André Chénier

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

André Chénier
Portrait during his last captivity by Suvée
Portrait during his last captivity by Suvée
Born(1762-10-30)30 October 1762
Constantinople, Ottoman Empire
Died25 July 1794(1794-07-25) (aged 31)
Paris, France
OccupationWriter
NationalityFrench
GenrePoetry

André Marie Chénier (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃dʁe maʁi ʃenje]; 30 October 1762 – 25 July 1794) was a French poet of Greek and Franco-Levantine[1] origin, associated with the events of the French Revolution of which he was a victim. His sensual, emotive poetry marks him as one of the precursors of the Romantic movement. His career was brought to an abrupt end when he was guillotined for supposed "crimes against the state", just three days before the end of the Reign of Terror. Chénier's life has been the subject of Umberto Giordano's opera Andrea Chénier and other works of art.

Life

Bust of André Chénier by David d'Angers (1839).

Chénier was born in the

Collège de Navarre in Paris.[3]

In 1783 Chénier enlisted in a French regiment at

Jean François Lesueur, Claude Joseph Dorat, and, a little later, the painter Jacques-Louis David.[3]

Chénier had already decided to become a poet, and worked in the

bucolics, imitated to a large extent from Theocritus, Bion of Smyrna and the Greek anthologists. Among the poems written or at least sketched during this period were L'Oaristys, L'Aveugle, La Jeune Malode, Bacchus, Euphrosine and La Jeune Tarentine.[3] He mixed classical mythology with a sense of individual emotion and spirit.[citation needed
]

Apart from his idylls and his elegies, Chénier also experimented with didactic and philosophic verse, and when he commenced his Hermès in 1783 his ambition was to condense the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot into a long poem somewhat after the manner of Lucretius. Now extant only in fragments, this poem was to treat of man's place in the universe, first in an isolated state, and then in society. Another fragment called "L'Invention" sums up Chénier's thoughts on poetry: "De nouvelles pensées, faisons des vers antiques" ("From new thoughts, let us make antique verses").[3]

Chénier remained unpublished. In November 1787 an opportunity for a fresh career presented itself. The

Chevalier de la Luzerne, a friend of the Chénier family, had been appointed ambassador to Britain. When he offered to take André with him as his secretary, André knew the offer was too good to refuse, but was unhappy in England. He bitterly ridiculed "... ces Anglais. Nation toute à vendre à qui peut la payer. De contrée en contrée allant au monde entier, Offrir sa joie ignoble et son faste grossier."[3] Translation: "... these English. A nation for sale to whoever can pay for it. Going from country to country and out to the whole world, offering its ignoble joy and its coarse splendor." Although John Milton and James Thomson seem to have interested him, and a few of his verses show slight inspiration from Shakespeare and Thomas Gray, it would be an exaggeration to say Chénier studied English literature.[citation needed
]

The events of 1789 and the startling success of his younger brother,

Tennis court oath[4] addressed to the radical painter Jacques-Louis David.[3]

In the meantime Chénier orated at the

insurrection of 10 August 1792 uprooted his party, his paper and his friends, and he only escaped the September Massacres by staying with relatives in Normandy. In the month following these events his brother, Marie-Joseph, had entered the anti-monarchical National Convention. André raged against all these events, in such poems as Ode à Charlotte Corday congratulating France that "un scélérat de moins rampe dans cette fange", "one scoundrel less creeps in this mire".[3] At the request of Malesherbes, the defense counsel to King Louis XVI, Chénier provided some arguments for the king's defense.[citation needed
]

Appeal of the last victims of terror in the prison of St. Lazarus, 7, 9 Thermidor 1794. Chénier appears seated at the foreground's center. Painting by Charles Louis Müller, (Musée de la Révolution française).

After the king's execution Chénier sought a secluded retreat on the Plateau de Satory at Versailles and only went out after nightfall. There he wrote the poems inspired by Fanny (Mme Laurent Lecoulteux), including the exquisite Ode à Versailles. His solitary life at Versailles lasted nearly a year. On 7 March 1794 he was arrested at the house of Mme Pastoret at Passy. Two obscure agents of the Committee of Public Safety (one of them named Nicolas Guénot) were in search of a marquise who had fled, but an unknown stranger was found in the house and arrested on suspicion of being the aristocrat they were searching for. This was Chénier, who had come on a visit of sympathy.[3]

Chénier was taken to the

Prison Saint-Lazare. During the 140 days of his imprisonment he wrote a series of iambs (in alternate lines of 12 and 8 syllables) denouncing the Convention, which "hiss and stab like poisoned bullets",[5] and which were smuggled to his family by a jailer. In prison he also composed his most famous poem, "Jeune captive", a poem at once of enchantment and of despair,[3] inspired by the misfortunes of his fellow captive the duchesse de Fleury, née Aimée de Coigny.[6] Ten days before Chénier's death, the painter Joseph-Benoît Suvée completed the well-known portrait of him, shown in the box above.[7][8] Aimée de Coigny survived the Terror, her freedom being bought by Casimir, Comte de Montrond
on the same day that she was to follow Chénier to the guillotine.

Chénier might have been overlooked but for the well-meant, indignant officiousness of his father. Marie-Joseph tried, but failed, to prevent his brother's execution.[3] Maximilien Robespierre, who was himself in dangerous straits, remembered Chénier as the author of the venomous verses in the Journal de Paris and had him hauled before the Revolutionary Tribunal, which sentenced him to death. Chénier was one of the last people executed by Robespierre.[9]

At sundown, Chénier was taken by

Cimetière de Picpus
.

Works

During Chénier's lifetime only his Jeu de paume (1791) and Hymne sur les Suisses (1792) had been published. For the most part, then, his reputation rests on his posthumously published work, retrieved from oblivion page by page.[3]

The Jeune Captive appeared in the Décade philosophique, on 9 January 1795; La Jeune Tarentine in the

Génie du Christianisme. Fayolle[10] and Jules Lefèvre-Deumier also gave a few fragments; but it was not until 1819 that an attempt was made by Henri de Latouche to collect the poems in a substantive volume,[3] from manuscripts retained by Marie-Joseph Chénier. Many more poems and fragments were discovered after Latouche's publication, and were collected in later editions. Latouche also wrote an account of Chénier's last moments.[citation needed
]

Critical opinions of Chénier have varied wildly. He experimented with classical precedents rendered in French verse to a much greater extent than other 18th-century poets; on the other hand, the ennui and melancholy of his poetry recalls Romanticism. In 1828, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve praised Chénier as a heroic forerunner of the Romantic movement and a precursor of Victor Hugo. Chénier, he said, had "inspired and determined" Romanticism.[3] Many other critics also wrote about Chénier as modern and proto-Romantic. However, Anatole France contests Sainte-Beuve's theory: he claims that Chénier's poetry is one of the last expressions of 18th-century classicism. His work should not be compared to Hugo and the Parnassien poets, but to philosophes like André Morellet. Albert Camus in 1951's The Rebel called Chenier "the only poet of the times".[11] Paul Morillot has argued that judged by the usual test of 1820s Romanticism (love for strange literature of the North, medievalism, novelties and experiments), Chénier would have been excluded from Romantic circles.[citation needed]

The poet

Alexandr Pushkin wrote a poem about his last hours based on Latouche and Ivan Kozlov translated La Jeune Captive, La Jeune Tarentine and other famous pieces.[3] Chénier has also found favor with English-speaking critics; for instance, his love of nature and of political freedom has been compared to Shelley, and his attraction to Greek art and myth recalls Keats.[citation needed
]

Chénier's fate has become the subject of many plays, pictures and poems, notably in the opera

Pushkin, the delicate statue by Denys Puech in the Luxembourg, and the well-known portrait in the centre of Charles Louis Müller's Last Days of the Terror.[3]

See also
  • 1793 Chénier Act on
    "right of the author" (French alternative concept to copyright
    )

Legacy

References

  1. ^ Franco-Levantine: A Catholic or Latin-speaking resident of the Levant, or one who culturally belongs to this community.
  2. ^ "Andre Marie de Chenier - Poetry & Biography of the Famous poet". All Poetry. Retrieved 18 July 2018.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Seccombe, Thomas (1911). "Chénier, André de". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 78–79.
  4. ^ The indoor tennis court at Versailles was the jeu du paume.
  5. ^ Seccombe 1911.
  6. ^ Jules Derocquigny, ed., Poésies choisies de Andre Chenier, (1907) "Introduction".
  7. ^ Morillot, Paul (1894). André Chénier (in French). Paris: Lecène, Oudin et cie. p. 63. Retrieved 14 March 2021.
  8. ^ "Essai d'inventaire des tableaux et objets représentant le poète André Chénier". Retrieved 14 March 2021.
  9. ^ Robespierre himself would be guillotined 3 days later, on 28 July 1794.
  10. ^ Mélanges littéraires, composés de morceaux inédits de Diderot, Caylus, Thomas, Rivarol,André Chénier... (Paris 1816), noted by Derocquigny 1907.
  11. ^ Camus, A. (1956). The rebel: An essay on man in revolt. New York: Knopf.
  12. ^ "Google Maps". Google Maps.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to André Chénier.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=André_Chénier&oldid=1216806144"