CHENIER, ANDRE DE (1762-1794), French poet, was horn at Constantinople of a French father and a Greek mother. His parents returned to France in 1765, and though the father afterwards served as consul general in Morocco, the children (Marie-Joseph is noticed below) remained in France. Andre was educated at the college de Navarre in Paris, and after some months in the army at Strasbourg, returned to Paris, where he met the poets and artists of the day in his mother's salon. A visit to Italy in 1784 made a deep impression on his mind, and strengthened his passion for the antique. The next three years were spent in experi menting in eclogues and idylls in the classical manner. Of the works of this period the most famous is La jeune Tarentine, classi cal in form, but characterized by the grace and charm which in formed all Chenier's work. He proposed to write and actually composed fragments of a poem modelled on Lucretius, Hermes, which was to cover the contents of the Encyclopedie. In 1787 he went to London as secretary to his relative, M. de la Luzerne, at that time French ambassador. London displeased him, and in 1790 he returned to France, and plunged into political writing, His prose Avis au people f rancais (Aug. 24, 1790) was followed by the Jeu de Paume, a moral ode addressed to the painter Louis David. Chenier was a member of the Feuillant club, and contrib uted to the Journal de Paris the Iambes addressed to Collot d'Herbois Sur les Suisses revoltes. He escaped the massacres of September because his family got him away to Normandy, and after the execution of Louis XVI. he hid in an obscure refuge near Versailles. To this period belong his Ode d Charlotte Corday and his Ode d Versailles. His lines on the art of writing poetry are still quoted in French university circles.
But on Mar. 7, 1794, he was arrested in the house of Madame Piscatory at Passy. He was lodged first in the Luxembourg and then in Saint-Lazare. His imprisonment lasted 141 days. His brother, Marie-Joseph, a member of the Convention, could not save him, and he was guillotined on July three days before Robespierre, whose death would have saved him. To this four months' imprisonment belong Andre Chenier's greatest poems, the Jeune Captive, the Iambes (in alternate lines of 12 and 8 syllables) attacking the Convention and conveyed sheet by sheet to his friends by a venal gaoler.
These circumstances explain how it was that the greatest French lyricist of the 18th century had to wait 20 years for the merest recognition of his genius. For only fragments of his work were known, and he only reached the full measure of his powers in the months before his tragic end. Only the Jeu de Paume and the Hymne sur les Suisses were known in his life time. The Jeune Captive and the La Jeune Tarentine were published in periodicals in 1795 and 1801. The first imperfect attempt to collect the body of his work was made in 1819. Since that date there has been unanimous acknowledgment of his genius, but the critics have been divided as to whether he should be classed, as Sainte-Beuve classed him, as the forerunner of Victor Hugo and the romanticists, or, as Anatole France would have it, as the last exponent of the art of the 18th century. Perhaps his influence was greatest on the classicists who led the reaction against the romanticists at the end of the 19th century, on Leconte de Lisle and BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The Chenier literature is enormous. His fate has Bibliography.-The Chenier literature is enormous. His fate has been commemorated in numerous plays, pictures and poems, notably in the fine epilogue of Sully Prudhomme, the Stello of A. de Vigny, the delicate statue by Puech in the Luxembourg, and the well-known portrait in the centre of the "Last Days of the Terror." The best editions are still those of Becq de Fouquieres (1862, 1872 and 1881), supplemented by those of L. Moland (2 vols. 1889) and R. Guillard (2 vols. See also Sainte-Beuve, Tableau de la Litt. fr. (1828) ; Anatole France, La Vie litteraire vol. ii. ; E. Faguet, Andre Chenier 0902).