SENANCOUR, ETIENNE PIVERT DE (177o-1846), French author, was born in Paris in November 1770. His father desired him to enter the seminary of Saint-Sulpice preparatory to becoming a priest, but Senancour, to avoid a profession for which he had no vocation, went on a visit to Switzerland in 1789. At Fribourg he married in 1790 a young Frenchwoman, Made moiselle Daguet, but the marriage was not a happy one. His absence from France at the outbreak of the Revolution was ill interpreted, and his name was included in the list of emigrants. He visited France from time to time by stealth, but he only succeeded in saving the remnants of a considerable fortune. In 1799 he published in Paris his Reveries sur la nature primitive de l'homme, a book containing impassioned descriptive passages which mark him out as a precursor of the romantic movement. His best known work Obermann (2 vols., 1804), was to a great extent inspired by Rousseau, was edited and praised successively by Sainte-Beuve and by George Sand, and had a considerable influence both in France and England. It is a series of letters
supposed to be written by a solitary and melancholy person, whose headquarters are placed in a lonely valley of the Jura. He returned to France in 1803 and died at St. Cloud on Jan. Io, 1846. He wrote late in life a second novel in letters Isabelle (1833).
Senancour is immortalized for English readers in the Obermann of Matthew Arnold. Obermann itself was translated into English, with biographical and critical introduction, by A. G. Waite (2903). See the preface by Sainte-Beuve to his edition (1833, 2 vols.) of Obermann, and two articles Portraits contemporains (vol. i.); Un Precurseur and Senancour (1867) by J. Levallois, who received much information from Senancour's daughter, Eulalie de Senancour, herself a journalist and novelist ; and a biographical and critical study Senancour, by J. Merlant (1907).