André Chénier's ‘Dernières poésies’: Animism and the Terror

Abstract

Abstract:Starting from the premise that André Chénier's poetry is fundamentally pantheist in nature, this article identifies animism as one of its most important modes of expression. The pantheist belief structures and animist dynamic also inform his final poems written during the Terror (1793-1794). Yet in this psychologically constraining and physically violent world, they produce a deeply 'uncanny', often bestial, vision of the Revolution and its actors. What is more exceptional is that this animism also inspires the figure of the Jacobins' unwavering enemy, a figure at once of Aristotelian magnanimity and implacable animosity towards the revolutionary regime. Chénier's last poems thus institute a corrective 'justice' to the perceived abuses meted out by the Jacobins' executive and judicial systems. They do so, moreover, by appropriating the revolutionaries' own performative and nominative speech acts, making Chénier a poet-legislator paradoxically close in character to Rousseau's mythic law-giver in Du contrat social.