André Chénier

André Marie Chénier was a French poet born in Constantinople in 1762 and guillotined in Paris in 1794, during the Terror of the French Revolution. He wrote in French within the neoclassical tradition, yet his sensual, emotional verse has led critics to count him among the forerunners of Romanticism. His story matters both for the quality of his poetry and for what it shows about the clash between literature and politics at the end of the eighteenth century.

He was born in Galata, in what is now the Karaköy district of Istanbul. His father, Louis Chénier, had made his living as a cloth merchant from Languedoc before becoming, in effect, the French consul in Constantinople. When André was three, the family moved back to France. He and his brother Marie-Joseph grew up largely in Carcassonne, in the care of an aunt, before studying at the Collège de Navarre in Paris, where he excelled at translating the classics. His mother's salon drew a lively crowd of thinkers and artists, among them Lavoisier and the painter Jacques-Louis David, and this milieu nurtured his vocation.

He enlisted briefly in a regiment at Strasbourg in 1783 and soon returned to Paris. A journey to Rome, Naples and Pompeii in 1784 deepened his devotion to antiquity. For nearly three years he wrote mainly eclogues and pastoral poems in the manner of Theocritus and Bion of Smyrna. Among these works is La Jeune Tarentine, a personal mosaic of classical echoes that feels remarkably fresh. He also attempted a long philosophical poem, Hermès, intended to turn Diderot's Encyclopédie into verse in the manner of Lucretius, but it survives only in fragments. A line from one of his fragments states his program: new thoughts, expressed in antique verse.

Between 1787 and 1790 he served as secretary to the French ambassador in London. He took the post but disliked England, and he left some sharp satires about the English. In 1790 he returned to Paris, just as the Revolution was consuming public life. He backed a constitutional monarchy and became a political satirist of increasingly biting tone, writing for the Journal de Paris and frequenting political clubs. After the insurrection of August 1792 he escaped the September massacres by taking refuge in Normandy. He denounced revolutionary violence in his verse, and after the king's execution he withdrew to the countryside near Versailles, where he wrote his celebrated Ode à Versailles.

He was arrested in March 1794 at Passy, at a house he had come to visit, when he was mistaken for a marquise the authorities were seeking. In prison he wrote Jeune captive, a poem that became his most famous, along with iambic verses attacking the Convention. Condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal, he was guillotined in July 1794 at the age of thirty-one. Little of his work appeared during his lifetime; most was published posthumously, rescued piece by piece by friends and by his brother. His legacy lies in the blend of classical discipline and new sensibility that places him on the threshold of Romanticism, and in the afterlife his story found in works such as Umberto Giordano's opera Andrea Chénier.