AUGIER, GUILLAUME VICTOR EMILE (182o 1889), French dramatist, was born at Valence, Drome, on Sept. 17 182o. He was the grandson of Pigault Lebrun, and belonged to the well-to-do bourgeoisie in principles and in thought as well as by actual birth. He received a good education and studied for the bar. In 1844 he wrote a play in two acts and in verse, La Cigue, produced with considerable success at the Odeon. Thencefor ward, at fairly regular intervals, either alone or in collaboration with other writers—Jules Sandeau, Eugene-Marie Labiche, Ed. Foussier—he produced plays which were in their way eventful. His last comedy, Les Fourchambault, belongs to the year 1878. After that date he wrote no more, restrained by an honourable fear of producing inferior work. He died at Croissy on Oct. 25 1889.
Augier, with Dumas fils and Sardou, may be said to have held the French stage during the Second Empire. The man respected himself and his art, and his art on its ethical side—for he did not disdain to be a teacher—has high qualities of rectitude and self restraint. Uprightness of mind and of heart, generous honesty, as Jules Lemaitre well said, constituted the very soul of all his dramatic work. L'Aventuriere (1848), in verse, the first of Augier's important works, already shows a deviation from romantic models; and in the Mariage d'Olympe (1855) the cour tesan is shown as she is, not glorified as in Dumas's Dame aux Camelias. In Gabrielle (1849), in verse, he declared war on romanticism; and in the comedies that followed he showed no sympathy for the nervous and melancholy types of character hitherto in favour. But it is difficult to comment on contemporary life in verse, and Augier found fuller expression for his criticism of the Paris of his day when he turned to prose-writing. Le Gendre de M. Poirier (1854), written in collaboration with Jules Sandeau, is still a classic. Others of his nine successful plays are Le Fils de Giboyer (1862), Lions et renards (1869), Jean de Thommeray (1874), Madame Coverlet (1876), and Les Four chambault (1878). The two last-named are pieces a these on the strict Dumas model. Augier's first drama, La Gigue, belongs to a time (1844) when the romantic drama was on the wane; and his almost exclusively domestic range of subject scarcely lends itself to lyric outbursts of pure poetry. His verse, if not that of a great poet, has excellent dramatic qualities, while the prose of his prose dramas is admirable for directness, alertness, sinew and a large and effective wit. Rene Doumic has said of his plays that in their ensemble they form the most complete expres sion of the bourgeois society of the time, and that they are one of the most important manifestations of the bourgeois spirit in the whole of French literature.