International audience André Chénier’s poetry gives the imagination a great deal of importance: conceived as a form of dispossession of the self, the violence and the autonomy the poet, rendered passive by its works, lends it, make it akin to a crisis of reason. Raptures, impulses, disorganisation of the faculties, its symptoms link it to the madness that captures all minds around 1800: from the quest for a less rigid syntax to the fashion in the theatres for “madwomen” through the political convulsions that confuse the public, the signs of a loss of rules and direction are numerous at the turn of the century. Chénier, to whom this context is fully relevant, played an important role by holding the mirror of his texts to the excesses and astonishments of the love, family and political imaginings that are the source of his inspiration. What if his works intended to be, through the ruptures and absences that characterise them, the reflection of the worrisome songs he was hearing all around?