Background
Eugène Brieux was born in Paris, on January 19, 1858, the son of a carpenter.
Jean Jules Jusserand (left) and Eugène Brieux (1914).
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Eugène Brieux was born in Paris, on January 19, 1858, the son of a carpenter.
Brieux attended only elementary school, but he made up for the inadequacy of his education by omnivorous reading. He dreamed of a career as a writer, however, and educated himself in Latin and Greek while attending night school with the money he earned from his job.
Eugène worked as an apprentice in his father’s cabinet shop. At fourteen, Eugène was orphaned and was forced to take a job in a bank. Far from quelling his literary ambitions, the setback led him to try even more forcefully to break into the world of Paris theatre. He sent out numerous plays which were rejected, even going so far as to submit a play he had co-written with his friend Gaston Salandri to Paris’s leading critic, who did not take the effort seriously.
In 1879, Brieuxs and Salandri’s efforts paid off. Their Bernard Palissey was performed in a series for unpublished scripts at the Theatre Cluny, and Brieux hoped that it would generate enough interest to give his budding career a boost. Unfortunately, the one performance caused little fanfare, and Brieux was back where he started. He and Salandri then tried a satire on the consequences of an impending repeal of France’s divorce laws. Again, however, they were disappointed. Discouraged, Brieux began work as a reporter in Dieppe, then moved to the newspaper Nouvelliste de Rouen. In six years he had become its editor-in-chief. He continued to work on his plays, and in 1881, Stenio, a comic opera, was produced in Rouen. Rouen was still a far cry from Paris, but Brieux was encouraged.
He continued to submit his work to famous writers like novelist Emil Zola to no avail, but in 1887, Brieux caught the attention of Andre Antoine, who was starting the Theatre-Libre in order to provide a forum for young playwrights who were not part of the Paris establishment. In 1890, Antoine produced Brieux’s Menages d'Artistes, which satirized false bohemianism. The play did not receive good notices. A later reviewer in Nation said, “Though characters, plot, and action are here not sacrificed to a thesis, Brieux still points his moral. The final scene, with its theatrical mechanism and its forced pathos, is as unconvincing as Tervaux’s suicide, and evidence of the dramatist’s technical inexperience.” Blanchette, performed in 1892, was his breakthrough; the play was performed more than one hundred times, and was adopted as part of the repertoire of the Comedie-Francaise in 1903.
The success of Blanchette enabled Brieux to give up his newspaper career and move to Paris, though he continued to write for papers like Figaro, Patrie, and Gaulois, and was the drama and music critic for La Vie contemporaine from 1893 to 1899. Blanchette's success gained Brieux a wider audience, and he produced M. de Reboval in 1892 at the Odeon, a larger venue. Like Blanchette, it tells of the puncturing of the idealism of a young girl, the daughter of a senator. This and his next several plays were not particularly popular, though they did continue to keep Brieux’s name before the public as an important writer. With L’ Engrenage in 1894, Brieux again achieved a measure of success, inspiring moderate praise.
In 1895, Brieux came out with a one-act comedy, La Rose Bleue, about a young country woman who tries to act rude when a relative visits from Paris so that she will be allowed to stay with her father, and in 1896 he wrote Les Bienfaiteurs (“The Benefactors”), a satire of charity workers. The play was picked up by a popular theater, the Theatre de la Porte Saint-Martin, but did not enjoy great success because of its address of social themes. Also in 1896, L’ Evasion premiered at the Comédie Française, and this effort garnered a prize as best comedy of the year. The play treats science’s displace-ment of religion satirically through the character of Dr. Bertry who meddles in everyone’s affairs.
L’Evasion is considered by some critics to mark the end of Brieux’s comic period. A darker tone and an exaggeration of present evils characterized the next period. Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont is considered one of the best of this period, and with its tale of wrangling over a dowry echoes Chekov’s Three Sisters with its dark irony. Several plays followed, and La Robe rouge, which would become one of his most widely known works, was staged in 1900. The play attacks the judicial and court system by showing a country family desroyed by an ambitious prosecutor who needs to convict someone in order to win promotion to Judge.
Les Avaries in 1901 addressed the subject of syphilis but was banned by censors from being performed in France. It was performed in Belgium, but was widely discussed in France as part of the debate over censorship, and eventually was instrumental in having the censor laws overturned. In 1905, it was finally performed in Paris, and, although not considered Brieux’s best work, its controversial subject added to his reputation. Brieux continued to regularly produce plays, many dealing with his favorite themes of children who become victims of adult manipulations. This second period of Brieux’s career, known as the “Storm and Stress” period, ended with Matemitie in 1903, a story of abortion. George Bernard Shaw used the play as one of three with which to introduce Brieux to an English speaking audience in 1911, with translations done by his wife. Shaw wrote the preface, and a critic writing for the New York Times said of the collection, “they are not pleasant plays. Yet they are plays which no one, having once taken them up, is likely to lay down till they are read. It is enough to say that these English versions, with Mr. Shaw’s eloquent preface, provide for serious persons who do not read French, an opportunity to judge for themselves what a Frenchman of great power and high sincerity is trying to do in a region which English literature has not yet dared to do more than touch upon-much less make drama of it.”
Following this period, Brieux returned to comedy briefly with plays like Les Hannetons in 1906 which looks at domestic quarrels, and La Française, which addresses foreign misconceptions of the French. Simone in 1908 returned to serious themes, drawing on the style of murder mysteries to tell the story of a daughter who finds out the truth of how her father killed her mother for committing adultery but was acquitted by the French legal system.
La Foi (translated as False Gods), performed in 1909, returns to religion as a theme. It is set in Ancient Egypt, where a young idealist convinces his countrymen to give up their belief in false gods only to discover that he has robbed them of their happiness. A New York Times reviewer called it “probably the ablest play on religion in contemporary drama.” Brieux continued writing up until World War I, when he devoted himself full time to re-educating and rehabilitating French soldiers who had been blinded. He gained the nickname “the father of the blind” for his work.
Brieux died of pleurisy in Nice on December 6, 1932.
Eugène was a member of the Académie Française since 1912.
Eugène was widely respected for both his generosity of spirit and his concern with social issues, and also for his talent for turning social problems into appealing drama.
