Eugène Labiche

Eugène Labiche (Paris, 1815 - Paris, 1888) was a prolific French playwright best known for his farces and vaudevilles of the Second Empire. He wrote about the middle classes with a sharp but good-humoured eye, and his plays turned on tangled plots, comic misunderstandings and recognisable social types. His work still holds a place in the French repertoire.

Born into a bourgeois Parisian family, he studied law but soon turned to writing. His first attempts, both in prose and on stage, won little attention. In 1851 he scored a hit with The Italian Straw Hat, written with Marc-Michel, a farce in which a character searches for something through the whole play and finds it only at the very end. For roughly twenty-five years he kept producing comedies and vaudevilles built on a similar blueprint, and he often worked with collaborators. His partnership with the actor Jean Marie Geoffroy was especially important, since Geoffroy specialised in the pompous bourgeois types Labiche created.

His peak came in the 1860s, with plays such as The Voyage of Mr. Perrichon and La Cagnotte. In 1877 he left the stage for his rural estate in Sologne, where he took up farming and land reclamation. His old friend Émile Augier urged him to collect and revise his works, and the ten-volume edition of 1878 and 1879 was well received. Critics came to see that the plays succeeded because of their writing rather than the actors who performed them. He was elected to the Académie française in 1880 and died in Paris in 1888, buried in the Montmartre Cemetery.

His legacy lies in the long afterlife of his plays, which have been filmed in several countries, and in his affectionate but unsparing portrait of the bourgeoisie, a model for later writers of comedy.