1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ginguené, Pierre Louis

GINGUENÉ, PIERRE LOUIS (1748–1815), French author, was born on the 27th of April 1748 at Rennes, in Brittany. He was educated at a Jesuit college in his native town, and came to Paris in 1772. He wrote criticisms for the Mercure de France, and composed a comic opera, Pomponin (1777). The Satire des satires (1778) and the Confession de Zulmé (1779) followed. The Confession was claimed by six or seven different authors, and though the value of the piece is not very great, it obtained great success. His defence of Piccini against the partisans of Gluck made him still more widely known. He hailed the first symptoms of the Revolution, joined Giuseppe Cerutti, the author of the Mémoire pour le peuple français (1788), and others in producing the Feuille villageoise, a weekly paper addressed to the villages of France. He also celebrated in an indifferent ode the opening of the states-general. In his Lettres sur les confessions de J.-J. Rousseau (1791) he defended the life and principles of his author. He was imprisoned during the Terror, and only escaped with life by the downfall of Robespierre. Some time after his release he assisted, as director-general of the “commission exécutive de l’instruction publique,” in reorganizing the system of public instruction, and he was an original member of the Institute of France. In 1797 the directory appointed him minister plenipotentiary to the king of Sardinia. After fulfilling his duties for seven months, very little to the satisfaction of his employers, Ginguené retired for a time to his country house of St Prix, in the valley of Montmorency. He was appointed a member of the tribunate, but Napoleon, finding that he was not sufficiently tractable, had him expelled at the first “purge,” and Ginguené returned to his literary pursuits. He was one of the commission charged to continue the Histoire littéraire de la France, and he contributed to the volumes of this series which appeared in 1814, 1817 and 1820. Ginguené’s most important work is the Histoire littéraire d’Italie (14 vols., 1811–1835). He was putting the finishing touches to the eighth and ninth volumes when he died on the 11th of November 1815. The last five volumes were written by Francesco Salfi and revised by Pierre Daunou.

In the composition of his history of Italian literature he was guided for the most part by the great work of Girolamo Tiraboschi, but he avoids the prejudices and party views of his model.

Ginguené edited the Décade philosophique, politique et littéraire till it was suppressed by Napoleon in 1807. He contributed largely to the Biographie universelle, the Mercure de France and the Encyclopédie méthodique; and he edited the works of Chamfort and of Lebrun. Among his minor productions are an opera, Pomponin ou le tuteur mystifié (1777); La Satire des satires (1778); De l’autorité de Rabelais dans la révolution présente (1791); De M. Neckar (1795); Fables nouvelles (1810); Fables inédites (1814). See “Éloge de Ginguené” by Dacier, in the Mémoires de l’institut, tom. vii.; “Discours” by M. Daunou, prefixed to the 2nd ed. of the Hist. litt. d’Italie; D. J. Garat, Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de P. L. Ginguené, prefixed to a catalogue of his library (Paris, 1817).