Maurice de Guérin

Maurice de Guérin (born August 4/5, 1810, Château du Cayla, near Andillac, France—died July 19?, 1839, Château du Cayla) was a French Romantic poet who achieved cultish admiration after his death.

Reared in a strictly Roman Catholic, Royalist family by his possessive sister, Eugénie, Guérin prepared for a clerical career at the Collège Stanislas in Paris. There he met the young novelist and critic Barbey d’Aurevilly, who became his lifelong friend.

By 1831 Guérin had decided against a religious life, and he soon went to Brittany to live in a radical community led by the brilliant Roman Catholic rebel Abbé Félicité-Robert de Lamennais. In his journal Le Cahier vert (1861; “The Green Notebook”), Guérin recorded some of the studies and discussions there, which were major influences in his life. Within a year Lamennais was condemned by the Pope, the community dissolved, and Guérin moved into the social life of Paris, where he wrote his two major prose poems, La Bacchante and Le Centaure. Both works are remarkable for the richness and depth of their pantheistic descriptions of nature. In 1837 he fell ill and returned to his native Cayla, where he recovered sufficiently to marry a rich young woman, Caroline Gervain; but he soon died of tuberculosis.

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Recognition came to Guérin in 1840, when some of his works were published posthumously through the efforts of his sister and friends. Later, in 1861, a collection of works, Reliquiae (2 vol.), appeared. A Guérin cult arose, causing the publication of every scrap of writing by Maurice and Eugénie, including their most intimate correspondence. The Journal et lettres (1862) of Eugénie de Guérin (1805–1848) show that she possessed gifts as rare as her brother’s, but her mysticism had assumed a more strictly religious form.