Biography
Other info : Career | Bibliography
Jean-Pons-Guillaume Viennet ( Béziers - Le Val-Saint-Germain) was a French politician, playwright and poet. He was also a member of the Académie française and a prominent Freemason.
His long career as a soldier then a politician, playwright and poet
lasted through political revolutions and literary wars, and is full of
incident and travels. He had a talent for self-promotion within many
regimes and got to know all political and literary dignitaries, all the
while verging on impopularity - he said "I have counted up to 500
epigrams a year against me; anyone who escapes college to join a
soap-opera thinks I should have his first kick". His name was like a red
rag to a bull to Republicans and Romantics, but he avenged himself on
his worst enemies by fables or epithets against them.
Viennet was the son of National Convention-member Jacques Joseph Viennet and nephew of the priest Louis Esprit Viennet who, aged 40, was made curate of the église Saint-Merri in Paris and who in the early phase of the French Revolution in 1790 preached a sermon on the civil constitution of the clergy.
