Charles Nodier

Charles Nodier (born April 29, 1780, Besançon, France—died January 27, 1844, Paris) was a 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.