PIERRE

See also:

• PIERRE DUPONT (1821-1870)

DUPONT (1821-1870)  , French song-writer, the son of a blacksmith, was born at Lyons on the 23rd of April 1821 . His parents both died before he was five years old, and he was brought up in the country by his godfather, a village priest . He was educated at the seminary of L'Argentiere, and was afterwards apprenticed to a notary at Lyons . In 1839 he found his way to Paris, and some of his poems were inserted, in the Gazette de France and the Quotidienne . Two years later he was saved from the conscription and enabled to publish his first volume—Les Deux Anges—through the exertions of a kinsman and of Pierre Lebrun . In 1842 he received a prize from the Academy, and worked for some time on the official dictionary . Gounod's appreciation of his peasant song, J'ai deux grands bceufs clans mon etable (1846), settled his vocation as a song-writer . He had no theoretical knowledge of music, but he composed both the words and the melodies of his songs, the two processes being generally simultaneous . He himself remained so innocent of musical know-ledge that he had to engage Ernest Reyer to write down his airs . He sang his own songs, as they were composed, at the workmen's concerts in the Salle de la Fraternite du Faubourg Saint-Denis; the public performance of his famous Le Pain was forbidden; Le Chant des ouvriers was even more popular; and in 1851 he paid the penalty of having become the poet laureate of the socialistic aspirations of the time by being comdemned to seven years of exile from France . The sentence was cancelled, and the poet withdrew for a time from participation in politics . He died at Lyons, where his later years were spent, on the 24th of July 1870 .

His songs have appeared in various forms—Chants et chansons (3 vols., with music, 1852-1854), Chants et poesies (7th edition, 1862), &c . Among the best-known are Le Braconnier, Le

Tisserand, La Vache blanche, La Chanson du ble, but many others might be mentioned of equal spontaneity and charm . His later works have not the same merit . See also Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, iv.; Ch . Baudelaire, Notice sur P . Dupont (1849) ; Dechaut, Biographie de Pierre Dupont (1871); and Ch . Lenient, Poesie patriotique en France (1889), ii . 352 et seq .