Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné

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Engraving of Merle d'Aubigné from 1872.

Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné (16 August 1794 - 21 October 1872) was a Swiss Protestant minister and historian of the Reformation.

He was born at Eaux Vives, a neighbourhood of Geneva. A street in the area is named after him. The ancestors of his father Robert Merle d'Aubigné (1755-1799), were French Protestant refugees. Jean-Henri was destined by his parents to a commercial life; but at college he decided to be ordained. He was profoundly influenced by Robert Haldane, the Scottish missionary and preacher who visited Geneva. When in 1817 he went abroad to further his education, Germany was about to celebrate the tercentenary of the Reformation; and thus early he conceived the ambition to write the history of that great epoch. At Berlin he received stimulus from teachers as diverse as J. A. W. Neander and W. M. L. de Wette. After presiding for five years over the French Protestant church at Hamburg, he was, in 1823, called to become pastor of a congregation in Brussels and preacher to the court. He became also president of the consistory of the French and German Protestant churches.

At the Belgian revolution of 1830 he thought it advisable to undertake pastoral work at home rather than to accept an educational post in the family of the Dutch king. The Evangelical Society had been founded with the idea of promoting evangelical Christianity in Geneva and elsewhere, but it was found ki at there was also needed a theological school for the training of pastors. On his return to Switzerland, d'Aubigné was invited to become professor of church history in an institution of the kind, and continued to labor in the cause of evangelical Protestantism. In him the Evangelical Alliance found a hearty promoter. He frequently visited England, was made a D.C.L. v Oxford University, and received civic honors from the city ui Edinburgh. He died suddenly in 1872.

His principal works are

Discours sur ltude de lhistoire de hi ~zris1ianisme (Geneva, 1832)
Le Luthranisme et la Reforme (Paris, 1844)
Germany, England and Scotland, or Recollections of a Swiss Pastor (London, 1848)
Trois sicles de lulte en Ecosse, of c deux rois et deux royaumes; Le Protecteur ou la republique hi Angleterre aux jours de Cromwell (Paris, 1848)
Le Concile et It nfaillibilit (1870)
Histoire de la Reformation au XVIie sicle (Paris, 1835-1853; new ed:, 1861-1862, in 5 vols.)
Histoire de ti Reformation en Europe au temps de Calvin (8 vols., 1862-1877)

The first portion of his Histoire de la Reformation, which was devoted to the earlier period of the movement in Germany, gave it at once a foremost place amongst modern French ecclestical historians, and was translated into most European tongues. The second portion, dealing with reform in the time of laustively treated, but it did not meet with the same success. is part of the subject, with which he was most competent to Il, was all but completed at the time of his death. Among minor treatises, the most important are the vindication of character and aims of Oliver Cromwell, and the sketch of the ~tendings of the Church of Scotland.