Amiels Journal | Page 5

belonged to one of the emigrant families, of which a more or less
steady supply had enriched the little republic during the three centuries
following the Reformation. Amiel's ancestors, like those of Sismondi,
left Languedoc for Geneva after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
His father must have been a youth at the time when Geneva passed into
the power of the French republic, and would seem to have married and
settled in the halcyon days following the restoration of Genevese
independence in 1814. Amiel was born when the prosperity of Geneva
was at its height, when the little state was administered by men of
European reputation, and Genevese society had power to attract
distinguished visitors and admirers from all parts. The veteran
Bonstetten, who had been the friend of Gray and the associate of
Voltaire, was still talking and enjoying life in his appartement
overlooking the woods of La Bâtie. Rossi and Sismondi were busy
lecturing to the Genevese youth, or taking part in Genevese legislation;
an active scientific group, headed by the Pictets, De la Rive, and the
botanist Auguste-Pyrame de Candolle, kept the country abreast of
European thought and speculation, while the mixed nationality of the

place--the blending in it of French keenness with Protestant
enthusiasms and Protestant solidity--was beginning to find inimitable
and characteristic expression in the stories of Töpffer. The country was
governed by an aristocracy, which was not so much an aristocracy of
birth as one of merit and intellect, and the moderate constitutional ideas
which represented the Liberalism of the post-Waterloo period were
nowhere more warmly embraced or more intelligently carried out than
in Geneva.
During the years, however, which immediately followed Amiel's birth,
some signs of decadence began to be visible in this brilliant Genevese
society. The generation which had waited for, prepared, and controlled,
the Restoration of 1814, was falling into the background, and the
younger generation, with all its respectability, wanted energy, above all,
wanted leaders. The revolutionary forces in the state, which had made
themselves violently felt during the civil turmoils of the period
preceding the assembly of the French States General, and had afterward
produced the miniature Terror which forced Sismondi into exile, had
been for awhile laid to sleep by the events of 1814. But the slumber
was a short one at Geneva as elsewhere, and when Rossi quitted the
republic for France in 1833, he did so with a mind full of misgivings as
to the political future of the little state which had given him--an exile
and a Catholic--so generous a welcome in 1819. The ideas of 1830
were shaking the fabric and disturbing the equilibrium of the Swiss
Confederation as a whole, and of many of the cantons composing it.
Geneva was still apparently tranquil while her neighbors were disturbed,
but no one looking back on the history of the republic, and able to
measure the strength of the Radical force in Europe after the fall of
Charles X., could have felt much doubt but that a few more years
would bring Geneva also into the whirlpool of political change.
In the same year--1833--that M. Rossi had left Geneva, Henri Frédéric
Amiel, at twelve years old, was left orphaned of both his parents. They
had died comparatively young--his mother was only just over thirty,
and his father cannot have been much older. On the death of the mother
the little family was broken up, the boy passing into the care of one
relative, his two sisters into that of another. Certain notes in M.
Scherer's possession throw a little light here and there upon a childhood
and youth which must necessarily have been a little bare and forlorn.

They show us a sensitive, impressionable boy, of health rather delicate
than robust, already disposed to a more or less melancholy and dreamy
view of life, and showing a deep interest in those religious problems
and ideas in which the air of Geneva has been steeped since the days of
Calvin. The religious teaching which a Genevese lad undergoes prior to
his admission to full church membership, made a deep impression on
him, and certain mystical elements of character, which remained strong
in him to the end, showed themselves very early. At the college or
public school of Geneva, and at the académie, he would seem to have
done only moderately as far as prizes and honors were concerned. We
are told, however, that he read enormously, and that he was, generally
speaking, inclined rather to make friends with men older than himself
than with his contemporaries. He fell specially under the influence of
Adolphe Pictet, a brilliant philologist and man of letters belonging to a
well-known Genevese family, and in later life he was able, while
reviewing one of M. Pictet's books, to give grateful expression