His father, on the outbreak of the French Revolution, was appointed mayor of Besançon and consequently chief police magistrate, and seems to have become an instrument of the tyranny of the Jacobins without sharing their principles.

[citation needed] He was sent to Strasbourg, where he studied with Eulogius Schneider, the notorious Jacobin and public prosecutor of Alsace, but a good Greek scholar.

Nodier was working as a secretary to the elderly Sir Herbert Croft, 5th Baronet and his platonic friend Lady Mary Hamilton.

[6] After the evacuation of French forces from the Illyrian provinces in 1813 he returned to Paris, and the Restauration found him a royalist, though he retained something of republican sentiment.

[8] Nodier was a passionate admirer of Goethe, Laurence Sterne and Shakespeare, and himself contributed to the literature that was one of the leading traits of the Romantic school.

During the 1820s, after adapting Dr. John William Polidori's short story "The Vampyre" successfully for the stage in France (Le Vampire, 1820), Nodier involved himself in the theatre for a few years.

An account of his share in the Romantic movement is to be found in Georg Brandes's Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature.

Nodier's 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.

A collection of Nodier's dream writings (De Quelques Phénomènes Du Sommeil) was published by Le Castor Astral in 1996.

Nodier's 1822 novella Trilby, ou le lutin d'Argail, provided the inspiration for the ballet La Sylphide, 1832, to a scenario devised by Adolphe Nourrit.

Since 1985, a bronze bust of Nodier stands at the court of its building, work of Jakov Brdar, according to the plans by the architect Marjan Ocvirk.