Jean Desmarets, Sieur de Saint-Sorlin (1595 – 28 October 1676) was a French writer and dramatist. He was a founding member, and the first to occupy seat 4 of the Académie française

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 1634.

Biography

Born 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...

, Desmarets was introduced to Cardinal Richelieu, and became one of the band of writers who carried out the cardinal's literary ideas when he was about thirty years old. His inclination, however, was to writing novels, and the success of his romance L'Ariane in 1632 led to his formal admission to a circle of writers that met at the house of Valentin Conrart

Valentin Conrart

Valentin Conrart was a French author, and as a founder of the Académie française, the first occupant of seat 2.-Biography:He was born in Paris of Calvinist parents, and was educated for business. However, after his father's death in 1620, he began to move in literary circles, and soon acquired a...

. When this circle later developed into the Académie française

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,...

, Desmarets became its first chancellor.

His success led to official preferment, and he was made conseiller du roi, contrôleur-général de l'extraordinaire des guerres, and secretary-general of the fleet of the Levant

Levant

The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...

.

Works

It was at Richelieu's request that he began to write for the theatre. In this genre he produced a comedy long regarded as a masterpiece, Les Visionnaires (1637); a prose-tragedy, Erigone (1638); and Scipion (1639), a tragedy in verse.

His long epic Clovis (1657) is noteworthy because Desmarets rejected the traditional pagan

Paganism

Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....

 background, and maintained that Christian

Christianity

Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...

 imagery should supplant it. With this standpoint he contributed several works in defence of the moderns in the famous quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns

Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns

The quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns was a literary and artistic debate that heated up in the early 1690s and shook the Académie française.-Description:...

.

In his later years Desmarets devoted himself chiefly to producing a number of religious poems, of which the best known is perhaps his verse translation of the Office de la Vierge (1645). He was a violent opponent of the Jansenists

Jansenism

Jansenism was a Christian theological movement, primarily in France, that emphasized original sin, human depravity, the necessity of divine grace, and predestination. The movement originated from the posthumously published work of the Dutch theologian Cornelius Otto Jansen, who died in 1638...

, against whom he wrote a Réponse à l'insolente apologie de Port-Royal (1666). He died in Paris on 28 October 1676.