André Chénier
André Chénier (actually André Marie Chénier, often André de Chénier , born October 29, 1762 in Galata near Istanbul , † July 25, 1794 in Paris ) was a French author who is best known as a poet. He was the brother of the now forgotten playwright Marie-Joseph Chénier .
Life and work
Chénier was born the fourth of five children of the cloth merchant Louis de Chénier and his wife Elisabeth Lomaca. The father, who came from a merchant family in the south of France with aristocratic roots, had settled in Istanbul at a young age and had become prosperous there as a cloth merchant. The mother came from the city's significant Greek minority. The building complex in which Chenier was born and spent the first years of his life, the so-called "St. Pierre Han", still exists.
In 1765 the family returned to France for economic reasons, initially to Paris. Here they separated temporarily: The father, who had already worked part-time as a French consul in Istanbul, went to the Moroccan port city of Salé for several years , where he had received the post of French consul. His wife and three oldest children stayed in Paris. André and brother Marie-Joseph were given care to an uncle in Carcassonne , also a cloth merchant.
In 1773 they both returned to Paris, where they received a solid humanistic education at the Collège de Navarre . In addition, they met various writers, artists, scholars, naturalists and - because ancient Greek art has just been rediscovered - archaeologists in the salon of their socially active mother, which traded as "Greek" . It was here that Chénier read his first poems from around 1778, which were written in the neoclassical "anacreontic" manner of the time, following Greek and Latin models.
After a disappointing attempt as a noble officer candidate in Strasbourg in 1782/83, he made educational trips with a pair of friends through Switzerland (1784) and Italy (1785), where he was impressed by the finds of ancient art. Afterwards he lived again as an intellectually versatile young bon vivant with his family in Paris and worked as a writer. As before, he was encouraged to do this by his mother's guests. B. the anacreontic poet Ponce-Denis Écouchard-Lebrun , known at the time, known as Lebrun- Pindare . Above all, he wrote poetry during these years: bucoliques (pastoral poems), élégies , épigrammes , odes , hymnes and poèmes . Some of these poems, especially the elegies, are inspired by his enthusiastic love for a "Camille" behind whom the married Michelle de Bonneuil hides.
In addition to the poetry in the narrower sense, Chénier wrote some long poems in the style of the era, u. a. the poetological reflection fragment L'Invention (1787). Furthermore, he began two large-scale, scientifically intended didactic poems, also based on the model of Lebrun: Hermès and L'Amérique . In the interests of the Enlightenment, they were supposed to represent the natural or geographical knowledge of the time poetically, but remained unfinished.
At the end of 1787 he accepted a position as secretary to the newly appointed French ambassador in London, who was friends with the family, in order to earn something and perhaps open up a career. However, since he, like many French people of the time, did not like England and the English, he felt uncomfortable there and often went home to visit. There was no significant influence of English literature or philosophy on his thinking and work.
In April 1790 he settled again in Paris, where political events had been going on for a year and a half and his brother had just made a name for himself as a political playwright. He joined the moderate revolutionaries and worked as a conference speaker and publicist for the cause of a constitutional monarchy and meritocratic social constitution.
Since he considered the revolution to have ended successfully with the constitution passed in September 1791 , he attacked the radical revolutionaries, the Jacobins , to whom his brother Marie-Joseph also joined, from the end of 1791, mostly in the journal de Paris loyal to the king , with aggressive verses and pamphlets would have. When the Jacobins came to power in August 1792, Chénier found himself increasingly condemned to an underground existence. His attempts to actively help save King Louis XVI. to participate, who was dismissed in September and charged in December, was unsuccessful.
After the king's execution in January 1793, Chénier fled Paris and lived in hiding with friends in Versailles . From this time z. B. the ode à Charlotte Corday , calling for political murder , in which he glorifies the assassin who stabbed the radical politician Marat on July 13, 1793 . The odes to "Fanny" were also written in Versailles, inspired by his love for his hostess, the (married) Françoise Le Coulteux.
At the beginning of 1794 he was arrested as an unknown suspect while visiting friends in Passy near Paris and after his identification he was imprisoned and sentenced to death. The indictment was based on the correct assumption that he was involved in an action intended to win or bribe members of the National Convention during the trial of the king to vote against the death sentence.
Waiting for his execution, Chénier wrote poems that he could smuggle out of prison with his dirty laundry and send to his family. They were mostly sharp political-satirical texts (iambes), but also the famous ode à une jeune captive , in which the author speaks in the role of a young fellow prisoner who inwardly rears up against the threat of death on the scaffold.
On July 25, at the age of 31, Chénier was guillotined, two days before the fall of the dictator Robespierre and the end of the Great Terror . His body was probably thrown into a mass grave on the Cimetière de Picpus . Various people's attempts to save him had been in vain, and his brother Marie-Joseph (who, in turn, had voted for the king's execution as a member of the National Convention) could not do anything for him, as he had fallen out of favor with Robespierre.
Chénier was a member of the Parisian Masonic Lodge Les Neuf Sœurs .
Significance and aftermath
During his lifetime, Chénier was only known as a publicist and pamphleteer for a short time, his literary work in the narrower sense of the word remained unpublished with a few exceptions and much remained fragmentary due to his early death. Although he lived in the 18th century and wrote that he is so far become an author of the 19th, when his poetry until 1819 a wider readership became available with the release of a collection issue and then the young poet school of romantics and by 1850 the Parnassiens strong influenced. For both schools of poetry, Chénier was exemplary thanks to the beauty of his language, the playful lightness of his Alexandrians , the expressiveness of his pictures, the authenticity of the feelings portrayed and perhaps also thanks to the wistful mood that characterizes his verses. His tragic early death was certainly also a factor in his fame.
It is precisely this tragedy that naturally moved many authors and artists. She stands z. B. at the center of the opera Andrea Chénier by Umberto Giordano (first performed in 1896).
literature
- Pierre Prades: Ils ont tué le poète. André Chénier (3 octobre 1762-25 juillet 1794). Paris: Editions des écrivains 1998. ISBN 2-84434-056-3
- Wolfgang Sykorra : France 1800. Chénier, in: europaLyrik 1775-today. Poems and interpretations. Published by Klaus Lindemann. Paderborn-Munich-Vienna-Zurich: Ferdinand Schöningh 1982, pages 103-116. ISBN 3-506-75045-3
- Elisabeth Quillen: L'Angleterre et l'Amérique dans la vie et la poésie d'André Chénier. Berne u. a .: Lang 1982. (= Publications universitaires européennes; Sér. 13, Langue et littérature françaises; 74) ISBN 3-261-04986-3
- Ulrich Töns: Studies on the poetry of André Chéniers. Münster: Aschendorff 1970. (= research on Romance philology; 20)
Web links
- Literature by and about André Chénier in the catalog of the German National Library
- Article Chénier in Gert Pinkernell: names, titles and dates of French literature (source for "Life and Creation" and "Meaning and Aftermath")
Individual evidence
- ↑ Alexander Giese: Die Freemaurer, Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-205-98598-2
- ↑ Œuvres complètes , Paris, Baudouin frères, Foulon et Cie libraires, 1819.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Chénier, André |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Chénier, André Marie; de Chénier, André; de Chénier, André Marie |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French author |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 29, 1762 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Galata , Turkey |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 25, 1794 |
| Place of death | Paris |