Quinet, EDGAR, a great French writer, was born of an old Catholic family at Bourg in the department of Ain, February 17, 1803. His mother, whose dreamy and emotional nature he inherited, was a Protestant. In 1806 the child was carried by his mother to join his father, then Commissioner of the Army of the Rhine, and he spent great part of his boyhood in the remote and dreary solitudes of Certines near Bourg. His parents were both ardent republicans, hating the very name of Napoleon. Accordingly the boy early made him a hero in his heart; but as he grew up a passion for liberty superseded his first love. He was educated at the colleges of Bourg and Lyons (1817–20), and next went to Paris; but refusing to take the course for a soldier at the École Polytechnique, he published in justification of his choice of a profession Les Tablettes du Juif Errant in 1823. He found the spiritual impulse that he needed in an English translation of Herder's Philosophy of History, and this he determined to translate into French, although he had first to learn German to do so. He published the book in 1825, and his remarkable Introduction procured him the friendship of Cousin, at whose house he met Michelet, for fifty years the 'brother of his heart and mind.' He had already travelled in Germany, Italy, and England, when in 1829 he was appointed to a post on a government mission to Greece. The fruit of his travels was La Grèce Moderne (1830). A speculative republican of ideas, one of the earliest writers for the Revue des Deux Mondes, and a student before their time of the old Chansons de Geste, Quinet played a conspicuous part in the Paris of his day, and made his name known beyond its walls by his Ahasvérus (1833), a kind of spiritual imitation of the ancient mysteries, in which the Wandering Jew stands as an emblem of humanity in its hopeless groping for certainty and rest. In 1834 he married, and next produced his less successful poems, Napoléon (1836) and Prométhée (1838). These three works fall naturally into a kind of trilogy, in which Ahasuerus represents the race, Napoleon the individual, and Prometheus the martyr, typical of the religious leader. In 1838 he published his Examen de la Vie de Jésus, in which he shows that Strauss is too analytic to detect the true principle of life in the gospels. Quinet's deepest conviction was that religion is the very substance of humanity, that the true founders of society have been teachers like Zoroaster and Moses, and that Christianity itself is the apotheosis of personality.
Appointed in 1839 professor of Foreign Literature at Lyons, he began those lectures which afterwards formed his brilliant book, Du Génie des Religions (1842). He was now recalled to Paris to the chair of 'Littératures Méridionales' at the Collège de France, and here for four years he lectured to a crowd of enthusiastic disciples on such themes as the revolutions in Italy, the Jesuits, Ultramontanism, and Christianity in relation to the French Revolution. He joined Michelet in attacking the Jesuits, and his epigrammatic eloquence, added to the enthusiasm and earnestness of his convictions, made the blow he struck the order the deadliest it had received in France since the days of Pascal. But his lectures caused so much excitement that government suppressed them in 1846. Next came the Revolution, in which Quinet took his place on the barricades, and after its success was elected to represent Ain in the National Assembly, where he voted in the Extreme Left. He was little of a practical statesman, but from the beginning he saw the traitor under the mask of Louis Napoleon. After the coup d'état he was exiled to Brussels, whence in 1857 he migrated to Veytaux on the shores of the Lake of Geneva. His mother had died in 1847, his wife in 1851, and soon after his exile he married the daughter of a Roumanian patriot, Georges Asaky. At Brussels he produced Les Esclaves (1853), and an edition of the chief writings of Marnix de Ste Aldégonde (1856); and in Switzerland Merlin l'Enchanteur (2 vols. 1860), a book of enormous rhetorical power, lofty but ill-sustained thought, and dazzling imagery. Other works were La Révolution Religieuse au XIX.e Siècle (1857); Histoire de mes Idées (1860), a delightful fragment of an autobiography; Histoire de la Campagne de 1815 (1862), in which he showed that Napoleon's fall was due to his own outrage upon righteousness alone; La Révolution (1865), in which he demonstrated that its frightful crimes were the fruit of the suspicions and mistrust begotten by twelve centuries of despotic education. All the disasters of French history he traced to the national denial of righteousness in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; the Terror was the direct result of St Bartholomew and the Dragonnades, and again was itself the parent of the 18th Brumaire and the 2d December. After the downfall of Napoleon III. he returned to Paris, and during the siege strove to keep aglow the expiring fire of patriotism. He sat in the National Assemblies at Bordeaux and Versailles, and aroused great enthusiasm by his impassioned if somewhat vague orations. He died at Versailles, 27th March 1875.
Quinet's latest books were La Création (1870), a characteristically bold and imaginative incursion into the domain of science; La République (1872); and L'Esprit Nouveau (1874). Le Livre de l'Exilé appeared posthumously. His wife published in 1870 Mémoires d'Exil; his Correspondance Inédite followed in 1877 (2 vols.), his Lettres d'Exil à Michelet et à Divers Amis in 1884-86 (4 vols.). An edition of his Œuvres Complètes in 26 vols. (1857-79) was prepared by an influential committee as a national tribute of respect to the poet, the prophet, and the patriot. See the biography by Chassin (1859); Edgar Quinet depuis l'Exil (1889), by his widow; Richard Heath's Edgar Quinet: His Early Life and Writings (1881); also the essays by Professor Dowden in Studies in Literature (1878), and É. Montégut in Mélanges Critiques (1879).