Alphonse de Lamartine was born in 1790 in a comfortable and very fervently Catholic milieu. At 22, he became mayor of Mâcon, thus marking the beginning of a political career which remained vigorous throughout his life. In 1816, he became involved with Julie Charles; they fix a rendezvous for 1817, but Julie dies in the meantime, and it is her absence which is evoked in the poem "Le Lac." His Méditations poétiques appear in 1820, and in that same year Lamartine marries and starts a family. He is elected to the French Academy in 1829; in 1832 he travels in the Middle East and visits the Holy Sepulchre. His impressions are recorded in his Voyage en orient. On the political side, Lamartine remains a strident opponent of the death penalty and of slavery. In 1850, his play about the Haitian slave revolutionary betrayed by Napoleon, Toussaint Louverture, opens in Paris. Lamartine died in Paris in 1869.

Below is a famous portrait of lamartine: