Jacques Vanière

Portrait of Jacques Vanière by Étienne-Jehandier Desrochers

Jacques Vanière SJ (Latin: Jacobus Vanierius; 1664 – 1739) was a French Roman Catholic priest, poet and Latinist.

Biography

Born in Causses, near Béziers, into a noble family, he studied in Béziers, at the Jesuit College, later the Lycée Henri IV. After studying rhetoric, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1680 where he did his two years of novitiate, before studying philosophy at the college of Tours. It was there that he revealed his talent for Latin poetry by publishing the poem of the Ponds ("Stagna") after having been encouraged to engage in this way by Father Joseph Joubert (1640–1719), who published a French and Latin Dictionary in 1709.

Vanière then taught humanities and rhetoric in Toulouse, then in Montpellier. Recalled to Toulouse by his superiors, he was put in charge of the boarders' house. After having fulfilled these functions for ten years, he was granted the position of writer in the college of Toulouse, which allowed him to devote all his leisure time to poetry.

In 1706, he published the first version of his Praedium rusticum, which critics compared to Virgil's Georgics, earning him the nickname "French Virgil".

He was then appointed rector of the college of Auch, but he remained there for only three years, and returned to Toulouse, before being sent to Paris in 1730 to plead before the Council of State the legality of the bequest to the Jesuits of the library of the archbishop of Narbonne, Charles Le Goux de La Berchère; a donation that was being attacked by the heirs of the prelate. Jacques Vanière lost the lawsuit, but he was received with the greatest honors in the capital. All the people of letters wanted to see him and know him.

He then returned to Toulouse, where he obtained a pension which allowed him to devote himself to the writing of a French-Latin Dictionary which he had been working on for two decades. But this work was never published.

Works

• Praedium rusticum (1682) — In which Vanière sings about the work and pleasures of the countryside. In this poem, he came as close to Virgil as a modern could. Published for the first time in Paris in 1682, then in 1710, again in Paris (by Jean Le Clerc) in 10 songs only, it appeared in full only in 1730. It was translated into French by Bertrand d'Halouvry (1756), and by Antoine Le Camus (1756), into Italian by Gian Pietro Bergantini (1748) and into English by Arthur Murphy (1799).
• Regia parnassi seu palatium musarum in quo synonyma (1699; with François Vavasseur) — a versification manual.
• Opuscula (1730) — collection of poems.
• Dictionarium poeticum (1740) — a kind of Gradus ad Parnassum.

References

• Marie-Nicolas Bouillet & Alexis Chassang, eds., "Jacques Vanière." In: Dictionnaire Universel d’Histoire et de Géographie. Paris: Hachette (1878)
• Florian Reynaud, Les bêtes à cornes (ou l'élevage bovin) dans la littérature agronomique de 1700 à 1850. Caen: Thèse de doctorat en histoire (2009)

External links

• Works by Jacques Vanière at Gallica