Eugène Brieux

• Born: January 19, 1858
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: December 6, 1932
• Place of death: Nice, France

Other Literary Forms

Eugéne Brieux abandoned a career as a journalist to devote himself to the writing of plays, for which he is best known.

Achievements

In a preface to a volume of Eugéne Brieux’s plays in translation, George Bernard Shaw claimed for the dramatist the distinction of being the greatest French writer since Molière in the genre of true-to-life comedy. A lesser dramatist-critic, Ashley Dukes, taking an opposite view, considered Brieux’s plays to be the work of a dullard. Shaw’s extravagant praise is as wide of the mark as is Dukes’s less-than-generous dismissal. Brieux’s social dramas, with their focus on the stultifying and frequently destructive life of the French bourgeoisie and peasantry, evoked a sharp response from that same middle class he zealously criticized and frequently satirized. Although linked at times with the intellectual elite championed by the theatrical reformer André Antoine at his Théâtre Libre, Brieux’s works rarely verged on the bitterly cynical comédie rosse, the biting comedy so favored by the patrons of Antoine’s avant-garde stronghold. Instead, Brieux found himself more at home in the popular theaters of the Paris boulevards, where he reached a wider audience. If that popularity was achieved by an occasional sentimentalizing of serious subject matter, Brieux nevertheless brought before his public several works that outspokenly underscored the dehumanizing effects of the dowry system in arranged marriages, a barbaric judicial system designed to benefit its practitioners rather than those unfortunates wrongly brought to trial, and the widespread ignorance concerning venereal disease.

To Brieux’s credit, his works may well have played a part in social reforms of the period, most specifically in the passage of a law in several countries requiring blood tests of prospective partners in marriage. Less to his credit, a modern sensibility might well be offended by his ambiguous stand concerning universal suffrage, the employment of women, the worth of education, and the value of religion as a comfort to the masses. In an age of rapid social change, Brieux was in fact a conservative who chose to concentrate on the more obvious shortcomings of his own society. That conservatism was reflected by his election to the staid French Academy.

Like Alexandre Dumas, fils, Émile Augier, and Émile Zola, the writers who influenced him most, Brieux considered the theater a valid weapon for social reform. Like Eugène Scribe, on the other hand, he managed to entertain, even placate, middle-class audiences, who for a time flocked to his plays despite those works’ serious intentions. Following World War I, however, Brieux’s narrow concerns seemed petty compared with the universal problems of a world attempting to maintain a shaky peace and find its way toward economic recovery. He lost the obsessive reformer’s drive that fueled his creativity, and his popularity waned. His plays have come to be neglected by all but the most dedicated students of the naturalistic style in the turn-of-the-century French theater. Despite a rare ability to humanize his characters of lowly station, a knack for finding genuine comedy in dramatic confrontations, and a startling honesty in depicting relations between the sexes, Brieux as a dramatist is remembered as an awkwardly moralizing clinician and outdated reformer, judged on the basis of a single play, Damaged Goods, which is, in fact, inferior to much of his output.

Biography

Eugène Brieux firmly believed that the public need know only a man’s work, not the man himself. Even during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, the years of his greatest popularity, Brieux shunned the limelight. Typically, after his initial acclaim and good fortune enabled him to purchase a house on the Riviera, Brieux chose to move his residence as soon as a new road provided the curious with easy access to him. As a result of his retiring attitude, little is known concerning his formative years.

Brieux was born in Paris in 1858 into a working-class family, the son of a carpenter. Orphaned at the age of fourteen, he received little formal schooling. An avid reader, he attempted to educate himself, but his plan to follow prescribed school curriculum came to an end when Greek proved an insurmountable obstacle. Attempting to make ends meet as a clerk, he frequently read by lamplight or in the dimly lit hall of the building in which he lived.

A century earlier, Brieux would have become a preacher, he once observed; for a time, he decided to follow the life of a missionary. That missionary zeal Brieux eventually channeled into his writing. Interested in the dramatic literature of his time, especially the thesis plays of Augier, he believed that he could make a lasting mark as a dramatist. He submitted some of his early efforts both to Augier and to Zola but received no encouragement from either. To earn a living as a writer, he worked for various newspapers, at last settling in Rouen, where eventually he became editor of La Nouvelliste de Rouen.

During this period, Brieux continued to send manuscripts of his plays to theatrical producers. Only Bernard Palissy, a one-act verse play written in collaboration with Gaston Salandri, was accepted; it was performed once, at the Théâtre Cluny in Paris, in 1879. Brieux was unable to place another with a Parisian management for more than a decade, although a few of his plays received productions in Rouen. Finally, his Artists’ Families, a clumsy satire exposing the hollowness of the decadent literary movement, attracted some attention in a production at Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in 1890, and Brieux’s career was launched.

Antoine was responsible for Brieux’s first major success when he presented Blanchette in 1892, still perhaps his most popular work in his native country. This success enabled the dramatist to move to Paris from Rouen, but he admitted afterward that his provincial life in a small town had been the best preparation for a writing career devoted to the exploration of the life of the bourgeoisie. Soon he was presenting a loyal public with a new play almost every year under various managements, including the Comédie-Française. In 1910, he achieved one of his earliest ambitions, membership in the French Academy, having by then already been named a commander of the Legion of Honor. In 1913, he was offered the directorship of the Comédie-Française but refused the position in order to continue his own writing. In translation, some of his more forthright works ran afoul of the censors in England and the United States, but, with the aid of Shaw’s energetic backing, he eventually became not merely a favorite of French theatergoers, but also a dramatist of repute abroad.

During World War I, as president of the French Committee for the Blind, Brieux devoted himself to the rehabilitation of French soldiers blinded in battle, while his energies as a dramatist diminished considerably. As a writer, he seemed no longer to be stimulated by the challenge of new causes, and his later works lack the urgency of his better plays before the war. As new plays by Brieux appeared with less frequency to diminishing acclaim, his reputation dwindled as well. His successful earlier works, however, enabled him to live comfortably during his final years. Suffering for several weeks from pleurisy and confined to a wheelchair, he asked, on December 6, 1932, to be wheeled onto the balcony of his villa overlooking the Mediterranean near Nice. Lapsing into a coma, he died shortly afterward.

Analysis

With the exception of a few early plays—Bernard Palissy and La Fille de Duramé as well as False Gods, a later play set in ancient Egypt—all Eugène Brieux’s more than thirty plays have contemporary settings, and each one focuses on a different social question. Believing in the perfectibility of humanity, Brieux attempted, through dramatization, to eradicate every social evil he encountered. As a result, the initial impulse for each of his plays was a thesis. The better works successfully dramatize the thesis by placing sympathetic and believable characters who are the victims of a particular evil in an intriguing, sometimes comic, but always highly dramatic situation. The least successful artistically are the works that remain leadenly didactic, in which the situation does not stem from characters but instead provides a platform for the espousal of an idea. Brieux’s righteous indignation often overwhelms an otherwise entertaining, frequently moving drama, the point of which might have been more effective if made with greater subtlety.

Blanchette

Among Brieux’s least didactic plays is his first critical and popular success, Blanchette, but its three variant endings pinpoint the dramatist’s recurring weakness. That the play can end in any of three ways underscores its arbitrary structure. The characters are well drawn, with delicacy and affection, but their actions ultimately do not dictate their fates. Blanchette may end up miserably as a prostitute, may return home a wealthy man’s mistress, or may remain undefiled to become the bride of a local wheelwright. Brieux’s attempt to win popular success, rather than to create a sense of logic in his heroine’s inherent traits, seems to have dictated the eventual course of the play.

Blanchette affectionately depicts the lives of the Rousset family, who barely make a living from the rural tavern they run and the small tract of land they farm. They have sacrificed to send their only child, Blanchette, to school to earn a teaching certificate, but their daughter is low on the list of those waiting to be hired. The state, it seems, trains more teachers than it can use, and the waiting period may last more than a year. In the meantime, Blanchette, now educated above her station, has come to loathe the peasants among whom she lives and is even embarrassed by her parents. She spends her days reading romantic novels and dreaming about marrying a wealthy young man who will allow her to turn his elegant home into a fashionable salon. Until her daydreams come true, she plans at least to turn the tavern into a more suitable café. When her father strikes her in the midst of an angry argument over her gross miscalculation with a fertilizer that has burned their land and her deliberate breaking of a lamp, Blanchette decides that her existence has become intolerable. She goes off to make a new life for herself.

Blanchette’s leavetaking, which takes place at the end of the second act, makes a suitable ending for the play. Brieux makes his point, that education ought to have some practical end, without belaboring it. Neither Antoine, who presented the work at his Théâtre Libre, nor the author himself was particularly pleased with any of the three third acts that Brieux eventually provided for the play; indeed, Antoine frequently presented only the first two acts of the play. The original third act, the most pessimistic, with Blanchette ending up a prostitute, is out of keeping with the tone of the rest, but Brieux considered it to be in line with the pessimistic view of most of the plays at Antoine’s theater. His own earlier play there, Artists’ Families, had also ended on a negative note with the unprepared-for and unlikely suicide of its protagonist. Blanchette, however, despite an earnest thesis, is a play of charm and humor. No audience would care to see the Roussets suffer, for they are sympathetic and sensible, good-hearted peasants, if somewhat bewildered by their moody daughter. Blanchette is at times an infuriating and unfeeling young lady, but an audience understands her frustrations and winces along with her as her father embarrasses her in front of others. Yet the play’s final and best-known version, in which Blanchette accepts the marriage proposal of a young worker of equal class, is overly sentimental.

Brieux veered from an ending as dark as that of the usual comédie rosse of the Théâtre Libre to an ending light enough to have been dictated by a boulevard audience. The revised Blanchette kept playgoers happy but enabled them to overlook the very point of the play. Brieux would not make that mistake again. After Blanchette‘s success, he had no need ever again to cater to an audience’s whim.

The Three Daughters of M. Dupont

The Three Daughters of M. Dupont and The Red Robe represent Brieux at his best, successfully mingling satiric comedy with effective melodrama to argue a worthy thesis. A shifting focus of attention is a weakness of both plays, but intriguing character and situation hold an audience’s interest throughout.

The first act of The Three Daughters of M. Dupont reveals Brieux as a skillful comic satirist as two sets of parents settle the terms of a dowry. The Duponts’ youngest daughter, Julie, is to marry Antonin, the son of M. and Mme Mairaut. While the parents of the one pretend to know little of the financial situation of the other, the truth of the matter is that all concerned have done their homework, and each family knows exactly how much the other is worth. When M. Dupont, a printer in a provincial town, offers to add his country home to his daughter’s dowry, Mme Mairaut, the wife of the local banker, immediately points out that the house in question is flooded for two months each year. M. Dupont makes outrageous statements that startle even his wife, while poor, henpecked M. Mairaut is hardly permitted by his domineering wife to enter the conversation. Brieux at first creates amusing situations at the expense of the one-dimensionally drawn parents. Both the Duponts and the Mairauts are thoroughly convinced that they have effectively swindled each other. As the play’s tone changes from farce to serious drama, however, the audience is made aware that the real victim is Julie, who is being bartered as a commodity and condemned to a life of misery.

The practice of arranged marriages based on financial settlements was Brieux’s target. A sensitive and intelligent twenty-four-year-old young woman is locked into marriage with an insensitive and materialistic boor who can never know her worth. Julie and Antonin share no common ground and cannot even communicate with each other. Neither makes any fruitful attempt to come to know, to understand, the other. Julie realizes that she will never love her husband, whereas Antonin confuses love with his sexual desire for his attractive bride. In the play’s most extraordinary and powerful scene, one which rivals in impact the final scene of Henrik Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (1879; A Doll’s House, 1880), husband and wife finally speak openly to each other and admit the failure of their marriage. With daring honesty, Brieux has Julie express her revulsion at her husband’s sexual advances, which gives way to revulsion with herself for accepting those advances, which in turn awaken her own animal desires. Julie’s wish for children of her own has kept her at her husband’s side. When Antonin, however, reveals his determination to remain childless, Julie prepares to leave him.

What slightly weakens an otherwise effective drama is Brieux’s attempt to widen his scope by dramatizing the plight of other women who are victims of a constricting provincial society. Julie’s stepsisters, too, suffer at society’s hands. Caroline, a pathetic spinster, must work for a living, painting flowers on china, and is an embarrassment to her family. Her older sister, Angèle, was driven from their home years before for entering into an unsanctified liaison with a man and eventually, like so many unhappy heroines of French drama, drifted into prostitution. Caroline and Angèle are conventional figures of the drama. Julie, on the other hand, is a character of depth in the process of self-discovery. The action falters when the focus shifts to her sisters, whom Brieux has included so that Julie will learn from their unhappy predicaments. As the play ends, Julie comes to understand, as Ibsen’s Nora does not, that she has no choice but to return to her husband. In his resolution, Brieux, undercutting his stance as reformer, displays his conventional attitudes toward marriage but tempers them with the suggestion that Julie may take a lover.

The Red Robe

As a journalist covering court trials in Rouen, Brieux was sometimes appalled by the slow workings and complications of the machinery of justice. Innocent and guilty alike were victims of a system that they could not fully comprehend, a system fueled at times by the greed and the ambitions of those public servants expressly appointed to uphold the laws of the state. In The Red Robe, Brieux exposed the inhumanity of an officialdom that could force a split between the law and actual justice. Considered by some critics to be the dramatist’s best work, the play contains one of Brieux’s most masterful scenes but is less cohesive than The Three Daughters of M. Dupont as it veers from satire to melodrama.

Set in a small town in the Pyrenees (which enabled Brieux to contrast hardworking Basque peasants, who have a language and customs of their own, with the more sophisticated men from other parts of the country, who dispense justice to them), The Red Robe begins in the home of the public prosecutor of a district of the third class, who has for years been denied promotion to the post of counselor in the Court of Appeal. Vagret would wear the red robe to which the higher rank would entitle him, but he has never won a trial in which the defendant has received a life sentence. He believes that his time is approaching, for an old man has been murdered and the culprit will surely be sentenced to death. Mouzon, a young man with no scruples who knows the ins and outs of political maneuvering, has been appointed examining magistrate in the case and is determined to bring to trial a local peasant who owed the victim a vast sum of money. Etchepare, the peasant, is in fact innocent, but, in order to avoid being indicted, lies about his whereabouts on the night of the murder and is caught in his lies. In the play’s strongest scene, Mouzon cruelly plays cat and mouse with Etchepare and his wife, Yanetta, nearly causing the accused man to confess to the crime that he has not committed and the wife, who would protect him, to seal his doom with some damaging testimony.

At the trial itself, Yanetta’s sordid past is revealed for the first time to her loving husband, and Vagret, the prosecutor, is at the point of winning a conviction against Etchepare when he is assailed by serious doubts. Realizing that he is more concerned with besting the defense attorney in a contest of orators than in seeing justice done, Vagret admits his doubts to the jury, and the peasant is acquitted. After the trial, when it is disclosed that Mouzon, despite his being unfit for the post, has been made the new counselor in the Court of Appeal because of his connections, Vagret can take his disappointment in stride. For once, he has acted as a man, not as a magistrate. Ironically, it is left to Yanetta to mete out justice in the end. Deserted by her husband, who cannot forgive her for her waywardness before their marriage, and denied her home and family, she confronts Mouzon with the wreckage of her life. When Mouzon insists that the law owes her nothing, she stabs him to death.

Once again, a structural weakness is evident in the play. The satiric comedy of the first act, when Vagret tries on the red robe that his frustrated wife has been saving for him for years, gives way to the melodrama of the scenes involving the despicable Mouzon. In addition, Vagret’s change of heart, so crucial to the play’s resolution, is not convincingly motivated. Brieux is also guilty of drawing his characters with overly broad strokes. Despite their acknowledged wrongdoings in the past, the peasants are men and women of integrity, whereas the officials of the court call to mind the venal cartoon figures of the French satiric painter Honoré Daumier. Nevertheless, in underscoring the discrepancies between law and justice and exposing people’s inhumanity in dealing with other people, Brieux transforms social protest into viable and, at least in one scene, enthralling drama.

Damaged Goods

Damaged Goods, unfortunately the play for which Brieux is best known, demonstrates a lapse in craft. Here, didacticism overpowers drama, and what results is an earnest illustrated lecture not only on the dreadful consequences of venereal disease but also on the harm caused by widespread ignorance concerning the taboo subject. The protagonist disappears after act 2, and the focus then shifts to the raisonneur, the author’s spokesperson, a doctor whose lecture on venereal disease and its social consequence makes up nearly all of act 3. That a worldwide audience heeded what amounted to an illustrated lecture was a tribute more to the author’s timeliness and daring than to his dramatic skill.

Informed by his doctor that he has contracted syphilis, George Dupont reveals that he is soon to be married. Because he intends to use the dowry to buy a notary’s practice, he does not wish to delay the ceremony for the three-year period the doctor insists is necessary to be certain of his cure. Despite the doctor’s warnings of the danger to his wife and the children she may bear, George postpones the wedding for only six months, under the treatment of another doctor who promises a rapid cure. He allays any concerns his bride’s family might have by telling them that he is being treated, successfully, for tuberculosis.

The original doctor was correct in his diagnosis and prognosis for a cure, and the first child of George and Henriette is born syphilitic. Once George’s mother learns the truth, she tries to hide the facts from Henriette and the baby’s wet nurse, even though the doctor has told her of the possible consequences to the nurse and her family. To Mme Dupont, the well-being of the child is the only concern, and she refuses to allow the baby to be put on the bottle. The nurse’s suspicions are aroused, however, and when she confronts George and his mother, Henriette overhears the argument and, as the second act ends, is mortified by the revelation.

In act 3, the play breaks down completely. In Brieux’s most flagrant violation of logical dramatic structure, neither George nor his wife nor his mother appears. What ensues is a dialogue between the doctor and Henriette’s father, a deputy of government, concerning the responsibilities not only of prospective couples but also of their parents, and even the state, which has a duty to combat the misconceptions about the diseases of syphilis, tuberculosis, and alcoholism. After pointing out to the deputy his own negligence in having investigated his son-in-law’s finances but not his health, the doctor offers the hope that, should Henriette and George remain together, they may eventually be cured and bring healthy children into the world. The play, however, does not end on an entirely optimistic note. The doctor introduces the deputy to two female syphilitics and the father of an eighteen-year-old boy paralyzed by the disease. After the three have recounted their pathetic experiences, the doctor bids Henriette’s father farewell, cautioning him to remember what he has just seen and heard as he takes his seat in the government chamber, so that their conversation will not have been a waste of time.

Because of its daring subject matter—treated, for once, factually and honestly, although with little dramatic skill—Damaged Goods became a cause célèbre in its time, and once the censors allowed public performances, it offered something in the nature of a religious experience. Originally banned in Paris, Damaged Goods was read by Brieux himself to an invited audience of public officials and doctors on November 1, 1901. In 1902, Antoine was finally permitted to produce the play in Paris. To assure audiences that they were not participating in an immoral act, he introduced the performances himself by announcing from the stage the play’s serious intent and stressing the fact that it contained no obscene word or action, a practice generally continued by producers of the play in England and the United States.

The first performance in the United States took place on March 14, 1913, at the Fulton Theater in New York, before members of the Sociological Fund. Before presenting it for a regular run, the producer, Richard Bennett, arranged for a performance on a Sunday afternoon, April 6, at the National Theater in Washington, D.C., before an invited audience of Cabinet members, members of both houses of Congress, justices of the Supreme Court, representatives of the diplomatic corps, and prominent Washington clergymen. The performance was introduced by the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, who stressed the sacredness of the occasion, likening the play to a sermon on behalf of humankind. These words were followed by a request to the audience by the pastor of the Vermont Avenue Christian Church to bow their heads in prayer. That same year, the play was made available to nontheatergoers in a faithful novelization by Upton Sinclair with the permission of the original author.

The widely proclaimed insistence on the play as a moral act led to inordinate press coverage wherever the drama was performed. As a result, it is not surprising that Brieux became known quite simply as the author of Damaged Goods. The translation of the play into a sermon could not, however, hide its obvious flaws. A comparison with Ibsen’s Gengangere (pb. 1881; Ghosts, 1885) makes clear the shortcomings of Damaged Goods and the reason for the present neglect of its author’s dramatic works. In Ghosts, a timeless play, Ibsen makes use of venereal disease as a metaphor for the constricting hold of the past on the present. Brieux’s Damaged Goods, on the other hand, is a clinical discussion about venereal disease. Like so much of his work, it is a thesis play, the thesis of which is now sadly out of date.

Biliography

Cardy, Michael, and Derek Cannon, eds. Aspects of Twentieth Century Theatre in France. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Provides context in which to understand Brieux’s later works.

SantaVicca, Edmund F. Four French Dramatists: A Bibliography of Criticism of the Works of Eugène Brieux, François de Curel, Émile Fabre, Paul Hervieu. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974. A bibliography on the criticism of Brieux, among other French writers. Index.