Ampere J
ACHIEVEMENTS: A pioneer of study of the origins of mythology and language in Western Europe.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: None
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH:
12 August 1800, Lyon, France
DATE AND PLACE OF DEATH AND AGE AT DEATH:
27 March 1864, Pau, France. Aged 64
DISCIPLINE: Historian. Philologist
FIELD: History. Philology
LANGUAGE: French
PARENTS:
Father: Andre-Marie Ampere
Mother: Julie Carron
SIBLINGS: None
SPOUSE: None
CHILDREN: None
EDUCATION:
Unknown
MAJOR WORKS:
1839-40, “History of French Literature before the 12thCentury”
1841, “History of the Development of the French Language”
LIFE AND TIMES:
Ampere’s father was the distinguished scientist AM Ampere*. His mother died when he was three and he was brought up by grandmothers and aunts. At the age of twenty he fell in love with Madame Recamier who was then forty-three. Her salon was frequented by everybody of taste and refinement and for decades she virtually ruled the social and cultural life in Paris. Ampere remained her devoted disciple for thirty years.
He was already engaged on philological and historical studies and in 1822 he gave lectures which were attended by the English physicist Dalton* who was visiting Paris. In 1823 Ampere joined Madame Recamier’s entourage when she visited Italy and spent the winter in Rome. The following summer the group moved on to Naples, but in the autumn Ampere his father summoned him home.
Andre-Marie Ampere had accepted that his son would not become the mathematician he had hoped for, and was now set on Jean-Jacques writing a great tragedy. Ampere wrote some plays which were accepted at the Theatre Francais but they were never performed. He needed no urging to write verse and produced a large quantity of bad poetry.
In 1826 he traveled to Germany and spent the winter at Bonn. He was received by Wilhelm von Schlegel*, who was an old admirer of Madame Recamier, and he attended a course Schlegel gave that winter on German language and literature. When he left Bonn he visited Weimar, where he spent three weeks with Goethe*, the German poet and philosopher, who had been impressed by Ampere’s interpretation of Goethe’s work in French journals. He also met Prince Augustus of Prussia, another of Recamier’s conquests. Ampere went on to visit Sweden and Norway where he studied Scandinavian folk songs and popular poetry.
On his return to Paris he gave a series of lectures attended by the Swiss chemist Schonbein*. In 1830, Ampere lectured on Scandinavian and early German poetry at the Athenaeum in Marseilles, and in the same year published a book on the history of poetry in which the French public was introduced, for virtually the first time, to the Scandinavian and German epics.
Ampere was appointed professor in the history of foreign literature at the Sorbonne in 1830. In 1833 he became a professor at the College de France where he lectured on French literature and continued research in philology and history.
In 1839-40 he published “History of French Literature before the 12thCentury” and in 1841, he published his second major philological work “History of the Development of the French Language.” Ampere’s work emphasized the importance of environmental influences and national culture on history and the development of language, a view later taken by the historian-philosopher Taine*.
Ampere traveled to northern Africa in 1841, then toured Greece and Italy in the company of the writer Merimee* and others.
In 1848 Ampere published “Greece, Rome and Dante” which popularized the study of the Italian poet Dante* in France. Ampere was elected to the French Academy in the same year. In 1851 Merimee also accompanied Ampere to the United States and Mexico, a journey which was recorded in Ampere’s “Travels in America: the United States, Cuba and Mexico.”
After this, Ampere was mainly occupied in writing his “Roman History in Rome,” published between 1861 and the year he died.
ASSESSMENT: Ampere was a pioneer of study of the origins of mythology and language in Western Europe.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: Jean-Jacques Ampere, early French philologist
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
James, Henry, French Poets and Novelists, Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1964