HERTZEN, ALEXANDER (1812-1870), Russian author, was born at Moscow, a very short time before the occupation of that city by the French. His father, Ivan Yakovlef, after a personal interview with Napoleon, was allowed to leave, when the invaders arrived, as the bearer of a letter from the French to the Russian emperor. His family attended him to the Russian lines. Then the mother of the infant Alexander (a young German Protestant of Jewish extraction from Stuttgart, according to A. von Wurzbach), only seventeen years old, and quite unable to speak Russian, was forced to seek shelter for some time in a peasant's hut. A year later the family returned to Moscow, where Hertzen passed his youth--remaining there, after completing his studies at the university, till 1834, when he was arrested and tried on a charge of having assisted, with some other youths, at a festival during which verses by Sokolovsky, of a nature uncomplimentary to the emperor, were sung. The special commission appointed to try the youthful culprits found him guilty, and in 1835 he was banished to Viatka. There he remained till the visit to that city of the hereditary grand-duke (afterwards Alexander II.), accompanied by the poet Joukofsky, led to his being allowed to quit Viatka for Vladimir, where he was appointed editor of the official gazette of that city. In 1840 he obtained a post in the ministry of the interior at St Petersburg; but in consequence of having spoken too frankly about a death due to a police officer's violence, he was sent to Novgorod, where he led an official life, with the title of "state councillor," till 1842. In 1846 his father died, leaving him by his will a very large property. Early in 1847 he left Russia, never to return. From Italy, on hearing of the revolution of 1848, he hastened to Paris, whence he afterwards went to Switzerland. In 1852 he quitted Geneva for London, where he settled for some years. In 1864 he returned to Geneva, and after some time went to Paris, where he died on the 21st of January 1870.