Who Was Merle d'Aubigné? Historian of the Reformation
Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné (1794–1872) was a Swiss Protestant pastor and professor, and the most widely read historian of the Reformation in the nineteenth century. He grew up in Geneva, came to a living faith in Christ during the revival there, and served churches in Hamburg and Brussels before returning to Geneva to teach church history. His History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, the story of the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, sold in huge numbers in English. He spent his last years on a second great work, the History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, which he nearly finished before he died.
Here's a fuller look at his life, how he wrote history, and which of his books to start with.
A Huguenot family in Geneva
Merle d'Aubigné was born on August 16, 1794, at Eaux-Vives, just outside the walls of Geneva. His father's family were French Protestants, Huguenots, who had fled France to escape persecution. He never forgot that. In the preface to his first history he wrote that memories of his family's flight, and of the battles and exile endured for the Reformation in France, gave that part of the story a special pull on his heart.
His parents meant him for business, but as a student at the Academy of Geneva he chose the ministry instead.
The Geneva revival
When d'Aubigné was a student, the church in Geneva had drifted a long way from the faith of the Reformation. Many of its teachers no longer believed in the deity of Christ or the authority of the Bible, and the Academy taught no real study of Scripture.
Then, in late 1816, a Scottish layman named Robert Haldane came to Geneva. He gathered theology students in his rooms and taught them the Bible, above all Paul's letter to the Romans, from November 1816 to June 1817. D'Aubigné was one of those students. Those meetings were a turning point in what became known as the Geneva revival, or the Réveil, and they shaped his faith for the rest of his life. He came away convinced of the sinfulness of man, the free grace of God, and salvation by faith in Christ alone.
Wartburg, and a life's work
D'Aubigné was ordained in Geneva in July 1817. That autumn he went to Germany to study, and he was at the Wartburg castle in Thuringia during the celebrations for the three-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. There, at twenty-three, he resolved to write the history of the Reformation. He studied for some months at the University of Berlin, where the church historian August Neander was a great influence on him.
Hamburg and Brussels
In 1818 he became pastor of the French Reformed church in Hamburg, and he served there for five years. In 1823 he moved to Brussels as pastor of the Protestant church there and preacher at the court of King William I of the Netherlands, who then ruled Belgium. The Belgian revolution of 1830 ended that post, and in 1831 he went home to Geneva.
Professor in Geneva
Back in Geneva, d'Aubigné joined with other evangelical leaders in founding a new school of theology, so that young men could be trained for the ministry in the faith of the Reformers. He became its professor of church history and taught there for the rest of his life, alongside friends such as Louis Gaussen.
He began giving public lectures on the Reformation in the winter of 1831 and 1832. The first volume of his History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century came out in French in 1835, and the fifth and last in 1853. Translations into many languages followed. In Britain and America the books were read everywhere. The church historian Philip Schaff said that in their English translations they had a wider circulation than any other book of church history.
D'Aubigné often visited England and Scotland. Oxford University gave him an honorary degree, and the city of Edinburgh gave him civic honors. He was a warm friend of evangelical Christians in many countries.
God in history
What made d'Aubigné different from other historians was his conviction that God rules history. He said so plainly in the preface to his first volume:
God must be acknowledged — God proclaimed — in history.
History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, Vol. 1, Preface
For him the Reformation was not a political revolt or a quarrel between priests. It was a revival sent by God, a return to the faith of the apostles:
It was the triumph of the greatest of doctrines, that which animates those who embrace it with the purest and strongest enthusiasm — the doctrine of faith, the doctrine of grace.
History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, Vol. 1, Preface
He wrote openly as a Protestant and an evangelical, and he never pretended otherwise. But he read the letters and records of the period with great care, and he promised not to hide the faults of the Reformers. His gift was telling a story.
The Time of Calvin
Having finished his first history, d'Aubigné began a second history in the 1860s: the History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin. It follows Geneva's fight for liberty, Calvin's conversion and flight from France, the coming of the gospel to Geneva and Calvin's work there. It also traces the Reformation in England under Henry VIII, in Scotland, Scandinavia, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain.
In it he made a point he cared about deeply: that true liberty grows where the Word of God is honored.
Liberty has never been firmly established except among a people where the Word of God reigns.
History of the Reformation in the Time of Calvin, Vol. 1, Berthelier and the Youth of Geneva
He was still at work on it when he died suddenly at Geneva on October 21, 1872, at seventy-eight. Only a few chapters were left unwritten. The last three of its eight volumes were published after his death from his manuscripts.
Why he's still read
Historians today write about the Reformation with more documents and more detachment than d'Aubigné did. But few have told it with such life, or with such confidence that the story is God's. Christians still read him for the same reasons readers did in 1850: to see what the gospel of grace meant to the men and women who risked everything for it, and to be stirred by their courage.
Where to start
TheWay Library has ten of his volumes, free to read: the first two volumes of the History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century and all eight of the Time of Calvin. The two volumes of the first history come from incomplete scans with many chapters missing, as our guide to Merle d'Aubigné's books explains, so they're not the best place to begin.
If you're new to him, start with Volume 1 of the Time of Calvin, which tells how Geneva won its freedom and how young John Calvin was converted, and read the series in order from there. If you'd like one gripping volume first, take Volume 5, with the death of William Tyndale and Calvin's arrival in Geneva in 1536. For the German Reformation, the surviving chapters of Volume 2 of the History of the Reformation still give you Leipzig, the burning of the papal bull and the road to Worms.
Our collection of Merle d'Aubigné quotes gathers his best lines. You'll find all his books on the Merle d'Aubigné author page.