Senacour, Etienne Pivert de

(1770-1846)

   writer

   Born in Paris, Étienne Pivert de Senacour led a solitary and errant existence, finding in the theories of jean-jacques rousseau, then in the doctrines of the Enlightenment, the basis for disenchantment and an unsatisfied need that could not be resolved by Christianity. in his Réveries sur la nature primitive de l'homme (1799) and in his autobiographical, epistolary, and pre-romantic novel, Oberman (1804), there appeared a sense of an existential malaise that was translated into the incurable sadness and melancholy of his heroes. Senacour knew no success until after 1830; his principal works were reed-ited and he wrote a new novel, Isabelle (1833).