Jacques-Henri Meister

Born in 1744 in Bückeburg into a Protestant family of French refugee background, Jacques-Henri Meister became a French-language Swiss writer, theologian, and journalist. Early in life he served as a minister in Zurich, but after publishing De l’origine des principes religieux in 1768, he lost both his post and his civic rights there.

Meister later built a literary career that connected him to some of the leading intellectual circles of his time. He is known as a former secretary to Friedrich Melchior Grimm and as the last director of the Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, an influential manuscript review that circulated among elite readers. He also contributed to the Journal de lecture and wrote on politics, philosophy, imagination, old age, and travel.

His work reflects a life spent close to the debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among the books associated with him are Letters Written During a Residence in England, Lettres sur l’imagination, and later philosophical and moral essays. He died in Zurich in 1826.