Étienne Pivert de Senancour

On 11 September 1790, he married Marie-Françoise Daguet with whom he had two children: a daughter Eulalie (1791) who would later follow in her father's footsteps and become a writer, and a son, Florian-Julien (1793), who went on to pursue a career in the military.

In 1799 he published in Paris his Rêveries sur la nature primitive de l'homme, a book containing impassioned descriptive passages which mark him out as a precursor of the romantic movement.

This singular book, which has never lost its popularity with a limited class of readers, was followed in the next year by a treatise De l'amour, in which he attacked the accepted social conventions.

Senancour might have spent his life writing in complete obscurity were it not for a charge leveled against him by a public prosecutor for slandering religion in the second edition of his Résumé de l'histoire des traditions morales et religieuses (1827) wherein he described Jesus as a "youthful sage".

Danish literary critic Georg Brandes pointed out that while Chateaubriand's novella René was appreciated by some of the ruling spirits of the century, Obermann was understood only by the highly gifted, sensitive temperaments, usually strangers to success.

Having no resources but his pen, Senancour was driven to hack-work during the period which elapsed between his return to France (1803) and his death at Saint-Cloud; but some of the charm of Obermann is to be found in the Libres Méditations d'un solitaire inconnu.