris on July 17, 1857. Béranger has been repeatedly compared to Burns, but he has neither the passion nor the deep humour of the Scottish poet. His songs cover a wide variety of subjects. Their vivacity and wit and tripping lightness of movement, their spontaneity and humanity, their gaiety which trembles into pathos, their satire which melts into laughter, their inimitable simplicity and seemingly unstudied grace of workmanship, explain and justify the unequalled popularity which their author secured and still retains among his countrymen. See Ma Biographie (Paris, 1857), and his correspondence edited by Boiteau (4 vols. 1859-60); also Jules Janin's Béranger et son Temps (Paris, 1866); W. Besant's French Humorists (Lond. 1873); and W. H. Pollock's French Poets (Lond. 1879).