Dupont, Pierre

Born April 23, 1821, in Lyon; died there July 24, 1870. French poet and songwriter.

Dupont worked as a weaver’s apprentice, a clerk, and a bank employee. In 1842 he was awarded a prize from the French Academy for his first book, Two Angels. Later he was an editor of The Dictionary of the French Academy. Dupont’s first songs appeared in the book Peasants (1846). His “Song of the Workers” (1846), calling for unification of the proletariat, acquired wide fame. Inclined to Utopian wishful thinking, Dupont in 1848 praised the era of the Second Republic as a time of class fraternity. The June 1848 insurrection gave him just another occasion to appeal for social harmony. However, the bourgeois reaction intensified the revolutionary and democratic motifs of Dupont’s poetry: in his “Song of the Peasants” (1849), which later became a favorite of the Paris Communards, he expressed the dream of a republic where peasants would unite with workers. After Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’etat in 1851, Dupont was sentenced to seven years exile but was pardoned.