Eugène Labiche

• Born: May 5, 1815
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: January 23, 1888
• Place of death: Paris, France

Other Literary Forms

Eugène Labiche is known only for his plays.

Achievements

Eugène Labiche’s 175 works, a moderate total for the period, encompass many varieties of comic theater and include operettas. The quality of these works varies. At worst, the single-act vaudeville pieces are amusing, with their exuberant humor and caricatures; at best, the more substantial comedies of character and manners contain portraits in the moralistic tradition of Jean de La Bruyère and Molière. The comic elements of Labiche’s plays are not of the witty type; they tend instead to be of the kind Henri Bergson described in his essay Le Rire (1900; Laughter, 1911). Actions more than words form their basis. The most influential theater critics of his period credited Labiche with having revolutionized the vaudeville comedy form in France by enlarging its traditional scope and format to include realistic observation. Thoroughly bourgeois in status and formation himself, Labiche wrote plays primarily for and about his own social class. It is for his double portrait of middle-class French society, astutely observed from an interior vantage point, and of human vanities in general, that he is justly acclaimed.

Only six of his plays were written without collaborators. Nevertheless, all the works possess a continuity of style and tone that seems attributable to Labiche himself. Several of his collaborators asserted that their role in the creative process was to act primarily as a sounding board for ideas that Labiche had already elaborated. The best of Labiche’s plays have entered the classic repertory of French theater and are still performed regularly. Outside France, the popularity of Labiche’s comedies rests largely on what is perceived as their Gallic humor and on the playwright’s skillful handling of movement and rhythm.

Biography

Eugène-Marin Labiche, the son of Jacques Philippe Marin Labiche, owner of a glucose factory at Reuil, was born into a comfortable bourgeois household. Only a mediocre student at the Collège Bourbon, the future playwright passed his baccalaureate examinations, achieving high honors because, according to his own admission, he had memorized the study manual. With three classmates, he then toured Switzerland, Italy, and Sicily before entering law school in 1834.

Labiche eventually received a law degree, but he became increasingly interested in writing and the theater. He published travel pieces, short stories, drama reviews, and miscellaneous literary pieces in journals such as Essor, Chérubin, and the Revue du théâtre. Frequenting the popular cafés and the theater wings, he established a reputation as a reasonable, well-behaved young man-about-town. Although in later years Labiche placed his theatrical debut in 1838 with M. de Coyllin: Ou, L’Homme infiniment poli (the infinitely polite man), he had in fact collaborated on a comedy the year before with Auguste Lefranc and Marc-Antoine-Amédée Michel. This play, La Cuvette d’eau (the bucket of water), and another one from the same year were never published and so have left no visible traces. Two additional comedies and a drama were only moderately successful. Labiche did not take his efforts at playwriting seriously but continued because he enjoyed it and wrote easily.

The year 1839 marked two important turning points in Labiche’s career. He saw his aspirations for becoming a novelist dashed by the unsuccessful reception accorded La Clef des champs (the key of the fields); only three hundred copies were printed, and Labiche had them withdrawn almost immediately. At the same time, he had written a vaudeville piece with Lefranc and Michel that they signed under the collective pseudonym Paul Dandré. Its popular success convinced Labiche that he had found his place as a writer.

In 1840, Labiche moved from the family home into his own apartment. Two years later, he married Adèle Hubert, a young woman whose bourgeois background matched his own. A popular story recounts how his future father-in-law demanded that Labiche renounce playwriting and how, after a year of marriage, his wife released him from that restriction when she saw how unhappy he was. Regardless of whether this story is true, the fact remains that from 1843 until his retirement from writing in 1877, Labiche produced a constant stream of plays. His prolific pen reached a high point of eleven plays for the year 1852. Twice he dabbled in politics: He ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the legislature in 1848, and he served as mayor of Sologne in the early 1870’s.

Labiche’s first unqualified success came in 1851 with The Italian Straw Hat. The play tallied three hundred consecutive performances, a rare accomplishment for the period. He established himself as the favorite playwright of the Palais-Royale Theatre, while continuing to contribute regularly to the Variétés and the Gymnase. By 1853 his royalty income made it possible for him to purchase the Launoy château in Sologne. From that time on, and especially after 1864, Labiche became ever more a gentleman farmer, spending progressively less of each passing year in Paris.

The nine-year period between The Italian Straw Hat and his next great triumph with The Journey of Mr. Perrichon saw Labiche attain a reputation as France’s foremost author of vaudeville comedies. Several times he attempted to break away from the type of play for which the public knew him in order to write works of a more serious and satiric nature. The theatergoing public, however, refused to accept Labiche when it seemed that the playwright was laughing at them and not with them. Among his more somber plays that were either outright failures or only partial successes were La Chasse aux corbeaux (1853; crow hunt), which depicted the financial establishment, and L’Avare en gants jaunes (1858; the miser in yellow gloves). Another such play, written especially for the Comédie-Française, was Moi (1864; me); it met with only polite applause, although Gustave Flaubert proclaimed it a comedy worthy of Molière.

Following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, the temper of the French public changed and, at the same time, Labiche’s humor became less exuberant. When three of his plays met successively with very short runs in 1876, Labiche decided to retire gracefully. His last play, La Clé (the key), was staged in 1877. There were successful revivals of his works, but he resisted all offers to write new plays, preferring to manage his country estate instead. At the insistence of Émile Augier, his friend and fellow playwright, Labiche selected fifty-seven of his favorite plays to be published as his “complete” works. The resulting tomes began appearing in 1878, and the set of ten volumes rapidly became a best-seller. Labiche’s reputation soared once again. This new popularity succeeded in vanquishing the objections of many to admitting a mere writer of vaudeville comedies to the French Academy, and Labiche was elected to this august body in 1880.

Analysis

Movement and timing are fundamental to the success of Eugène Labiche’s comedies. The fast-paced rhythm of a performance distracts an audience from any prolonged consideration of situations that would not be so amusing if removed from their comic vehicle. It is only when Labiche’s plays can be examined at leisure in their written form and the visual comic elements recede that a critical view of bourgeois society and men’s egotism emerges. Some critics have concluded that the laughter of these plays conceals what is actually a very harsh and cruel attitude. Certainly Labiche’s characters and the society they inhabit embody many negative qualities. One cannot fail to observe, however, that although the stupidity of these characters may be great—since they rarely provide the solution to their problems by themselves and only occasionally seem to have learned anything constructive or helpful from their experiences—their creator consistently treats them in a good-humored manner, never overtly judging them. As much as the audience may believe that these creatures deserve chastisement for their foolish actions and attitudes, the playwright himself always extricates them from their predicaments in the end. It is left to the audience to decide if any moral conclusion is to be drawn. Seen on the stage, Labiche’s plays continue to offer diverting comedy; perused at home in the armchair, their overtones of social criticism add an appealing intellectual depth to situations still pertinent to today’s society.

The Italian Straw Hat

The Italian Straw Hat was the first example of Labiche’s new kind of vaudeville. The manager of the Palais-Royal Theatre, where this play premiered, judged it to be so stupid that he left Paris to avoid the opening-night reviews. Audiences, however, were delighted. (In 1927, René Clair transformed Labiche’s script into an equally successful silent film.) The play’s appeal rests on a combination of elements: the comic devices, the incongruous situations, and Labiche’s choice of a popular target for his humor.

The comic procedures and devices employed do not differ notably from those that can be found in almost any comedy. Bergson’s Laughter discusses most of them. The characters of The Italian Straw Hat are perfect examples of the mechanical inelasticity that Bergson asserted was basic to provoking laughter. They go charging blindly and unthinkingly after the hero. A pair of tight shoes or a pin stuck in a dress causes the victim to jerk like a marionette. The characters repeat words and actions to the point that the audience anticipates them; laughter begins to swell with the anticipation. Nonancourt’s myrtle tree, which he insists on carrying everywhere, and his now proverbial exclamation that echoes throughout the play—“Mon gendre, tout est rompu!” (“Son-in-law, it’s all off!”)—are two memorable instances of such repetition. Labiche’s talent for comedy lies not in the fact that he employed these devices but rather in the appropriateness of his selection and in his sense of timing when applying them to particular situations.

Essentially a comedy of complications, The Italian Straw Hat depicts the escapades of Fadinard, a man who is pursued around Paris by his own wedding party as he attempts to replace a lady’s straw hat, which was ruined by his horse. This situation is delightfully incongruous and is exploited in each act in a similar manner. The scene is set, and Fadinard, the impatient groom, enters and attempts to explain his unusual quest. The wedding party inevitably arrives in pursuit, convinced that they are somewhere that they are not. They mistake a milliner’s salon for the mayor’s office, a baroness’s dining room for the restaurant where the wedding feast is to be held, and someone else’s apartment for Fadinard’s. The confusion they perpetrate in one scene adds to the expectation of what they will do in the next one. One hilarious episode follows another before Fadinard is able to replace the hat with one he accidentally discovers among his own wedding gifts.

A salient characteristic of Labiche’s comedy is the sense of movement it carries. The comic motifs accumulate with dizzying rapidity, and even the situations themselves can contribute to the impression of movement. An important factor here are the four or five doors commonly found in a Labiche stage setting. These multiple doors can create an accumulation of characters onstage (such as the wedding party) or they can control the speed with which characters appear or disappear (multiple entries or exits). They can conceal characters (the wedding party in the bedroom of the wrong apartment) as well as produce unexpected and compromising encounters when the wrong character opens the right door at the right moment (Fadinard meets an old girlfriend, and the adulteress Madame Beauperthuis, her maid). The viewer is whisked along from one situation to the next by the opening and shutting of the doors and by the characters who enter or exit through them.

The target of Labiche’s humor is the lower middle class—their material concerns and their basic inability to function outside their own limited circles without creating embarrassing situations. The details by which he creates his characters and their situations are astutely chosen. The unaccustomed and uncomfortable clothes that characters wear in order to appear properly dressed for a special occasion, for example, bring a smile of recognition to the viewer. Labiche was not alone in his generation to single out the bourgeoisie as a humorous target; Flaubert did so as well. Unlike Flaubert, however, Labiche does not assume any obvious attitude of superiority, although the occasions to do so are frequent. Middle-class social idiosyncrasies are dismissed with a bemused shrug.

All the playwright’s favorite themes—marriage, adultery, family, and middle-class dull-mindedness—are to be found in The Italian Straw Hat. Marriage represents a highly desirable status. Not least among its attractions is the financial well-being it may bring. Suitors and prospective fiancées are initially judged acceptable or not on the basis of their monetary worth. Perhaps not surprisingly, the outcome of such unions is not always happy, as the adultery of Madame Beauperthuis proves. In this exuberant comedy, however, adultery and unfaithfulness are treated lightly: The cuckolded husband acts in such a grotesquely comical manner that his blustering attempts to catch up with his wife gain no sympathy, and the discomfort and embarrassment that she must endure in the course of the play seem sufficient punishment for her transgression. For the most part in Labiche’s plays, adultery constitutes an unimportant event in a marriage, an incident best taken in a philosophical manner should it be discovered.

The family that Fadinard will join by his marriage merits close observation. Certainly the mechanical inelasticity its members exhibit in all situations provokes laughter, but this same inability to bend can be seen in another light as well. Nonancourt is amusing, but he is also a domineering and authoritarian patriarch. He is even the ultimate obstacle that Fadinard must conquer—it is the father, not the daughter, who in reality must be courted. This family knows little of the world beyond the nursery and seed business they operate, and some of them cannot even pronounce the name of their profession correctly. With such a limited frame of reference, their social behavior and manners are woefully inadequate for attending a wedding in the sophisticated big city. Dim-witted Bobinard’s amorous attentions to his cousin the bride even hint at an unhealthy degree of inbreeding. When the laughter is stilled for a moment, a claustrophobic milieu can be glimpsed beneath the prosperous façade of this typical bourgeois family.

The Journey of Mr. Perrichon

The Journey of Mr. Perrichon is both a comedy of character and a comedy of manners. In this play, another typical Labiche family—a wealthy, retired carriage maker and his wife and daughter—embarks on a trip to the Alps. They are followed by two suitors. One of these young men, Armand, saves Mr. Perrichon from falling into a crevasse. Once recovered from the fright, however, Perrichon quickly discredits the importance of Armand’s action. Daniel, the other suitor, surmises correctly that Perrichon dislikes being indebted to anyone, so he determines to win favor by allowing Perrichon to be of use to him. Accordingly, he pretends to fall into another crevasse so that the carriage maker may “rescue” him. The ruse succeeds admirably, and Daniel rises in Perrichon’s esteem.

Back in Paris, Armand again finds himself in a position to do Perrichon a favor, but his well-intentioned efforts succeed only in creating an embarrassing situation and in intensifying Perrichon’s struggle with his conflicting feelings of gratitude and ingratitude. Faced with a duel, Perrichon backs down and apologizes to his adversary in Armand’s presence. The young man thus becomes even less attractive to Perrichon, for he has witnessed the carriage maker’s weakness and embarrassment. The play ends happily, nevertheless, because Perrichon overhears Daniel boasting of his schemes. Possibly more because he is disgruntled at having been manipulated than as recognition of his gratitude, Perrichon finally grants his daughter’s hand to Armand.

The comic element of this play derives from different sources and is of a different tenor from those Labiche employed in The Italian Straw Hat. Here the comedy results from the ludicrous discrepancy between Perrichon’s restricted personal sphere and the wider world beyond, and to an even greater extent from the discrepancy between Perrichon’s inflated self-image and his all-too-human weaknesses. One laughs at his bourgeois inability to cope with the complexities of checking baggage at a train station, at his choice of an inoffensive picture book as appropriate reading material for his daughter, at his spelling error that transforms mer (sea) into mère (mother), and at his inability to understand others correctly. As long as Perrichon’s foibles and vanity reflect only on himself, they are quite amusing. When his myopic attitude and hypocrisy begin to interfere with others’ lives, the humor becomes more tenuous and would disappear altogether without the chance discovery that leads to a happy, albeit ambiguous, ending.

Throwing Dust in People’s Eyes

Throwing Dust in People’s Eyes, a comedy of manners, is another of Labiche’s plays written in an ambiguous tone. Two families are shown, each in turn, in their typically bourgeois salons; once again, an impending marriage provides a framework for the plot. The young couple in question love each other in a straightforward, honest manner. Once the formal visits and negotiations between the parents begin, each family increasingly attempts to create the illusion of greater riches than it possesses. Carriages, clothes, important clients, servants, boxes at the theater—their vanity piles pretension on pretension in a comic snowball effect. When the parents can proceed no further without financial disaster and are on the verge of calling off the marriage desired by their children, an outside catalyst arrives in the person of an uncle. This relative is a rich entrepreneur, but he has never let his wealth go to his head. He breaks the deadlock and restores common sense to the proceedings. The children will marry, and the parents good-naturedly admit the folly of their vanity; they have allowed themselves to be carried away by the customs of the times. Chastened, they sit down to dinner—six courses, all with truffles, will be their punishment.

The mothers instead of the fathers dominate the families of Throwing Dust in People’s Eyes. This topsy-turvy state of affairs nearly leads to disaster before the men can assert themselves and correct it. Most female characters in a Labiche comedy tend to fade into the background as demure daughters or nondescript wives. Those who do occasionally stand out are presented in an unflattering manner—as vengeful shrews pursuing unfaithful husbands (Si Jamais je te pince, 1856, if I ever catch you); J’invite le colonel!, 1860, I’ll invite the colonel), or as broad caricatures (Three Cheers for Paris). Reproached for never having written any good roles for women, Labiche reportedly replied that it was because women were basically not funny.

Three Cheers for Paris

Three Cheers for Paris (the piggy bank), a mid-career work, represents Labiche at his most typical and best. A comedy of both complications and manners, Three Cheers for Paris depicts the misadventures of a provincial family and two of their close friends who journey to Paris to spend the sum accumulated in their collective piggy bank. The comic elements of the play oscillate, beginning in comedy and often slipping into moments of farce. There are unexpected encounters. Repeated motifs—such as buttons in the piggy bank, mention of manure during a dinner conversation, and a smoking lamp whose wick requires adjustment every few minutes—become more amusing with each repetition. During a serious situation, Labiche turns his characters into Bergsonian marionettes by having them pop up and down from their seats side by side on a bench.

The first act is a masterful creation of tone and atmosphere. The family is set snugly in its comfortable salon: father, daughter, and son-in-law-to-be. The mother is replaced in this instance by a maiden aunt. Among the father’s friends who complete the family circle, there is one who could be the aunt’s suitor. The interplay of contrasting identities and personalities is rich: A young girl and an aging spinster are both set on marriage; there is constant bickering between siblings and much animosity between sexes; comfortable retirees are faced with young people who are just beginning a career; and there are conflicts between individual egos and interests. The likes, dislikes, phobias, complaints, and illusions the characters voice are so many deft touches with which Labiche creates scenes of marvelous human veracity. The individual personalities emerge, as does a collective portrait of the society they represent. As in the other plays, a not too flattering impression is submerged beneath the comic one. The characters in Three Cheers for Paris may be sympathetic, but they are also selfish, hypocritical, and dishonest in small matters. Beneath the easy familiarity that reigns in this drawing room is the same claustrophobic atmosphere that characterizes Labiche’s other bourgeois families.

When these country folk arrive in Paris in act 2, the playwright’s acute sense of observation accompanies them, highlighting the incongruous results of the conflict between middle-class values and assumptions and those of a more cosmopolitan reality. The group’s activities are typically those of tourists: They shop for friends at home, dash to visit the famous monuments, and dine at a good restaurant. The situations they encounter, however, become comically exaggerated when the group reacts according to their bourgeois attitudes. Through these situations, Labiche presents his basic themes: a middle-class family coming to grips with problems of money, marriage, their own egos, and the narrowness of their world. The meal costs much more than the sum they had calculated, because the frame of the menu hides the final zeros of all the prices. They refuse to pay and are arrested. At the police station, they are mistaken for a ring of pickpockets. They manage to escape, but without their money. After they are recognized at a marriage broker’s ball, they are obliged to spend the night hiding in a construction area. When morning comes they are faced with the problem of returning to home and safety on only ten sous. They are rescued by the appearance of the young suitor who was to have come with them but who had missed the train.

Money, the cause of all their troubles to begin with, also releases the family from their predicament. They do not pause to reflect on their experiences. Anxious only to satiate the hunger they feel from not having eaten since the grand meal of the previous day, they troop off merrily to another good meal, planning to return to the police station afterward to claim their belongings and money, since the real pickpocket has now been arrested. They merely remark that in the future they will stay home to spend their money. At that point, the argument over precisely how they should spend it breaks out again. The play thus ends on a bittersweet note: The repetition of their previous squabbling is amusing, but the sad certainty is that they will return to their claustrophobic life exactly as they left it to continue their same petty ways.

In Three Cheers for Paris, as in all of his best works, Labiche succeeded in creating and maintaining a delicate tension between comedy and pathos. His treatment of the aging spinster Leonida Chambourcy illustrates a technique he often used to accomplish this feat. Leonida has finally received a response to her newspaper advertisement for a husband. This situation is presented in a humorous but not exaggerated tone. When the naïve woman appears from the wardrobe at the Parisian marriage broker’s, dressed unaccustomedly in a ball gown, what was amusing veers toward the ludicrous. When it turns out that one of her would-be suitors is Cordenbois, the hometown pharmacist with whom she has been playing cards for twenty years, the ludicrous becomes pathetic. The pathos is both intensified and moderated by Cordenbois’s preening. He has purchased a waist-cincher that comically rearranges his middle-age girth. He has also rented elegant evening attire that unfortunately still carries a strong odor of cleaning fluid.

Labiche does not allow the pathetic note to remain for more than a few moments. The set’s multiple doors enter the action: Leonida and the pharmacist, not understanding that they are the intended match, try to lose each other as each of them seeks the attractive young person whom the broker has described. They exit together and reenter separately but simultaneously, their movements punctuated by those of the broker, who pops in and out of the room looking for them. When Leonida’s second suitor appears, he turns out to be the police commissioner who had earlier incarcerated the group; the exits and entrances increase wildly as the situation careens into farce and another act.

Bibliography

Pao, Angela C. The Orient of the Boulevards: Exoticism, Empire, and Nineteenth Century French Theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. A look at nineteenth century French theater that focuses on Orientalism. Bibliography and index.

Pronko, Leonard C. Eugène Labiche and Georges Feydeau. New York: Grove 1982. This study examines the lives and works of Labiche and Georges Feydeau. Bibliography and index.