Lamartine, Alphonse de (1790-1869)

French poet, man of letters, and statesman, who was a leader in the romantic movement.  Lamartine was born October 21, 1790, in Mâcon, the son of a Royalist army officer. A supporter of the Bourbon restoration in 1814, he became secretary of the French embassy at Naples under Louis XVIII. During the reign of Charles X, Lamartine served in the diplomatic corps at Florence, and, under Louis Philippe, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies. He was minister of foreign affairs in the provisional government established after the overthrow of Louis Philippe in 1848.  As a writer, Lamartine is known chiefly for his poetry, which has the romantic characteristics of conventional sentiment expressed with lyric grace and refinement, an atmosphere of gentle melancholy, and particularly effective descriptions of rural scenery. His most popular and influential volume of poems is Méditations poétiques (Poetic Meditations, 1820); other volumes are Nouvelles méditations poétiques (New Poetic Meditations, 1823), Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (Poetic and Religious Harmonies, 1830), Jocelyn (1836), La chute d'un ange (An Angel's Fall, 1838), and Recueillements (Reflections, 1839). Lamartine was also a prolific writer of fiction and of biographical, critical, and historical works. His prose works include Histoire de Girondins (1847) and the autobiographical novels Raphaël (1849) and Graziella (1852; trans. 1876). Lamartine died February 28, 1869, in Paris.