Marie-Joseph Chénier

Poet

• Born: August 28, 1764
• Birthplace: Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey)
• Died: January 10, 1811
• Place of death: Paris, France

Biography

Marie-Joseph Blaise Chénier, sometimes called the poet laureate of the French Revolution, was a prolific dramatist, poet, and pamphleteer and an enthusiastic revolutionary activist. His brother, André Chénier, a gifted poet who perished at the guillotine, is better recognized today, but in the prerevolutionary ferver, Chénier was the most celebrated playwright and poet of the movement, championing revolutionary ideals in his writing as well as organizing and making speeches at festivals and holding influential political appointments. His prominence continued after the revolution, although his political status was precarious during the Reign of Terror, and he provided celebratory verses for almost all major public occasions during the republican era, as well as producing several popular plays and contributing to the development of “bourgeois tragedy.” His popularity declined due to changing fashions and public claims that he was a political opportunist, and his writing is interesting for its political influence and cultural significance rather than its literary merit.

Chénier was born in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey), in 1764, where his father, the historian Louis de Chénier, was then French representative. Both he and his brother were sent to an aunt in the Languedoc for schooling, but Chénier’s academic career was undistinguished and he joined the military in his late teens. From a young age he had been interested in literature, and he resigned his commission in 1783 when his parents returned to Paris. His mother, a beautiful Greek intellectual named Santi-l’Homaka, established a celebrated salon frequented by the revolutionary painter Jacques- Louis David and the chemistAntoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Chénier wrote his first plays in this environment; two were produced but were vocally rejected by aristocratic theatergoers. Anger at the aristocracy may have led Chénier to abandon his title and to commit himself to revolutionary ideals.

His first revolutionary play, Charles IX: Ou, L’École des rois, took as its topic the oft- treated Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, but unlike previous dramatic treatments of the topic, Chénier blamed the massacre of the Huguenots as much on the negligence of the monarchy as on the clerical failure to curb heated religious passions. For this reason, the play did not get past the censors or win support from aristocratic patrons, and it remained stalled until Chénier enlisted aid from revolutionary political activists, who barged into the Comedie-Française during a performance to demand the play be produced, with or without the censors’ approval. Their demand garnered tremendous publicity and installed Chénier at the center of an upsurge in political drama promoting the French Revolution. This political theater flourished in part due to 1791 legislation that Chénier helped draft, which limited benefits to state- sponsored playhouses and protected authors. In this climate, Charles IX was compared to Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s La Folle journée: Ou, Le Mariage de Figaro (pb. 1785), and Chénier began writing popular songs and pamphlets advocating Jacobin causes.

By early 1792, Chénier was the most prominent spokesman for the revolutionary cause and was openly at odds with his more moderate brother, André. André aligned himself with the moderately reformist Feuillants, who wanted to preserve the monarchy while limiting it with a constitution and Parliament, much as in Britain. Marie-Joseph was solidly a Jacobin, opposed entirely to both the monarchy and the royal court. Later in 1792, when Chénier became the representative to the National Assembly from Poissonnière, his Parisian district, he was the principal author of the petition Adresse de la ville de Paris à l’Assemblée nationale pour demander la déchéance du roi, which was sent to the Legislative Assembly to request that the king be dethroned.

After the French Revolution turned heated in the weeks following the petition’s failure and a new government was installed, Chénier remained in public office, serving in the National Convention, holding several prominent positions, and making influential friends. The radicals Jean-Paul Marat and Robespierre disliked him, however, and his political standing became precarious during the Reign of Terror. He returned to drama, writing a fairly neutral play, Fénélon (pr. 1793), reminiscent of the “convent plays” which had capitalized on anticlericicism early in the revolutionary movement. This nonpartisan play was popular, but some critics questioned whether it was properly a tragedy because it featured middle-class characters. Chénier spoke out on behalf of “democratizing” drama and his influence advanced the acceptance of bourgeois tragedy, more famous examples of which were written by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and George Lillo.

Chénier’s moderation and populism irritated the radical Montagnards, like Marat and Robespierre, and they removed him from his positions, including his very visible role on the Committee of Public Instruction, which was responsible for developing a secular curriculum and school system to break the church’s stranglehold on education. However, Chénier was not particularly committed to the more moderate Girondists either, and his uncontroversial but affecting patriotic speeches and plays espousing core revolutionary values—as well as his opportunistic willingness to denounce anything Robespierre opposed too strongly—enabled him to be too politically ambivalent and too much in the public eye for Robespierre to execute him. Despite perpetual harassment from the radicals, Chénier avoided his brother’s fate and served in the National Convention and the Council of Five Hundred after Robespierre was deposed.

Chénier eventually became one of many revolutionary activists to support Napoleon I, twisting revolutionary language to defend the French Empire. Napoleon disliked political art, however, and Chénier’s sincere commitment to liberty made him less-than-enthusiastic about many Napoleonic policies. Furthermore, his revolutionary plays could not be performed because of Napoleon’s ban on the theatrical depiction of clerics. Chénier lost his little remaining political standing in 1806, when he published the Epître à Voltaire, an unqualified and passionate defense of Voltaire’s response to a vicious critique of Voltaire by Napoleon’s drama critic, Julien-Louis Geoffroy. The letter to Voltaire enraged Napoleon, who removed Chénier from his official posts, although Napoleon did grant him a pension and a commission to write a history of France.

Chénier spent the last years of his life in academic pursuits, writing the history and a survey of contemporary French literature since the French Revolution. He died on January 10, 1811, leaving his papers to the author Pierre-Claude Danou, who collected and published an edition of Chénier’s works in 1816.