Charles Nodier
born April 29, 1780, Besançon, Fr.
died Jan. 27, 1844, Paris
writer more important for the
influence he had on the French Romantic
movement than for his own writings.
Nodier had an eventful early life, in
the course of which he fell foul of the
authorities for a skit on Napoleon. In
1824 he settled in Paris after his
appointment as director of the
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal (Arsenal
Library) and soon became one of the
leaders of the literary life of the
capital. In his drawing room at the
Arsenal, Nodier drew together the young
men who were to be the leading lights of
the Romantic movement: Victor Hugo,
Alfred de Musset, and Charles-Augustin
Sainte-Beuve.
An ardent admirer of Goethe and
Shakespeare, he did much to encourage
the French Romantics to look abroad for
inspiration. Nodier wrote a great deal,
but the only works of his that are still
read are his fantastic, masterfully
written short stories, rather in the
style of the German Romantic E.T.A.
Hoffmann. By his revelation of the
creative power of the dream and by his
equation of a state of innocence with
certain conditions normally called mad,
Nodier was rebelling against the tyranny
of “common sense” and opening up a new
literary territory for later
generations. His election to the
Académie Française in 1833 virtually
constituted official recognition that
Romanticism had become a significant and
respectable literary movement.
