The violent personalities of a pamphlet entitled Marie Joseph Chenier et le prince des critiques (1844), in reply to Jules Janin, brought him a six months' sojourn in La Pelagic, in the cell just quitted by Lamennais.
ANDRE DE CHENIER (1762-1794), French poet, was born at Constantinople on the 30th of October 1762.
His father, Louis Chenier, a native of Languedoc, after twenty years of successful commerce in the Levant as a cloth-merchant, was appointed to a position equivalent to that of French consul at Constantinople.
But the glamour of the military life was as soon exhausted by Chenier as it was by Coleridge.
But Chenier is always far more than an imitator.
Apart from his idylls and his elegies, Chenier also experimented from early youth in didactic and philosophic verse, and when he commenced his Hermes in 1783 his ambition was to condense the Encyclopedia of Diderot into a poem somewhat after the manner of Lucretius.
De la Luzerne, was connected in some way with the Chenier family, and he offered to take Andre with him as his secretary.
A strong constitutionalist, Chenier took the view that the Revolution was already complete and that all that remained to be done was the inauguration of the reign of law.
At sundown on the 25th of July 1794, the very day of his condemnation on a bogus charge of conspiracy, Andre Chenier was guillotined.
Exquisite as was already his susceptibility to beauty and his mastership of the rarest poetic material, we cannot doubt that Chenier was preparing for still higher flights of lyric passion and poetic intensity.
Bequeathed to the Bibliotheque Nationale by Mme Elisa de Chenier in 1892, has been edited by Paul Dimoff and published by Delagrave.
Sainte-Beuve in his Tableau of 1828 sang the praises of Chenier as an heroic forerunner of the Romantic movement and a precursor of Victor Hugo.
Chenier, he said, had "inspired and determined" Romanticism.
This suggestion of modernity in Chenier was echoed by a chorus of critics who worked the idea to death; in the meantime, the standard edition of Chenier's works was being prepared by M.
The same patient investigator gave his New Documents on Andre Chenier to the world in 1875.
Heredia himself reverted to the judgment of Sainte-Beuve to the effect that Chenier was the first to make modern verses, and he adds, "I do not know in the French language a more exquisite fragment than the three hundred verses of the Bucoliques."
The general French verdict on his work is in the main well summed by Morillot, when he says that, judged by the usual tests of the Romantic movement of the 'twenties (love for strange literatures of the North, medievalism, novelties and experiments), Chenier would inevitably have been excluded from the cenacle of 1827.
What is universally admitted is that Chenier was a very great artist, who like Ronsard opened up sources of poetry in France which had long seemed dried up. In England it is easier to feel his attraction than that of some far greater reputations in French poetry, for, rhetorical though he nearly always is, he yet reveals something of that quality which to the Northern mind has always been of the very essence of poetry, that quality which made SainteBeuve say of him that he was the first great poet "personnel et reveur" in France since La Fontaine.
For these reasons, among others, Chenier, whose art is destined to so many vicissitudes of criticism in his own country, seems assured among English readers of a place among the Dii Majores of French poetry.
The Chenier literature of late years has become enormous.
SE.) [[Chenier, Marie - Joseph Blaise De]] (1764-1811), French poet, dramatist and politician, younger brother of Andre de Chenier, was born at Constantinople on the 11th of February 1764.1 He was brought up at Carcassonne, and educated in Paris at the College de Navarre.
Chenier attacked the censorship in three pamphlets, and the commotion aroused by the controversy raised keen interest in the piece.
Among the famous dramatic pieces of this epoch was the Andre Chenier (1843) of Edouard Wacken (1819-1861), who was a lyric rather than a dramatic poet; also the comedies of Louis Labarre (1810-1892) and of Henri Delmotte (1822-1884).
He was for some time secretary to the duc de la RochefoucauldLiancourt, the celebrated philanthropist, and afterwards joined the staff of the Journal de Paris, then managed by Suard, and where he had as colleagues Andre Chenier and Antoine Roucher.
This piece was played after the fall of the Terror, but the fratricide of Timoleon became the text for insinuations to the effect that by his silence Joseph de Chenier had connived at the judicial murder of Andre, whom Joseph's enemies alluded to as Abel.
Joseph Chenier had been a member of the Convention and of 1 This is the date given by G.
De Chenier in his La Write sur la famille de Chenier (1844) the Council of Five Hundred, and had voted for the death of Louis XVI.; he had a seat in the tribunate; he belonged to the committees of public instruction, of general security, and of public safety.
See the euvres completes de Joseph Chenier (8 vols., Paris, 1823-1826), containing, notices of the poet by Arnault and Daunou; Charles Labitte, Etudes litteraires (1846); Henri Welschinger, Le Thedtre revolutionnaire, 1789-1799 (1881); and A.
Lieby, Etude sur le thedtre de Marie-Joseph Chenier (1902).
