Social expressions
27 September 1821 11 May 1881 Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born in Geneva on 27 September 1821. French Huguenot Protestant family, having travelled and lived for some time in Berlin, back to Geneva, where, in 1849, he obtained the Chair of aesthetics. Later, in 1853, will also get to philosophy. In 1849 he published "literary movement in French Switzerland and of its future" scholar of Rousseau, Amiel is best remembered as the author of a diary (Journal) of over 17 thousand pages, in which delves with paroxysm their psychological motions. Amiel wrote also poems of romantic style ("grains of millet," Grains de mil, 1854) and essays: on literature of romance Switzerland on Rousseau, on contemporary authors. Among his works there are also a volume on the General principles of pedagogy, and written about Erasmus, Madame de Stael. His diary is published posthumously, so sparse: in 1884 with the title of "fragments of an intimate diary" (Fragments d'un journal intime), then an expanded edition in 1922, and in 1927 a new volume of confessions under the title "Philine". The taste of analytical investigation of its own with its inexhaustible Amiel, psychological motions, weaknesses, dreams of man denied to practical life, unable to suffer imperfections of reality, match a repulsively decadent taste. Henri-Frédéric Amiel dies of asphyxiation the day 11 May 1881, at the age of 60 years, in Geneva. Active and curious spirit, Amiel in life was always hampered by a morbid shyness and a profound disquiet that he found a remedy by folding back on itself and analyzing their feelings and other dull and thin clarity, expressing a philosophy of life deep and sometimes bitter. Amiel appears therefore as the expression of an evil, more sincere and sophisticated than that of the romantics.