AUGIER, EMILE. - Playwright, born in Valence in 1820, died in 1889. A successor to Ponsard, he in turn reacted against Romanticism, bringing about the triumph in the French theatre of what came to be called the “school of common sense.” He was the dramatist of the bourgeois class. In his own way he defended the principle of the legitimate family.
Around his masterpiece, Le gendre de M. Poirier (1855), are grouped his “family comedies,” namely: Un beau mariage (1859), Les lionnes pauvres (1858), Le mariage d'Olympe (1855), L'aventurière (1848), Gabrielle
(1849), Maître Guérin (1864). To these must be added Madame Caverlet (1876), in which divorce is justified.
He set forth his political ideas in the comedies Les effrontés (1861) and Le fils de Giboyer (1862), slandering Catholic journalism and “royalisme religieux.” Another comedy, Lions et renards (1869), is a calumnious satire on the Jesuits.
A bourgeois Molière, he was a skilful and effective constructor of scenes, in which, however, the old theatrical patterns reappear. His satire is often coarse and excessive. His secular and bourgeois “morality” won him acclaim, offices, and honours. Catholic polemicists vigorously opposed him.