Bonivard, FRANÇOIS DE

Bonivard, FRANÇOIS DE, a younger son of a family which held large possessions under the House of Savoy, was born about 1496 at Seyssel, on the Rhone, and in 1513 became prior of St Victor at Geneva. Falling under the suspicion of the Duke of Savoy, he was taken prisoner by him in 1519. After twenty months' imprisonment he was set free, but in 1530 he was again seized, and taken to the castle of Chillon at the east end of the Lake of Geneva, where he was imprisoned for six years, the last four in that subterranean vault which the genius of Byron has made famous by his poem on the sufferings of The Prisoner of Chillon. The details of Bonivard's history were unknown to Byron; the highly wrought description of the prisoner 'chained to a column stone' sprang from the imagination of the poet, and is now embodied in the local tradition. On the capture of Chillon by the Bernese and Genevese in 1536, he was liberated, and returned to Geneva. The priory of St Victor had meanwhile been rased for the defence of the city, and the now Protestant government, having devoted its revenues to the hospital, awarded Bonivard a pension. He died in 1570, leaving the town his books, which were the nucleus of the Geneva library. Bonivard was an indefatigable writer. His chief works are his Chroniques de Genève (1551; new ed. 2 vols. 1831), and De l'Ancienne et Nouvelle Police de Genève (1555), in which he paints in the blackest possible colours the opponents of the dominant Calvinist party. The credit of Bonivard, both as an historian and as a man, has in recent years suffered much from the investigations of more trustworthy historians. See works by Chaponnière (1846), Vulliemin (1863), Gaberel (1869); and Rossel's Hist. Litt. de la Suisse Romande (1889).