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.

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.

[citation needed] Apart from his idylls and his elegies, Chénier also experimented with didactic and philosophic verse, and when he commenced his Hermès in 1783 his ambition was to condense the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot into a long poem somewhat after the manner of Lucretius.

Although John Milton and James Thomson seem to have interested him, and a few of his verses show slight inspiration from Shakespeare and Thomas Gray, it would be an exaggeration to say Chénier studied English literature.

[citation needed] The events of 1789, and the startling success of his younger brother, Marie-Joseph, as political playwright and pamphleteer, concentrated all his thoughts upon France.

Though his political viewpoint was moderate, his tactics were dangerously aggressive: he abandoned his gentle idyls to write poetical satires.

His prose "Avis au peuple français" (24 August 1790) was followed by the rhetorical "Jeu de paume", a somewhat declamatory moral ode occasioned by the Tennis court oath[4] addressed to the radical painter Jacques-Louis David.

André raged against all these events, in such poems as Ode à Charlotte Corday congratulating France that "un scélérat de moins rampe dans cette fange", "one scoundrel less creeps in this mire".

[citation needed] After the king's execution, Chénier sought a secluded retreat on the Plateau de Satory at Versailles, and only went out after nightfall.

During the 140 days of his imprisonment he wrote a series of iambs (in alternate lines of 12 and 8 syllables) denouncing the Convention, which "hiss and stab like poisoned bullets",[5] and which were smuggled to his family by a jailer.

[3] It is possible that the French government remembered Chénier as the author of the venomous verses in the Journal de Paris and had him tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal for that reason.

Fayolle[9] 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,[3] from manuscripts retained by Marie-Joseph Chénier.

He experimented with classical precedents rendered in French verse to a much greater extent than other 18th-century poets; on the other hand, the ennui and melancholy of his poetry recalls Romanticism.

[10] 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.

[3] Chénier has also found favor with English-speaking critics; for instance, his love of nature and of political freedom has been compared to Shelley, and his attraction to Greek art and myth recalls Keats.

[citation needed] Chénier's fate has become the subject of many plays, pictures and poems, notably in the opera Andrea Chénier by Umberto Giordano, the epilogue by Sully-Prudhomme, the Stello by Alfred de Vigny, a poem by Pushkin, the delicate statue by Denys Puech in the Luxembourg, and the well-known portrait in the centre of Charles Louis Müller's Last Days of the Terror.