François Ponsard

• Born: June 1, 1814
• Birthplace: Vienne, France
• Died: July 7, 1867
• Place of death: Paris, France

Other Literary Forms

François Ponsard abandoned a career as a lawyer to devote himself almost exclusively to writing for the theater. For a short while, he edited several ephemeral magazines having to do with his literary philosophy as well as the theater in general, and in 1858, he published a short poem entitled Homère-Ulysse, which was composed as a framework for a translation into French of the fifth song of Homer’s Odyssey (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614).

Achievements

During his lifetime, François Ponsard was admitted into the ranks of the best-known literary lights. The public welcomed many of his plays with great enthusiasm, and the literary critics of France published many articles about his drama, whether to praise or to condemn him. Today, if his name is remembered at all, it is probably in relation to the literary coincidence that occurred in 1843: the failure, in March, of Les Burgraves, Victor Hugo’s long, complex Romantic play, and the success, a few weeks later, of Ponsard’s neoclassical drama, Lucrèce. For this one reason alone, Ponsard has been credited with having struck the coup de grâce at Romanticism in France. In his capacity as “the new Molière” and the leader of the “school of good sense” (l’école de bon sens), to which Émile Augier and Alexandre Dumas, fils, also belonged, he espoused commonsense, bourgeois values in the theater.

Biography

Ironically, it was not the theater that first attracted François Ponsard to literature. It was George Gordon, Lord Byron, whose Manfred (1817) he translated into French in 1837, some twenty-three years after he was born in Vienne, a small town just south of Lyons and northwest of Grenoble. As a young man, he studied law and eventually became a lawyer, but when he first saw Rachel on the stage at Lyons in the classical tragedies of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, he knew the theater was where his heart lay.

Toward the end of the year 1842, the reading committee of the Théâtre de l’Odéon accepted Lucrèce, a tragedy by an unknown author, for presentation on the stage. Until that time, Ponsard’s name had not been heard beyond the confines of his native town of Vienne, where the young lawyer had already achieved a modest literary renown for several articles in the local journal Revue de Vienne, including poems, a “proverb,” and a short assessment of the classical versus the Romantic theater. In writing Lucrèce, Ponsard was motivated by a desire to move from the drame romantique back to the “pure” classical style of the seventeenth century.

The various Parisian literary journals of the time were seemingly unrestrained in their interest in the upcoming play, proclaiming its author “a new Racine” possessing a brilliance accorded by God to the rarest of authors. The evening of the premiere of Lucrèce, Parisian society arrived in droves, expecting, on one hand, the revelation of a new Corneille or Racine and a return to the strict classical formula that had been superseded by Romanticism, and, on the other hand, an even greater and more resounding defeat of the Romantic theater than the drubbing it had received with the failure of Les Burgraves.

Few were disappointed. The author saw his play greeted with thunderous applause and repeated kudos from critics willing to pardon him the many Romantic elements and undeniable weaknesses in the play. Yet, while many would have placed Ponsard immediately in the same pantheon as that inhabited by Molière, Corneille, and Racine, others were less impressed. Victor Hugo, understandably, found Lucrèce unoriginal; the great novelist Honoré de Balzac noted in a letter to his future wife that Lucrèce was not only mediocre at best but also childish, sophomoric, and boring. Alfred de Vigny, the great poet and dramatist, pointed out that while Ponsard was attempting with his tragedy to revive the classical theater and destroy the Romantic, its success was a result, precisely, of the Romantic elements therein, along with inspiration from William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (pr. c. 1607-1608) and Julius Caesar (pr. c. 1599-1600). The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire also characterized Ponsard as far more Romantic in his play than was suspected at large.

In any case, following on the heels of the premiere, all the best salons of Paris opened their doors to Ponsard, the “messiah” of the French theater, who had trouble finding time to answer the many invitations he received, including one from the monarch himself, Louis-Philippe. Two important consequences of his monumental early success are worth noting: First, he did make some important contacts (Alphonse de Lamartine, for one) in the world of literature, politics, and society, receiving a sinecure as librarian of the Senate. Second, he was introduced into the milieu of the upper bourgeoisie, to whose values and norms he would adapt his works.

In 1845, the Académie Française awarded Lucrèce its prize for best tragedy. It was time for Ponsard to present a new play to the public, lest it be decided that his initial success was only a fluke. Therefore, after much deliberation and many false starts, his second play, Agnès de Méranie, finally opened, on December 22, 1846. Though the public, whose appetite had been whetted by Lucrèce, crowded into the theater with much anticipation, they were not to witness a dramatic event of earthshaking proportions. Polite, reserved applause signaled the end of Ponsard’s second play, which was not very warmly received in the press, either. The reaction of public and critics alike was a grave disappointment to Ponsard, who had slaved over the composition of Agnès de Méranie far more than he had over Lucrèce, hoping to make it as true to the former classical tradition as possible.

Ponsard’s third play, Charlotte Corday, which premiered in 1850, managed to recoup some of the reputation he had lost with the tepid reception of his second play. Even some of the Romantics who had excoriated Lucrèce were able to find good things to say about his latest dramatic venture. Both Alfred de Musset and Gérard de Nerval, eminent Romantic poets and dramatists, praised the play, the latter noting that his hands were still red from applauding. Perhaps the greatest compliment came from Ponsard’s former arch-enemy, Victor Hugo, who in a letter to Ponsard congratulated him on the strength and verve of the play, as well as on its humanity and style. Yet the reputation that he did partially save came from the critics almost uniquely, for the public disliked the “revolutionary” air of the drama during this agitated period in the unstable Second Republic.

Mention should be made of the importance of the great and famous French actress Rachel, in Ponsard’s career. It was, in fact, in part because of this much-respected interpreter of Corneille and Racine that Lucrèce, in which she starred, became a hit. Because of the failure of Agnès de Méranie, in which Rachel also played the lead role, she chose not to accept the title role in Charlotte Corday, a decision she regretted. Then, a few months after this play’s run, Ponsard presented a short comedy based on an ode by Horace and written for Rachel; Horace et Lydie would be his first play on which both public and critics agreed, and it remains his third most popular play in terms of numbers of times staged.

In 1852, a disastrous love affair and the censoring of his plays by the government left Ponsard despondent almost to the point of suicide and caused him to cease writing for the stage for some time. In the same year, the government of Louis-Napoleon (soon to be Napoleon III, emperor of his self-proclaimed Second Empire) prohibited Ponsard’s extant writings. He resigned his chair as librarian of the Senate and for several years experienced financial hardship. Nevertheless, the success of La Dame aux camélias (1852), by Alexandre Dumas, fils, suggested to Ponsard a new direction: He would combine the grand tradition of classical comedy with the more recent comedy of manners, which had been popular in the eighteenth century. With L’Honneur et l’argent (honor and money), Ponsard succeeded in melding the two styles, and with this play’s critical and public acclaim, he would be acknowledged, not the “master of the comedy of manners”—that title best suited Dumas, fils, or Ponsard’s associate and disciple, Émile Augier—but “the new Molière.” In 1855, Ponsard was also accorded the ultimate honor of France: election to the Académie Française. In what was reported by Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the literary critic and author, as a moving speech, Ponsard paid tribute to Victor Hugo and other great Romantics who had inspired him and his work, on his reception into the Academy.

Ponsard followed L’Honneur et l’argent in 1856 with La Bourse (the stock exchange), a play dealing with a common phenomenon of the Second Empire, stock speculation. The excitement of opening night was magnified by the presence of the emperor, Napoleon III, and many highly placed dignitaries. The critics and public alike praised the play, though the latter less than the former. In the next seven years, Ponsard was subject to various setbacks, both amorous and financial, which also left him sick and despondent, until 1863, when he began composing what would be his last successful play. At the premiere of Le Lion amoureux (the amorous lion), the audience was filled with anticipation—an atmosphere not unlike that which had greeted the appearance of Lucrèce, for the excesses of realism in the theater were beginning to make the public desirous of returning to a more “chaste” theatrical art. The premiere was an enormous success; everyone approved: The author, the theater management, the public, the critics, and even the emperor and his cohorts were once again present at an opening of a Ponsard play. The Comédie-Française, where it was staged, had not seen such success for many years.

Ponsard, now extremely ill, decided to attempt to add one more point to his crown. In great haste, he composed a three-act play, Galilée, which debuted at the beginning of 1867. Its success was undoubtedly attributable to the public sympathy felt for its dying author (indeed, even the emperor had softened, lifting the interdiction that had been placed on his plays in 1852 and granting him a small stipend), as well as to the esteem that he had finally found among the majority of French literary critics. When he died a few months later, his passing was widely mourned.

Analysis

It is claimed that François Ponsard acted only as a renovator of the classical theater and that, in such a role, he failed. In fact, he set about to be an innovator, for although he did reinvigorate the seventeenth century style of tragedy, he actually sought to combine elements of classicism with those of Romanticism. To that extent, he can be considered somewhat successful.

Ponsard was a dramatist who, though he never had a firm grasp on the technical aspects of dramaturgy, did, on occasion, reach sublime points in his dramas. Although the consensus of critics appears to be that he was a mediocre playwright, he did create a theater of ideas that formed a transition between the Romantic theater and the Naturalist and Symbolist theaters to come soon after him. Together with the fact that two or three of his plays do provide good drama, this element should afford Ponsard a somewhat higher place in the rankings of playwrights than that which he has occupied in the past.

Lucrèce

His play Lucrèce retells the ancient story, recounted by Livy, of Lucretia, wife of Tarquinius Collatinus (Tarquin Collatin), who is related to Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin le Superbe). The latter’s son, Sextus, is impassioned by Lucretia and rapes her, whereupon she, to prove her virtue, stabs herself to death in front of her husband and father. Immediately, Junius Brutus rattles the death dagger still dripping with blood, rouses the people to revolt, and proclaims the fall of the Tarquins.

Charlotte Corday

Throughout his literary career, Ponsard would choose his themes and settings from a wide variety of historical and contemporaneous tableaus. Agnès de Méranie, for example, had for its setting an event and characters from the Middle Ages, which was, ironically, the favored period of the Romantics. Charlotte Corday, considered by many his best play, amplifies the story of the slaying of the revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub by the exiled Girondin, Charlotte Corday during the time of the Terror, in 1793. With fervor and conviction reminiscent of Joan of Arc, Charlotte views herself as the person chosen by God (she arrives at this notion through her own interpretation of the Bible) to infiltrate the revolutionaries and assassinate Marat, who has sworn to rid France of the Girondins (among others). There are some powerful moments in the play, which run the gamut from the impassioned oath of commitment taken by Charlotte to the chilling description of Marat as a man without heart or conscience.

Subjects and Structure

With Horace et Lydie, Ponsard returned briefly to antiquity for inspiration, as he did with the slight Ulysse, but by 1853, he had changed direction, choosing a contemporary motif for his highly rated play L’Honneur et l’argent, which he followed three years later with the theme of excessive speculation as a vice and ruination in La Bourse. In his last great play, Le Lion amoureux, Ponsard returned once again to the late eighteenth century for events and characters in the period of the Directoire. Ponsard’s last play, Galilée, though very weak, represents a subject he had wanted to explore all his life: the Man from Galilee.

As for the structure of his plays, it does not follow the exigencies of the classical theater. Ponsard ignores the unities for the most part, and his sense of action is perhaps the weakest point of his dramaturgy altogether. There is a profusion of events leading to a lack of focus in the action, and the characters tend to express their many ideas rather than execute them—in short, they tend to “preach” onstage. The characters move about almost like puppets and seem to be there only to deliver the author’s message. Ponsard divides his plays into short and long acts and scenes willy-nilly, an aspect that produces an unbalanced play at best.

Ponsard is more adept at creating a sense of tragedy in his principal characters, where called for. For Lucrèce, the tragedy is innate, the conflict born within her, and in Agnès de Méranie, the audience sees the tragic aspect develop with the conflicting actions between Church and State. As mentioned, Charlotte Corday also conjures a sort of nobility of character that leads to the tragic. Yet for the most part, Ponsard’s sense of the tragic is not sustained in each character; rather, episodes provide glimpses of impending tragedy in lieu of building momentum. His attempts at creating comic action are even less successful than his attempts at tragic action.

The three principal areas that interested Ponsard are morality, politics, and religion. The theatergoer, on leaving the theater where a play by Ponsard has been staged, has the feeling that morality and virtue are always rewarded or, conversely, evil is always punished. The author is not necessarily subtle about his message, for at the ends of his plays, he frequently delivers it unequivocally through the mouth of the protagonist. In the various plays, greatness of character, victory over prejudice, and faithfulness are rewarded, while political crimes (such as that in Charlotte Corday), weakness of character (in La Bourse), weakness vis-à-vis the seducer, and blind submission to authority are all punished. In the area of politics, Ponsard, who had once briefly attempted to become a politician, was forthright in his opinions. A liberal Republican (that is, on the Left), he was often in trouble with the somewhat repressive government of Louis-Napoleon (the future Napoleon III), as he was with the Church. At heart a Voltairian, Ponsard was anticlerical to some extent, having an abiding faith in humankind.

Bibliography

Carlson, Marvin. The French Stage in the Nineteenth Century. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972. An overall look at French drama in the nineteenth century that provides background information helpful in understanding Ponsard.

Howarth, W. D. Sublime and Grotesque: A Study of French Romantic Drama. London: Harrap, 1975. A basic look at French drama in the nineteenth century, when Ponsard was active.