Charles Nodier

Man of letters, born in Besançon, NE France. He studied entomology, publishing Traité sur les Antennes et les Ouïes des Insectes (1798), then turned to literature with a work on Shakespeare (1801), a novel Le Peintre de Salzbourg, journal des Emotions d'un Coeur souffrant (1803), a collection of poems Essais d'un jeune Barde (1804), and a light tale Le dernier Chapitre de mon Roman (1803). He made known English and German literature, then favoured antiquity with Smara ou les Démons de la nuit (1821). On the fall of the Empire, against which he had written a pamphlet La Napoléone, he returned to France with Royalist ideas (L'Histoire des Sociétés secrètes de l'armée ,1813) and began his series of tales (1824), such as La Fée aux Miettes, which has echoes of Lewis Carroll. Librarian at the Arsenal (1824–30), he organized soirées, described in the Mémoires of Dumas (père), which were frequented by the first Romantics, including Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and Saint-Beuve. In 1830 he published one of his first essays on Le Fantastique en Littérature. His interest in dreams made him a precursor of the analysts of the unconscious. The famous sonnet, ‘d'Arvers’, was written for his daughter, Marie, born in 1811. He entered the Académie Française in 1833.

French literature
By category
French literary history
Medieval 16th century - 17th century 18th century -19th century 20th century - Contemporary
French Writers
Chronological list Writers by category Novelists - Playwrights Poets - Essayists Short story writers
France Portal
Literature Portal This box: view • talk • edit

Charles Nodier (April 29, 1780 – January 27, 1844), was a French author.

He was born at Besançon.

During the Reign of Terror his father put him under the care of Girod de Chautrans, with whom he studied English and German.

He then left Paris, where he had gone after losing his position at Besançon, and for some years lived a very unsettled life at Besançon, Dole, where he married, and in other places in the Jura. During these wanderings he wrote Le peintre de Salzbourg, journal des émotions d'un coeur souffrant, suivi des Meditations du cloître (1803).

In 1811 Nodier appears in Ljubljana, then the seat of Illyrian provinces, as editor of a polyglot journal, the Illyrian Telegraph (Télégraph officiel) published in French, German, Italian and Slovenian. In 1824 he was appointed to the librarianship of the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal.

The twenty years at the arsenal were by far the most important and fruitful of Nodier's life. Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset and Sainte-Beuve all acknowledged their obligations to him.

His best and most characteristic work, some of which is exquisite in its kind, consists partly of short tales of a more or less fantastic character, partly of nondescript articles, half bibliographic, half narrative, the nearest analogue to which in English is to be found in some of the papers of Thomas de Quincey. Of his tales the best are Smarra, ou les démons de la nuit (1821); Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept châteaux (1830); Inès de las Sierras (1838); Les quatre talismans et la légende de soeur Béatrix (1838), together with some fairy stories published in the year of his death, and Franciscus Columna, which appeared after it. The Souvenirs de jeunesse (1832) are interesting but untrustworthy, and the Dictionnaire universel de la langue française (1823), which, in the days before Littré, was one of the most useful of its kind, is said to have been not wholly or mainly Nodier's.

An account of his share in the Romantic movement is to be found in Georg Brandes's Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature. His Description raisonnée d'une jolie collection de livres (1844), which is a catalogue of the books in his library, contains a life by Francis Wey and a complete bibliography of his numerous works. and A Estignard, Correspondance inédite de Charles Nodier, 1796-1844 (1876), containing his letters to Charles Weiss.