MARTIN, Louis-Aimé, a distinguished French writer of the present century, was born at Lyons in 1779. After having received an excellent education in his native city, he set out for Paris at the age of twenty, and became connected with the Journal des Débats, for which he contributed articles on scientific subjects. By his Lettres à Sophie sur la Physique, la Chimie, et l'Histoire Naturelle, published in 1810, he gained for himself an honourable position among the rising literary men of his time, and which was more than confirmed a short time afterwards by his lectures at the Athénée on the literary history of France. He was appointed to a secretarialship under the Chamber of Deputies; and delivered a course of lectures during the same year to the École Polytechnique on the History of France, which he followed up in 1830 by a course on the History of Germany. Martin became early imbued with the somewhat extravagant ideas of progress then current in France, and devoted himself with praiseworthy energy to the realization of his cherished schemes for the regeneration of human society. He advanced new systems of instruction, projected communal libraries, and took a principal share in founding the Panthéon Littéraire, a collection of the chefs-d'œuvre of all nations, which, by popularizing instruction, were designed to improve the character, and increase the happiness of men. He published his views on this subject in his Plan d'Une Bibliothèque Universelle; Études des Livres
qui peuvent servir à l'Histoire Philosophique de Genre Humain, Paris, 1837. But Martin soon became alive to the fact, that his plans for securing the welfare of humanity were not quite so enlightened or profound as he had been led to believe, and that the perfecting of mechanical contrivances, and the construction of railways, while ministering to the material comforts of a people, tend, besides, to augment their wants, and increase their desire for gratifying them. Accordingly, in his work De l'Éducation des Mères de Famille, dedicated to M. Lamartine, which received the prize from the French Academy in 1835, he endeavoured to conduct men to a higher order of truths, and pointed them to religion as the true source of earthly happiness. His ideas on religion, however, did not meet with the approval of the Roman Catholic church, and his book for the edification of the mothers of France was placed on the Index. A warm admirer of Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Aimé Martin married the widow of that eminent writer, collected his writings, and vindicated his memory from the unjust attacks to which it had been exposed. He died at Saint Germain-en-Laye on the 18th November 1847, aged sixty-two; and his friend M. de Lamartine pronounced an eloquent funeral oration over his tomb.
In addition to his other works, Aimé Martin published excellent editions of the works of Molière and of Racine, with notes; of the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld, with a critique; of the Œuvres Philosophiques of Descartes; and of Fénélon's Traité de l'Existence de Dieu, with additions.