French playwright and critic, best known today for his operatic librettos, including those set to music by Étienne Méhul and Luigi Cherubini.

Hoffman studied law at the University of Strasbourg. Believing that his stammer hindered his legal career, he entered military service in Corsica. He served there for only a very short time, and, returning to Nancy, wrote some poems which brought him into notice at the little court of Lunéville over which the Marquise de Boufflers then presided. In 1784 he went to Paris where he wrote his first opera libretto, Phèdre, for the composer Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne. It was performed at Fontainebleau in October 1786. After quarrelling with Lemoyne, Hoffman offered his libretto Adrien, empereur de Rome to Cherubini, who turned it down in favour of another Hoffman drama, Médée. Adrien was accepted instead by Méhul, with whom Hoffman collaborated on several operas, including Euphrosine (1790), Stratonice (1792) and Ariodant (1799).

Hoffman was a strong advocate of authors' rights regarding artistic control, copyright and freedom of speech. This stance often brought him into conflict with the authorities. A quarrel with the management of the Paris Opéra over Nephté led to them rejecting Médée in 1790. In 1792, the French Revolutionary government objected to Adrien on political grounds, and Hoffman ran considerable risk by refusing to make the changes proposed to him. It was seven years before Adrien finally received its premiere at the Opéra.

Hoffman's later operas were in a lighter style than his works of the 1790s. A notable example is Les rendez-vous bourgeois, with music by Isouard. In 1807 he was invited by Charles Guillaume Étienne to contribute to the Journal de l'Empire (afterwards the Journal des Débats). Hoffman's wide reading qualified him to write on all sorts of subjects, and he turned, apparently with no difficulty, from reviewing books on medicine to violent attacks on the Jesuits. His severe criticism of Chateaubriand's Les Martyrs led the author to make some changes in a later edition. He had the reputation of being an absolutely conscientious and incorruptible critic and thus exercised wide influence.

Hoffman's poem Je te perds, fugitive espérance was set by Ludwig van Beethoven in 1806 in his song Als die Geliebte sich trennen wollten (WoO 132) in a translation by Stephan von Breuning.