Chénier, MARIE-ANDRÉ, a distinguished French poet, was born at Constantinople in 1762. He was the third son of Louis Chénier, French consul-general in that city. His mother was a Greek lady of remarkable beauty and accomplishments. While quite a child he was sent to France; and in his thirteenth year he was placed at the Collège de Navarre, Paris. Partly from predilection, and partly through the influence of his mother, Greek literature was from the beginning his special subject of study. At the age of twenty he entered the army, and served for six months in Strasburg as sub-lieutenant; but disgusted with the frivolity of the military life of that day, he returned to Paris, and gave himself up to a strenuous course of study. To this period belong two of his most famous idylls, Le Mendiant and L'Aveugle. His health giving way, he travelled in Switzerland, Italy, and the Archipelago. In 1786 he returned to Paris, and began several of his most ambitious poems, most of which, however, remained fragments. The most noteworthy are Suzanne, L'Invention, and Hermès, the last being in plan and spirit an imitation of the great poem of Lucretius; for Chénier shared the beliefs of the 18th-century philosophers of France. In 1787 he went to England as secretary to the French ambassador, but seems to have found his residence there as uncongenial as Heine did. Returning to Paris in 1790, he found himself in the ferment of the Revolution. Up to a certain point he gave the movement his ardent support; but alarmed by its excesses he mortally offended Robespierre by certain denunciatory pamphlets. He was thrown into the prison of Saint-Lazare, and after six months was executed on the 25th July 1794, just three days before the close of the Reign of Terror.
Chénier holds in France a somewhat similar position to Keats in England. They suggest each other also by their early deaths, and by a certain affinity of genius. Other pieces of Chénier that deserve special mention are La Jeune Captive, Le Jeune Malade, and Versailles. Sainte-Beuve thus sums up the claims of Chénier: 'Chénier was one of the great masters of French poetry during the 18th century, and our greatest classic in verse since Boileau and Racine.' The best edition of his poems is Joubert's (1883). See Sainte-Beuve, Critiques et Portraits; Bccq de Fonquières, Lettres critiques sur Chénier (1881); Haraszti, La Poesie d'André Chénier (1891).—His younger brother, MARIE-JOSEPH DE CHÉNIER (1764-1811), was an ardent republican, sat in the Legislative Assembly, and wrote satires and heavy declamatory plays.