Early Life and Education
He was born in Speyer, Palatinate, Kingdom of Bavaria. His parents moved to Zweibrücken in 1839, and in 1856 his father, Gustav Leonhard Hilgard (who died in 1867), became a justice of the Supreme Court of Bavaria, at Munich. He belonged to the Reformed Church. Henry's mother, Katharina Antonia Elisabeth (Lisette) Pfeiffer, was Catholic. While Henry had aristocratic tendencies, he shared the republican interests of much of the Hilgard clan. His granduncle Theodore Erasmus Hilgard had emigrated to the United States during a clan move of 1833-1835 to Belleville, Illinois; the granduncle had resigned a judgeship so his children could be raised as "freemen." Henry was also a distant relative of the physician and botanist George Engelmann who resided in St. Louis, Missouri.
Henry entered a Gymnasium (equivalent of a United States "high school") in Zweibrücken in 1848, which he had to leave because he sympathized with the revolutions of 1848 in Germany. He had broken up a class by refusing to mention the King of Bavaria in a prayer, justifying his omission by citing his loyalty to the provisional government. Another time, after watching a session of the Frankfurt Parliament, he came home in a Hecker hat with a red feather in it. Two of his uncles were strongly in sympathy with the revolution, but his father was a conservative, and disciplined him by sending the boy to continue his education at the French semi-military academy in Phalsbourg (1849–50). Originally his punishment was to be apprenticed, but his father compromised on the military school. Henry showed up a for classes a month early so he could be tutored in the French language beforehand by the novelist Alexandre Chatrian. He later attended the Gymnasium of Speyer in 1850-52, and the universities of Munich and Würzburg in 1852-53. In Munich he was a member of the student fraternity Corps Franconia. In 1853, having had a disagreement with his father, he emigrated—without his parents' knowledge—to the United States.
Read more about this topic: Henry Villard
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“I looked at my daughters, and my boyhood picture, and appreciated the gift of parenthood, at that moment, more than any other gift I have ever been given. For what person, except one’s own children, would want so deeply and sincerely to have shared your childhood? Who else would think your insignificant and petty life so precious in the living, so rich in its expressiveness, that it would be worth partaking of what you were, to understand what you are?”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth,—both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his WIT—as his RESISTANCE.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)