The French poet André Marie Chénier (1762-1794) compressed into his brief life many kinds of experience and many poetic forms. He emerges in history as a rare poet-hero whose life is exemplary and tragic.

André Chénier was born in Constantinople. His father was French, and his mother claimed to be of Greek origin. André's early sense of affinity for Greece was vital in his development as a poet. He spent most of his childhood with an aunt and uncle in Carcassonne in Languedoc. When he was 11, he rejoined his mother in Paris and was exposed to the flamboyant society of her salon.

Chénier was an excellent scholar at the exclusive Collége Navarre. His earliest works are adaptations of Homer and Virgil and poems of adolescent love. He was always an affectionate and ardent man; he had many mistresses and a few great loves but never married.

In 1794 Chénier was arrested more or less by accident in Versailles and was sent to Saint-Lazare prison with no formal charges against him, though he was suspect through association with moderate groups. Eventually, he was accused of being an accomplice in a fictitious prison conspiracy and, more seriously, of subversive writings. He was guillotined on July 25, 1794.

His Works

Chénier's writings were not published until 25 years after his death, at which time he became the model for the romantic poets. Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and others nurtured the legend of the poet as hero which sprang up around Chénier's memory.

Chénier's Bucoliques, melancholy poems about love and sensual imaginings, were written in his late teens and early 20s. Later he wrote the erotic and witty Elégies as well as the Odes for his mistresses. His Idylles, which instinctively capture the beauty of Greek lyricism, include such famous poems as L'Aveugle, Le Mendiant, La Liberté, and the superb Jeune Tarantine.

Chénier's poetry is always vital and enthusiastic, since he believed that poetry must spring from genuine experience and lived emotions. The poet must be an inventor - yet Chénier's classical roots are always apparent. He borrowed not only from Homer and Virgil but from Racine, La Fontaine, Rousseau, and others.

During the Revolution, Chénier established himself as a great satirical poet. His poetry became a chronicle of the great events of the Revolution. Among the most outstanding poems are Les Autels de la peur, Ode à Versailles, Ode à Charlotte Corday, and La Fête de l'Être Supreme. In prison, where he wrote his lambes and part of the Odes, Chénier withdrew into himself, yet did not fail to admire and to celebrate the courage of his fellow prisoners. The night before his execution Chénier wrote the last poem of lambes. In this noble work, half elegy and half satire, he rises from a sense of his own separateness and melancholy to real self-forgetfulness, compassion, and courage.

Further Reading

Two major works on Chénier are Francis Scarfe's scholarly André Chénier: His Life and Work, 1762-1794 (1965), which is devoted to close analysis of the poetry and to a study of poetic forms, rhetoric, and language; and Vernon Loggins, André Chénier: His Life, Death and Glory (1965), a more direct and simple, if adulatory, account of the poet's life, with less detailed discussion of the poetry.

Chénier, André (1762-94). The most gifted French poet of the 18th c. When he died a victim of the Revolution, his poems were unknown; they were published for the first time in 1819. Thereafter, for reasons both poetic and political, Chénier was adopted by the Romantics as a heroic precursor, and a noble legend formed about his name.

He was born in Constantinople of a French father and Greek mother, and always considered himself partly Greek, though he lived in France from the age of 2. After attending the Collège de Navarre, he led a life of study and pleasure, and was secretary of the French ambassador in London. An atheist and fierce critic of the abuses of the ancien régime, he welcomed the Revolution, but quickly decided it had got out of hand and threw in his lot with the moderate Feuillants. He was an impressive orator and journalist, attacking the Jacobins in virulent articles in the Journal de Paris. His stance here, as in his poetry, is an aristocratic one, that of the free spirit, belonging to no party, scorning the crowd, and speaking his mind fearlessly. During the Terror he lay low outside Paris, but was arrested, held in Saint-Lazare prison, and executed two days before Robespierre's downfall.

Chénier's surviving work is like a great sculpture yard, full of unfinished sketches. These include prose works, notably an ‘Essai sur les causes et les effets de la perfection et de la décadence des lettres et des arts’, and the beginnings of two philosophical epics, Hermès and L'Amérique, devoted to the physical history of the globe and human progress from darkness towards the light. Like his friend Lebrun, he had a high idea of the poetic calling, expressed in a remarkable ars poetica, ‘L'Invention’. His scorn for modern decadence and triviality was fuelled by an admiration for ancient simplicity and grandeur; he knew Greek literature exceptionally well.

His small body of finished poetry includes the beautifully orchestrated Bucoliques, apparently impersonal treatments of ancient themes (the most famous being a lament, ‘La Jeune Tarentine’), the more personal Élégies (mainly on love), epistles, epigrams, and odes. In his verse, he often recaptures both the music and the eloquence of Racine. His poetic language combines sonorous classical allusion with the naïveté which he saw as the essential poetic gift. Anticipating Hugo, he reshapes the rhythms of the alexandrine to give it a new expressive power, using enjambement in an unprecedented way. These qualities are perhaps most evident in his satirical and political poems. The Iambes, written in alternating alexandrines and octosyllables just before or during his imprisonment, leave an unforgettable picture of the Terror seen by its most eloquent victim.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• P. Dimoff, La Vie et l'œuvre d'André Chénier jusqu'à la Révolution française (1936)
• F. Scarfe, André Chénier: His Life and Work (1965)

(äNdrā' shānyā') , 1762–94, French poet, by some critics considered the greatest in 18th-century France. He was born in Constantinople, where his father was consul general, and was educated in France. From 1787 to 1790 he was attached to the French embassy in London. Active in the early phase of the French Revolution, he was later horrified by Jacobin excesses. In 1792 he contributed denunciatory pamphlets to the Journal de Paris, an organ of moderate royalism. He was arrested in Mar., 1794, by order of Robespierre, and was guillotined only three days before the end of the Terror. Chénier vivified the French classical tradition in his Élégies and Bucoliques. The Iambes are stirring political satires in verse. Most of his works were published after his death; La Jeune Captive, one of his most moving poems, appeared in 1795 and the first collected edition of his works in 1819. His life inspired the opera Andrea Chénier by Umberto Giordano.

Bibliography

See biography by R. A. Smernoff (1977).