1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ackermann, Louise Victorine Choquet

ACKERMANN, LOUISE VICTORINE CHOQUET (1813–1890), French poet, was born in Paris on the 30th of November 1813. Educated by her father in the philosophy of the Encyclopaedists, Victorine Choquet went to Berlin in 1838 to study German, and there married in 1843 Paul Ackermann, an Alsatian philologist. After little more than two years of happy married life her husband died, and Madame Ackermann went to live at Nice with a favourite sister. In 1855 she published Contes en vers, and in 1862 Contes et poésies. Very different from these simple and charming contes is the work on which Madame Ackermann’s real reputation rests. She published in 1874 Poésies, premières poésies, poésies philosophiques, a volume of sombre and powerful verse, expressing her revolt against human suffering. The volume was enthusiastically reviewed in the Revue des deux mondes for May 1871 by E. Caro, who, though he deprecated the impiété désespérée of the verses, did full justice to their vigour and the excellence of their form. Soon after the publication of this volume Madame Ackermann removed to Paris, where she gathered round her a circle of friends, but published nothing further except a prose volume, the Pensées d’un solitaire (1883), to which she prefixed a short autobiography. She died at Nice on the 2nd of August 1890.

See also Anatole France, La vie littéraire, 4th series (1892); the comte d’Haussonville, Mme. Ackermann (1882); M. Citoleux, La poésie philosophique au XIXe. siècle (vol. i., Mme. Ackermann d’après de nombreux documents inédits, Paris, 1906).