BERANGER, PIERRE JEAN DE French song-writer, was born in Paris on Aug. 19, 1780. He received very little formal instruction in his childhood in Paris, where as a schoolboy he witnessed the fall of the Bastille. Later he lived at Peronne with an aunt, who taught him to be a stout republican; and from the doorstep of her inn, on quiet evenings, he would listen to the thunder of the guns before Valenciennes, and fortify himself in his passionate love of France and distaste for all things foreign. In 1802, in consequence of a distressing quarrel, he left his father and began life for himself in the garret of his ever memorable song. For two years he did literary hackwork, when he could get it, and wrote pastorals, epics and all manner of ambitious failures. At the end of that period (1804) he wrote to Lucien Bonaparte, enclosing some of these attempts. He was then in bad health, and in the last state of poverty, mitigated only by the friendship of Judith Frere, with whom he had been already more or less acquainted since 1796, and who continued to be his faithful companion until her death, three months before his own, in 1857. She must not be confounded with the Lisette of the songs; the pieces addressed to her (La Bonne Vieille, Maudit printemps, etc.) are in a very different vein. Lucien Bonaparte interested himself in the young poet, and transferred to him his own pension of i,000 francs from the Institute; five years later, through the same patronage, although indirectly, Beranger became a clerk in the university at a salary of another thousand. Mean while he had written many songs for convivial occasions, and "to console himself under all misfortunes" in 1812, while he was watching by the sick-bed of a friend, it occurred to him to write down the best he could remember. Next year he was elected to the Caveau Moderne, and his reputation as a song-writer began to spread. Manuscript copies of Les Gueux, Le Sginateur, above all, of Le Roi d'Yvetot, a satire against Napoleon, whom he was to magnify so much in the sequel, passed from hand to hand with acclamation ; one man sang them to another over all the land of France. He was the only poet of modern times who could altogether have dispensed with printing.
His first collection escaped censure. "We must pardon many things to the author of Le Roi d'Yvetot," said Louis XVIII. The second (1821) lost him his situation in the university, and sub jected him to a trial, a fine of soo francs and an imprisonment of three months. At Sainte Pelagie he occupied a room (it had just been quitted by Paul Louis Courier), warm, well furnished, and preferable in every way to his own poor lodging where the water froze on winter nights. A second imprisonment of nine months followed on the appearance of his fourth collection. The government proposed through Laffitte that, if he would submit to judgment without appearing or making defences, he should be condemned only in the smallest penalty. But his public spirit made him refuse the proposal; and he would not even ask permis sion to pass his term of imprisonment in a maison de sante, although his health was more than usually feeble at the time.
In the revolution of July copies of his song, Le Vieux Drapeau, were served out to the insurgent crowd. He had been for long the intimate friend and adviser of the leading men ; and during the decisive week his counsels went a good way towards shaping the ultimate result. Beranger, however, refused to present himself at court, and used his favour only to ask a place for a friend, and a pension for Rouget de 1'Isle, author of the famous Mar seillaise. In 1848 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, but soon obtained leave to resign. This was the last public event of Beranger's life. He continued to polish his songs in retirement, visited by nearly all the famous men of France. He numbered among his friends Chateaubriand, Thiers, Jacques Laffitte, Michelet, Lamennais, Mignet. His correspondence is full of wisdom and kindness, with a smack of Montaigne, and now and then a vein of pleasantry that will remind the English reader of Charles Lamb. He occupied some of his leisure in preparing his own memoirs, and a treatise, which he never completed, on Social and Political Morality. He died on July 16, 1857. At his funeral the streets of Paris were lined with soldiers and full of townsfolk, silent and uncovered. From time to time cries arose : "Honneur, honneur d Beranger!" Beranger had little toleration for those erotic poets who are absorbed in singing their own loves and not the common sorrows of mankind, "who forget," to quote his own words, "forget beside their mistress those who labour before the Lord." Hence it is that so many of his pieces are political, and so many, in the later times at least, inspired with a socialistic spirit of indignation and revolt. It is by this socialism that he becomes truly modern and touches hands with Burns. (R. L. S.; X.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.--See Oeuvres de Beranger, ed. by Perrotin (1866) ; Oeuvres inedites, ed. H. Lecomte (1909) ; Ma biographie (his own memoirs) (1858) ; Paul Boiteau Vie de Beranger (1861) ; Correspond ence de Beranger ed. by Paul Boiteau (1860) ; Napoleon Peyrat Beranger et Lamennais (1857) ; A. Arnould Beranger, ses amis, ses ennemis et ses critiques (1864) ; J. Janin Beranger et son temps (1866) ; also Portraits contemporains Vol. i. ; J. Garson Beranger et la legende napoleonienne (1897) ; A. Boulle Beranger (1 qo8) . A bibliography of Beranger's works was published by Jules Brivois in 1876.