André Marie Chénier (; 30 October 176225 July 1794) was a French poet associated with the events of the French Revolution, during which he was sentenced to death. His sensual, emotive poetry marks him as one of the precursors of the Romantic movement. His career was brought to an abrupt end when he was guillotined for supposed "crimes against the state". Chénier's life has been the subject of Umberto Giordano's opera Andrea Chénier and other works of art.
Life
thumb|left|150px|Bust of André Chénier by [[David d'Angers (1839).]]
Chénier was born in the Galata district of Constantinople. His family home, destroyed in a fire, was located on the site of the present Saint Pierre Han, in today's Karaköy neighborhood of Istanbul. His father, Louis Chénier, a native of Languedoc, after twenty years in the Levant as a cloth-merchant, was appointed to a position equivalent to that of French consul at Constantinople. His mother, Élisabeth Santi-Lomaca, whose sister was grandmother of Adolphe Thiers, was of Greek Cypriot origin. When André was three years old, his father returned to France, and from 1768 to 1775 served as consul-general of France in Morocco. The family, of which André was the third son, and Marie-Joseph (see below) the fourth, remained in France and for a few years André was given his youthful freedom while living with an aunt in Carcassonne. A square in Carcassonne is named to commemorate him. He distinguished himself as a verse-translator from the classics at the Collège de Navarre in Paris.
In 1783, Chénier enlisted in a French regiment at Strasbourg, but the novelty soon wore off. He returned to Paris before the end of the year, was well received by his family, and mixed in the cultivated circle which frequented his mother's salon, including Lebrun-Pindare, Antoine Lavoisier, Jean François Lesueur, Claude Joseph Dorat, and, a little later, the painter Jacques-Louis David. addressed to the radical painter Jacques-Louis David. Ten days before Chénier's death, the painter Joseph-Benoît Suvée completed the well-known portrait of him, shown in the box above. Aimée de Coigny survived the Terror, her freedom being bought by Casimir, Comte de Montrond on the same day that she was to follow Chénier to the guillotine.
Chénier might have been overlooked but for the well-meant, indignant officiousness of his father. Marie-Joseph tried, but failed, to prevent his brother's execution. and Jules Lefèvre-Deumier also gave a few fragments; but it was not until 1819 that an attempt was made by Henri de Latouche to collect the poems in a substantive volume, Paul Morillot has argued that judged by the usual test of 1820s Romanticism (love for strange literature of the North, medievalism, novelties and experiments), Chénier would have been excluded from Romantic circles.
The poet José María de Heredia held Chénier in great esteem, saying "I do not know in the French language a more exquisite fragment than the three hundred verses of the Bucoliques" and agreeing with Sainte-Beuve's judgment that Chénier was a poet ahead of his time. Chénier has been very popular in Russia, where Alexandr Pushkin wrote a poem about his last hours based on Latouche and Ivan Kozlov translated La Jeune Captive, La Jeune Tarentine and other famous pieces.