Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné

Who was Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné?

Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné was a Swiss Protestant minister and historian of the Reformation.

D'Aubigne 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, were French Protestant refugees. The life Jean-Henri's parents chose for him was in commerce; but in college at the Académie de Genève, he instead decided on Christian ministry. He was profoundly influenced by Robert Haldane, the Scottish missionary and preacher who visited Geneva and became a leading light in Le Réveil, a conservative Protestant evangelical movement.

It was in small extra-curricular groups led by Haldane, that d'Aubigne and his peers studied the Bible; according to church historian John Carrick, no classes were offered in the Christian scriptures at the school at that time, their having been replaced by the ancient Greek scholars.

When d'Aubigne went abroad to further his education in 1817, 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.