Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset (August 29, 1709, Amiens

Amiens

Amiens is a city and commune in northern France, north of Paris and south-west of Lille. It is the capital of the Somme department in Picardy...

 – June 16, 1777) was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 and dramatist, best known for his poem Vert-Vert.

He was born at Amiens

Amiens

Amiens is a city and commune in northern France, north of Paris and south-west of Lille. It is the capital of the Somme department in Picardy...

. During the last twenty-five years of his life, he regretted the frivolity of his youth, which enabled him to produce his most famous poem. He was brought up by the Jesuits of Amiens. Accepted as a novice at the age of seventeen, he was sent to study at the Collège Louis le Grand

Lycée Louis-le-Grand

The Lycée Louis-le-Grand is a public secondary school located in Paris, widely regarded as one of the most rigorous in France. Formerly known as the Collège de Clermont, it was named in king Louis XIV of France's honor after he visited the school and offered his patronage.It offers both a...

 in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. After completing his course he was appointed, at the age of nineteen, to a post as assistant master in a college at Rouen

Rouen

Rouen , in northern France on the River Seine, is the capital of the Haute-Normandie region and the historic capital city of Normandy. Once one of the largest and most prosperous cities of medieval Europe , it was the seat of the Exchequer of Normandy in the Middle Ages...

.

Gresset published Vert-Vert at Rouen in 1734. It is the humorous story of a parrot, the delight of a convent whose talk was all of prayers and pious ambitions, and how it was conveyed to another convent as a visitor to please the nun

Nun

A nun is a woman who has taken vows committing her to live a spiritual life. She may be an ascetic who voluntarily chooses to leave mainstream society and live her life in prayer and contemplation in a monastery or convent...

s. On the way it falls among bad companions, forgets its convent language, and shocks the sisters on arrival by profane swearing. It is sent back in disgrace, punished by solitude and plain bread, repents, reforms and is finally killed by kindness. The treatment of the subject, the atmosphere which surrounds it, and the delicacy with which the little prattling ways of the nuns, their jealousies and trifling concerns, are presented, takes the reader entirely by surprise. The poem stands absolutely unrivalled, even among French contes en vers.

Gresset, now famous, left Rouen for Paris, where he found refuge in the same garret which had sheltered him when a boy at the Collège Louis le Grand, and there wrote his second poem, La Chartreuse. It was followed by the Carême impromptu, the Lutrin vivant and Les Ombres. Soon, complaints were made to the fathers of the alleged licentiousness of his verses, the real cause of complaint being the ridicule which Vert-Vert seemed to throw upon the religious community and the anti-clerical tendency of the other poems. Gresset was transferred to the Jesuit school of La Flèche

La Flèche

La Flèche is a municipality located in the French department of Sarthe and the region of Pays de la Loire in the Loire Valley. This is the sub-prefecture of the South-Sarthe, the chief district and the chief city of a canton. This is the second most populous city of the department. The city is part...

, and soon after (30 September 1735) left the Order, without having been ordained priest. Gresset, who had never been taught to stand alone, was devastated: he wrote a moving Adieux aux Jésuites.

He went to Paris in 1740 and there produced Edouard III, a tragedy (1740) and Sidnei (1745), a comedy. These were followed by Le Méchant

Le Méchant

Le Méchant is a 1747 play by Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset. It is considered the best verse comedy of the eighteenth-century French stage....

which was qualified by Ferdinand Brunetière

Ferdinand Brunetière

Ferdinand Brunetière was a French writer and critic.-Early years:Brunetière was born in Toulon, Var, Provence. After school at Marseille, he studied in Paris at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Desiring a teaching career, he entered for examination at the École Normale Supérieure, but failed, and the...

 as the best verse comedy

Comedy

Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...

 of the French 18th century theatre, even surpassing the Métromanie of Alexis Piron

Alexis Piron

Alexis Piron was a French epigrammatist and dramatist.He was born at Dijon, where his father, Aimé Piron, was an apothecary. Piron senior wrote verse in the Burgundian language. Alexis began life as clerk and secretary to a banker, and then studied law...

. Gresset was admitted to the Academy

Académie française

L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...

 in 1748. After his marriage, in 1751, to the daughter of a former mayor of Amiens, he withdrew to that city, where he carried on his literary activities through the 'Académie d'Amiens' which he had founded. However, going through a moral crisis et religious awakening he disowned the more frivolous writings of the past.
He died at Amiens on the 16 June 1777.

The best edition of his poems is A. A. Rénouard's (1811). See Jules Wogue, J. B. L. Gresset (1894).

External links

• Correspondence with Frederick the Great
• Mircea Platon, Physiocracy, Patriotism and Reform Catholicism in Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset’s Anti-Philosophe Enlightenment, in French History, October 2011
• Mircea Platon, Robespierre's Éloge De Gresset: Sources of Robespierre's Anti‐Philosophe Discourse, in Intellectual History Review, Volume 20, Issue 4, 2010