Vigny grew up in Paris, and attended preparatory studies for the École Polytechnique at the Lycée Bonaparte, obtaining a good knowledge of French history and the Bible before developing an "inordinate love for the glory of bearing arms".

Prolonging successive leaves from the army, he settled in Paris with his young English bride Lydia Bunbury, whom he married in Pau in 1825.

Vigny wrote of Hugo: "The Victor I loved is no more... now he likes to make saucy remarks and is turning into a liberal, which does not suit him.

"[1][2] Unlike Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine, who became gradually liberal and then radical during the 1830s, Vigny remained pliantly centrist in his politics: he accepted the July Monarchy, at first welcomed and then rejected the Second French Republic, and then endorsed Napoleon III.

During 1831 he presented his first original play, La Maréchale d'Ancre, a historical drama recounting events just prior to the reign of King Louis XIII.

After the death of his mother in 1838 he inherited the property of Maine-Giraud, near Angoulême, where it was said that he had withdrawn to his 'ivory tower' (an expression Sainte-Beuve coined with reference to Vigny).

His own philosophy of life was pessimistic and stoical, but valued human fraternity, the growth of knowledge, and mutual assistance[citation needed].

He was the first in literary history to use the word spleen in the sense of woe, grief, gall, descriptive of the condition of the soul of modern man.

During his later years he spent much time preparing the posthumous collection of poems known now as Les Destinées, for which his intended title was Poèmes philosophiques.