Émile Augier

• Born: September 1, 1820
• Birthplace: Valence, France
• Died: October 25, 1889
• Place of death: Croissy-sur-Seine, France

Other Literary Forms

Émile Augier wrote a libretto for Charles Gounod’s opera Sapho, in 1851, and published a volume of verse, Les Pariétaires, in 1856; with these exceptions, he devoted himself entirely to the composition of plays.

Achievements

In chronological terms, Émile Augier can be credited with being the first major dramatist of the realistic school of French literature to combat successfully the excesses and extravagances of the Romantic theater. While his contemporary, Alexandre Dumas, fils, shared some of Augier’s aversion to these excesses and extravagances, Augier preceded him in condemning the illusions of romantic love, which he removed from the center of the dramatic plot. He replaced those illusions with other motive forces: the desire for political power, the pursuit of tawdry liaisons, and, above all, the love of money. Already in The Adventuress and in Gabrielle, the anti-Romantic orientation of Augier’s theater is evident. His social setting would be principally the middle class, of which he himself was a proud member, and even as he attacked the dishonesty and corruption rampant in that class, he would laud its virtues: an abiding respect for the sanctity of family life, the veneration of true love as consecrated in marriage, and a belief in the legitimacy of material success when founded on personal industry and honest dealings.

As an enthusiastic exponent of what he perceived to be the solid values of the middle class and as a playwright who saw his theater as having the utilitarian goal of seeking to preserve those values, Augier was anything but a social reformer in the revolutionary sense. His plays were almost totally lacking in any suggestion of abstract concepts or ideals relative to the creation of a new society. Nor was he concerned with any of the philosophical problems that have haunted some of the greatest dramatists. On the other hand, Augier’s theater did enjoy the distinction of authenticity. Although later French playwrights, such as Henry Becque, would be more exhaustive in their realistic detail or more truculent in their denunciation of corruption, Augier offered character-types and settings that were readily recognized as being drawn directly from the world of the middle class. In this sense, he demonstrated a perceptive and, at times, profound grasp of the psychology and customs of his milieu, infusing his plays with a human interest that could result only from a keen and probing observation of bourgeois society.

Just as Augier could lay no claim to being a reformer in the domain of ideology, so he could lay no claim to being a reformer in the domain of technique or style. Although his plays are notable for their clever construction (in this he was a faithful disciple of Eugène Scribe, renowned for his pièces biens faites, or well-made plays), Augier lacked the fecund imagination of the truly great playwright, and often the calculated orchestration of his theatrical effects suggests more artifice than art. An example of this orchestration is the device of contrasting characters, such as in the case of his masterpiece, Monsieur Poirier’s Son-in-Law, in which Poirier and Verdelet, Gaston and Hector, are a little too neatly set in opposition to one another. As for the language of his characters, it was prosaic to the utmost; even his early plays were composed in verse.

Nevertheless, because they were the fruits of his actual social experience, Augier’s characters rang true in attitude and behavior and did not suffer from the Romantic inclination to excessive lyricism. Moreover, whatever the mediocrity of his prose style, it liberated French dramatic diction from the exaggerations and histrionic abuses practiced by the previous generation’s Romantic writers, reproducing, instead, the regular speech patterns of the bourgeoisie. Viewed in this light, Augier could justifiably be considered the creator of the modern comedy of manners in France. He will be remembered, however, not only for this historical distinction but also for a handful of well-crafted plays, of which Monsieur Poirier’s Son-in-Law is the most outstanding.

Biography

Guillaume-Victor-Émile Augier once said that after his birth nothing had ever happened to him. Aside from his generally triumphant career in the theater, Augier’s life was, in fact, largely uneventful. Augier was born at Valence, of a wealthy middle-class family, in 1820. The grandson of the celebrated writer Charles Pigault-Lebrun, who in 1831 dedicated to him his book of short stories Contes à mon petit-fils, Augier was not long in discovering his own literary proclivities. His father, Victor Augier, was a lawyer and hoped that his son would follow in his footsteps. In 1828, Victor took the family to Paris, where he bought a notary’s practice, and Augier did embark on a law career in the offices of M. Masson after establishing a fine academic record at the Collège Henri IV.

Although he obtained a law degree from the University of Paris in 1844, Augier did not practice, preferring to write for the stage. Indeed, the very year in which he completed his law studies, Augier presented the first of nine verse plays, La Ciguë, to the Théâtre-Français, which rejected it. He then submitted it to the Théâtre de l’Odéon, which performed it, and successfully. From that point on, Augier, with rare exceptions, was exclusively absorbed in the writing of plays. His career as a playwright, a career whose general orientation toward social drama was already discernible in these early verse plays, developed rapidly and securely. He wrote mainly for the Comédie-Française, the Théâtre du Gymnase, the Théâtre de l’Odéon, and the Théâtre du Vaudeville.

In 1853, Augier began seriously to write plays in prose, collaborating with Jules Sandeau on La Pierre de touche. He had already worked with Sandeau on the composition of La Chasse au roman in 1851, and before that, with Alfred de Musseton The Green Coat in 1849. In succeeding years, he collaborated again with Sandeau and coauthored plays also with Eugène Labicheand Édouard Foussier . Influenced by the example of François Ponsard, who had become the leading advocate of the école de bon sens, or “school of common sense,” a movement designed to free the French theater of Romantic extremes, Augier’s prose plays presented both an impassioned defense of middle-class values and a close examination of the ways in which those values were subverted. The plays found a receptive audience, principally among bourgeois theatergoers, and notably in 1854 with regard to the first performance, at the Théâtre du Gymnase, of Augier’s finest work, Monsieur Poirier’s Son-in-Law, an incisive study of a bourgeois social climber. The following year, with The Marriage of Olympe, Augier seemed to be countering the sympathetic treatment accorded the courtesan by Dumas, fils, in La Dame aux camélias (pr., pb. 1852; Camille, 1856). In Augier’s play, the courtesan ends up destroying the respectable family into which she has been married, proving herself, in the process, absolutely incapable of true moral regeneration.

Augier’s domination of the French theater started at this time, and by 1857, he had been elected to the French Academy. During the 1860’s, his would be the most prestigious name among living French playwrights, and by 1900, there would be a list of 2,656 performances of his plays at the Comédie-Française alone. The Annales du théâtre of 1881 would recognize Augier, along with Victor Hugo, Dumas, fils, and Victorien Sardou, as one of the four principal living dramatists of France.

His prestige during the 1860’s notwithstanding, Augier cannot be said to have enjoyed equal favor with all segments of French society at that time. Faces of Brass, presented in 1861 at the Comédie-Française, provoked angry responses from supporters of the press because of its denunciation of corruption in the ranks of the journalists. Giboyer’s Son, also produced by the Comédie-Française the following year, alienated partisans of the Catholic church by its description of the political machinations of the clergy. Nor did matters improve two years later, when, in still another first performance at thei Comédie-Française, Maître Guérin infuriated the legal profession with its assault on unscrupulous lawyers.

For Augier, the 1870’s were characterized primarily by the unfortunate consequences of the fall of the Second Empire and by his marriage, in 1873, to a young actress, Laure Lambert. The end of the reign of Napoleon III appeared to coincide, ironically, with the end of Augier’s reign in the theater. To be sure, he continued to write for the stage, as plays such as Jean de Thommeray and Madame Caverlet attest. Yet these works, while revealing Augier’s concern with the decline of middle-class values rooted in the harmony and cohesion of family life, were less well received, on the whole, than those of the 1860’s. The lone exception to the rule was The House of Fourchambault, which, in 1878, marked Augier’s return to the Comédie-Française for the last time (Madame Caverlet had been produced at the Théâtre du Vaudeville, and another play of 1876, Le Prix Martin, at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal). With The House of Fourchambault, an arresting depiction of a bourgeois family beset with financial difficulties, Augier withdrew from the stage, still acclaimed by his public despite the partial erosion of his talent. In the very year in which The House of Fourchambault was presented, Augier, suffering from a nervous disease, went into retirement at Croissy, where he was to die in 1889, at the age of sixty-nine.

Analysis

If the constant and predominant theme of Émile Augier’s plays is money and its corrupting effect, this circumstance is not without its historical justification. The period of the Second Empire in France was marked by an enormous development of the nation’s industrial potential, and with this development came a material prosperity that fostered both a wider dissemination of wealth and a more intense desire, among those not directly touched by the newfound prosperity, to share in it. So intense was this desire, in some cases, that it swept aside moral principle. Augier’s self-appointed task of calling attention to this decay and noting its deleterious effects on the middle class, even as he recalled the sound values of that class, is therefore more than caprice or literary fancy.

Augier’s plays are successful when he uses in a measured fashion the innovations in theme and style of the two playwrights who most influenced him, Dumas, fils, and Scribe. The former’s tendency to expound theses in his plays, converting them into pièces à thèse, exerted an unfavorable influence on Augier in those instances in which Augier’s dramatic apparatus becomes nothing more than a pretext for the elaboration of an idea. Scribe’s propensity for overemphasizing the aspect of technical adroitness in the delineation of plot and character also exerted an unfavorable influence on Augier in those instances in which Augier appears to have sacrificed realism in the description of a social situation or individual psychology to the objective of achieving a well-made play.

In his best works, however, Augier avoids these two traps, profiting from the lessons of Dumas, fils, and Scribe without subverting the worthy fruits of his insightful analysis of bourgeois society. The plays in which Augier arrives at this equilibrium of art and realistic observation are Monsieur Poirier’s Son-in-Law, Giboyer’s Son, and The House of Fourchambault.

Monsieur Poirier’s Son-in-Law

Monsieur Poirier’s Son-in-Law, rightly regarded as Augier’s masterpiece, is a nineteenth century reworking of a theme brilliantly treated in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (pr. 1670; The Would-Be Gentleman, 1675), the theme of the middle-class social climber. M. Poirier is a nouveau riche who, longing to be titled, marries off his daughter, Antoinette, to a poor aristocrat, the marquis de Presles. Underwriting the expenses of the couple, Poirier explodes in indignation when he discovers that his noble son-in-law is content to live off him and is in effect exploiting his largesse. Poirier then threatens to stop subsidizing the marquis, and this predictably provokes a crisis of major proportions for the latter, who now takes another look at the internal circumstances of his marriage and, in particular, his feelings for his wife. In so doing, he finds that he really loves her, and, happily, this discovery represents a new beginning for him, rather than a very sad end. Through the magnanimity of Poirier’s friend Verdelet, the marquis is able to redress the financial aspect of the crisis and even becomes employed. At the conclusion of the play, however, Poirier, having acquired the marquis’s property, is still clinging to his glorious ambition of gaining the status of a nobleman.

The particular subject of Monsieur Poirier’s Son-in-Law, the tensions between the nouveau riche and the impoverished aristocrat, was a most appropriate one for Augier because it mirrored faithfully the social agitation of the Second Empire, with the realignments engendered by the mercantile decline of the nobility and the upward movement of the bourgeoisie. What makes Augier’s treatment of this subject remarkable is his unrelenting scrutiny of the well-to-do bourgeois as typified by Poirier. Himself a bourgeois, Augier nevertheless resisted the temptation to poeticize his character. Poirier is clearly meritorious, admittedly, to the extent that he has created his wealth honestly, through hard work. Nor is he lacking in common sense, or in a kind of stubborn persistence in the pursuit of his ends, a persistence admirable by the very energy that animates it.

On the other hand, Augier has discerned Poirier’s defects and does not hesitate to reveal them. This social climber borders on a caricature by the vanity and vacuity of his social ambitions. More disquieting is the fact that, once he has decided that marrying his daughter to an unscrupulous marquis was a colossal blunder, he seeks to separate her from him with a bitterness and rancor that are repugnant. Yet, if these negative qualities reduce the audience’s admiration for Poirier, they reinforce the impression that his character is derived from the example of life itself. Poirier is, in fact, the model for many other representatives of the middle class in Augier’s theater, such as Vernouillet in Faces of Brass, Maréchal in Giboyer’s Son, and Guérin in Maître Guérin.

If Augier has not exaggerated Poirier’s moral assets, so he has not exaggerated the marquis de Presles’s moral liabilities. The marquis surely reflects the principal vices of his class as they were often perceived at this juncture in European history. In his own way, he too is prideful. It is only that his pride takes the form of a delight in indolence and frivolity. At the same time, however, he embodies the more traditional positive features of the aristocracy. He easily spends the money of others without question. Yet he does so with a wit, a grace, and a generosity that are the hallmarks of his aristocratic bearing at its best. What is more significant, however, is that the marquis de Presles gains in moral stature as his essential qualities are favorably mirrored in his wife Antoinette’s love for him. Augier has made of her a sympathetic figure, and her adoration of her husband affects the audience’s feelings toward him. The portrait of the marquis resembles that of Poirier in that both characters emerge as believable creations from the psychological as well as the historical viewpoint.

The artistic construction of Monsieur Poirier’s Son-in-Law attests an intelligent and skillful adaptation of the precepts of Scribe. The play is well-made less in the artificial sense of perfect technical balance—notwithstanding the careful contrasting of Poirier and Verdelet, Gaston and Hector—than in the more classical sense of a rigorous economy of organization in which there is practically no padding. The nineteenth century drama critic Francisque Sarcey expressed it succinctly in his review of Monsieur Poirier’s Son-in-Law when he observed that there was not a single scene or word in it that one would want to eliminate. When Sarcey added that the play was the masterpiece of contemporary comedy, he was asserting an opinion that the work’s general excellence completely justifies.

Giboyer’s Son

In Giboyer’s Son, the antagonism between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie is again a focal point of the dramatic action but in circumstances appreciably different from those of Monsieur Poirier’s Son-in-Law, as Augier creates a larger political context for that dramatic action. The play pits the traditional aristocracy, incarnated by the marquis d’Auberville, against the Liberal Party, represented, however intermittently, by M. Maréchal. To combat the growing influence of the Liberal Party, the marquis chooses as speech writer for his Conservatives, who are aligned with the clergy, an opportunist, the journalist Giboyer. In selecting Giboyer, the marquis is well aware of the venality of the man and feels confident that Giboyer will support whatever political position will bring him the most money, especially since he is bent on educating his son, Maximilien. The latter, who does not know that Giboyer is in reality his father, becomes Maréchal’s secretary, again through the agency of the marquis. Maréchal, who was formerly a member of the Liberal Party but is now under the wing of the marquis, dreams of an alliance of the “old” and the “new” aristocracy, reinforced in his expectations by the fact that his daughter, Fernande, has become the marquis’s protégée and by the fact that he himself has been chosen to deliver the Conservative Party’s speech in opposition to the spokesman for the Liberal Party.

Everything changes when the clerical members of the Conservative Party move to replace Maréchal. Angered and disillusioned, he bolts the party and becomes a Liberal again. His retaliatory speech is prepared by Maximilien, who now knows that Giboyer is his father because the latter, thinking his son imbued with Maréchal’s earlier conservatism, has revealed himself to be the hypocritical author of Maréchal’s original speech championing the Conservative ideal. Giboyer now urges his son to uphold the Liberal creed. Maréchal’s revolt further disrupts the marquis’s plans in that the latter, a widower with no children, had hoped to have his cousin the comte d’Outreville become heir to his title and property on condition that he marry Fernande. With Maréchal’s defection, however, the marriage becomes impossible, and all the more so since Fernande’s heart belongs to Maximilien, who returns her love. When the marquis discovers this, he offers to adopt Maximilien, who rejects his proposition.

Giboyer’s Son is part of a trilogy (the other two plays are Faces of Brass and Lions et renards) in which all three plays treat the same political theme and two feature Giboyer. Yet Giboyer’s Son, whose protagonist also appears in Faces of Brass, is the best of the trio, both from the standpoint of thematic development and from that of technical construction. In the play, which critics of the time did not hesitate to compare to Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s La Folle Journée: Ou, Le Mariage de Figaro (wr. 1775-1778, pr. 1784; The Marriage of Figaro, 1784) because of the audacity of its political theme, Augier castigates the unholy alliance of the clergy and the political conservatives. Yet he does so without allowing the political content to degenerate into the kind of preachment typical of the thesis play. Despite the politics, the plot still turns primarily on the question of sentimental relationships, as the audience wonders who will win the fight for the hand of Fernande: the man whom she truly loves, Maximilien, or the husband selected for her, the comte d’Outreville.

Yet the artful subordination of political motifs to amorous ones in Giboyer’s Son is not enough to preserve the validity of Augier’s political outlook. Contemplated in the historical perspective, Augier’s bourgeois biases against both Jesuits and royalists appear more glaring, and these biases necessarily call into question the ultimate fairness of his rendition of the play’s politics. Moreover, even at best the radical changes in party alignments wrought by the passing of time have made much of the work’s political maneuvering far less interesting.

In spite of these shortcomings, Giboyer’s Son retains its appeal because of the penetrating analysis of Giboyer’s character. The Giboyer of this play is from the very outset more fascinating than the Giboyer of Faces of Brass because he is now a father and, as such, is divided between his parental inclinations and the venality of his nature. That venality is all the more effectively analyzed by Augier in that, through his scrutiny, the playwright poses with unusual cogency a problem the implications of which transcend the particular case of Giboyer. The problem is both educational and moral. The son of a porter, Giboyer, in a sense, has been educated beyond the level typical of his class. Yet, while he possesses an education superior to that enjoyed by most of the other members of his class, he is still as materially poor as they and, furthermore, lacks the moral stamina to resist the temptation beckoning him to free himself from the circle of poverty by selling his journalistic talents to the highest bidder. Lured irresistibly by the prospect of making money through the opportunistic reformulation of his political views, Giboyer is anything but comic and inoffensive in his contradictions. Actually, he is a rather sinister and dangerous figure, since he is capable of journalistic blackmail. In Augier’s play, he is a journalist, but one can easily imagine his counterparts in business and law. Finally, what is so troubling in Giboyer is the systematic hypocrisy that attends his activity: He is all the more to be feared because his scoundrelly nature is not obvious to the naked eye.

Yet Giboyer is illuminated by a still-vibrant paternal instinct. His corrupt behavior has one main objective, and that is to make of his son an educated man and an honorable one. While this fatherly devotion does not exonerate Giboyer entirely, it adds just that contradictory dimension to his character that renders him lifelike. The moment in the play in which Giboyer reveals to Maximilien that he is his father, act 3, scene 16, can easily be played for its pathos, but it gains a special resonance and human significance by its moving portrayal of Giboyer’s genuine suffering.

Apart from the riveting complexity of its protagonist, Giboyer’s Son recommends itself by the deft management of a variety of motifs that are melded without creating an impression of confusion and without slowing down the action. If there is the basic marriage of the political and amorous motifs, there is also abundant social commentary—all this blended convincingly because the characters do not discourse didactically on these matters but allude to them with apparent naturalness when their passions are aroused. Comic scenes alternate with near-tragic ones in a rapid movement the dramatic interest of which rarely flags.

The House of Fourchambault

The House of Fourchambault, Augier’s last play, restates the fundamental position explicitly or implicitly advanced in virtually all his dramatic production—namely, that marriage must be predicated on true love and not on money. Fourchambault has had a child out of wedlock by his sister’s piano teacher but has married instead a woman with a rich dowry. Given to frivolity and spendthrift ways, Mme Fourchambault has spoiled their daughter Blanche by instilling in her the ambition to marry for money and social position. Furthermore, she has encouraged her son Leopold to take as a mistress a Creole orphan from Bourbon Island, Marie Letellier, whom the Fourchambaults are sheltering until she can find a position as a schoolteacher.

Marie speaks so highly of Bernard, the man who brought her to France, that the Fourchambaults wish to meet him, not knowing that Bernard, now a successful ship owner, is Fourchambault’s illegitimate son. Bernard discovers his true identity only when he tells his mother that the Fourchambaults are nearly bankrupt and she implores him to help her former lover and his family. The son not only grants his mother’s wish but also acts to prevent Blanche, actually his sister, from contracting a marriage of convenience with the Baron Rastiboulois when she really loves Victor Chauvet, a bank clerk. In an even greater show of nobility, Bernard presses Leopold to restore Marie’s compromised reputation, since she is thought to be Leopold’s mistress, although he, Bernard, loves her himself. As their exchange becomes emotionally charged, Bernard reveals to Leopold that they are brothers, and Leopold encourages him to court Marie for his own sake.

A leading merit of The House of Fourchambault is, once again, that the play propounds ideas in which Augier believed very deeply, even passionately, without ever encasing those ideas in the theses of the pièce à thèse. If Augier holds that marriage should not exist without love, nor for that matter, love without marriage, he also holds to certain corollaries: that not one’s family origins but one’s character determines one’s basic worth and that a sound character can be disastrously affected by a bad upbringing, as almost occurs with Blanche and Leopold. Yet these convictions are also enunciated, throughout the play, without doctrinal speechifying: They appear to result spontaneously from the interaction of the characters with one another.

This feature by itself does not, however, explain the effectiveness of The House of Fourchambault. A further reason for that effectiveness is the manner in which Augier depicts the Fourchambault and Bernard households. From act 1, the audience learns that Fourchambault is not an evil man, that his decision to abandon Bernard’s mother was based on his father’s questioning of her virtue and his own docile acceptance of that questioning. Though flawed, Fourchambault is seen in a less culpable light than his wife, whom he does not follow as she urges their son Leopold to take Marie as a mistress while waiting to meet a woman worthy of being married to him. The Fourchambaults’ daughter Blanche is described in a similar fashion as being essentially a good person, but one whose outlook on life has been vitiated by her mother’s insistence on a “proper” marriage.

From act 2, the audience learns that, despite its illegitimacy, the Bernard household is full of more tender loving care than is the Fourchambault household. Mme Bernard is a mother in the truest sense, and, if her son has been a success in business without sacrificing moral principle, the cause of that success is the sound education that she has given him. As for Bernard, so high is the esteem in which he holds his mother that he would not want to marry anyone who would be lacking in the apposite respect for her, and this restriction has inhibited the expression of his love for Marie. It is also in act 2 that the two families come into contact with each other, as Mme Fourchambault and Blanche, having heard so much praise of Bernard from Marie, appear at the Bernard residence. By the end of this same act, Bernard has guessed, from the emotional exchange with his mother about the Fourchambaults’ financial woes, that Fourchambault is his father. Figuratively as well as literally, the stage is now set for the drama that will unfold as the Fourchambaults struggle with the consequences of their financial crisis. Augier has once again applied, and without too great a cost in natural progression, the precepts of the pièce bien faite.

This is not to say that all this is managed without some concession to the most recognizable forms of theatrical convention. To take, first of all, the most obvious example, Augier creates the ultimate coup de théâtre in scene 5 of act 5, when Bernard reveals to Leopold that they are brothers. Sarcey, usually ardent in his praise of Augier, has alluded to the artificiality of the situation that develops in act 4, scene 8, where Bernard, even as he speaks to Blanche in an effort to dissuade her from marrying the Baron Rastiboulois, is really addressing his remarks to Marie also, both a participant in and a witness to the conversation. Perhaps a more telling criticism is that, despite all his theatrical ingenuity, Augier has not created here a character who lives with the vividness and vitality of a Poirier, or a Giboyer. Ironically, the reason may be that Augier has made these characters, particularly those of the Fourchambault family, too “nice,” whatever their superficial flaws, and too capable of the moral conversion that occurs once Bernard begins to exert his influence in their lives. The one character whose potential for wickedness might have been developed so as to make her a memorable creation, Mme Fourchambault, remains, rather, a case of arrested dramatic development.

These weaknesses notwithstanding, and while it is clearly inferior in artistic conception to Monsieur Poirier’s Son-in-Law and Giboyer’s Son, Augier’s last play testifies, nevertheless, to his continued overall mastery of his craft.Émile Zola, after enumerating some of the defects of the work, acknowledged that The House of Fourchambault was solidly constructed and firmly written. Having seen the play when it was introduced at the Comédie-Française, Zola concluded that Augier was the master of the French stage at that time.

In any event, with The House of Fourchambault, Augier went out in a blaze of glory from the vantage point of popular appeal. The play’s denouement in act 5, scene 5, if one is to believe Sarcey’s opening-night review, caused the whole audience to explode in applause. The same critic’s general assessment of the manner in which The House of Fourchambault was received by the public was that the play achieved one of the most outstanding first-night successes that he had ever witnessed in the theater. Sarcey’s comments seem less exaggerated when one recalls that Émile Perrin, then the director of the Comédie-Française, revived Le Fils naturel (pr., pb. 1858; The Natural Son, 1879), a play by Dumas, fils, which treated essentially the same subject, to capitalize on Augier’s immense triumph. It is clear, in the final analysis, that with the success of The House of Fourchambault, Augier left the theater at the very height of his popularity. It is also clear that he left the theater with a renewed expression of faith in the resiliency of the middle-class family and its values, which his decades of playwriting had in no way diminished.

Bibliography

Danger, Pierre. Émile Augier: Ou, Le Théâtre de l’ambiguïté: Éléments pour une archéologie morale de la bourgeoisie sous le Second Empire. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998. Critical analysis and interpretation of Augier’s works, with reference to the times in which he lived. Bibliography. In French.

Van Laan, Thomas F. “The Ending of A Doll House and Augier’s Maître Guérin.” Comparative Drama 17 (1983): 297-317. A comparison of one of Henrik Ibsen’s plays to Augier’s Maître Guérin.