Victor de Laprade

After completing his studies at Lyon, he produced, in 1839, a small volume of religious verse, Les Parfums de Madeleine.

In 1845 Laprade visited Italy on a mission of literary research, and in 1847 he was appointed professor of French literature at Lyon.

The Académie française, by a single vote, preferred Émile Augier at the election in 1857, but in the following year Laprade was chosen to fill the place vacated by Alfred de Musset.

[1] In 1861 Laprade was removed from his post at Lyon owing to the publication of a poem satirising the Second Empire (Les Musées d'Etat),[2] and in 1871 was elected to the National Assembly as a conservative.

His poetry belongs to the school of Chateaubriand and Alphonse de Lamartine, imitating classical models, inspired by a sense of the ideal, and worshipping nature as revealing the divine.