Georges Ohnet

Georges Ohnet (Paris, 1848 – 1918) was a French novelist and playwright who enjoyed enormous popularity with readers in the second half of the nineteenth century. Contemporary accounts place him ahead of writers such as Émile Zola and Alphonse Daudet in sales, which makes him a useful case study of how the literary market worked under the Third Republic.

Born in Paris on 3 April 1848 into a wealthy bourgeois family, he was educated at the Collège Sainte-Barbe and the Lycée Napoléon before studying law. He practised as a lawyer for a time, but journalism soon became his main route into the Parisian literary world. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 he wrote for Le Pays and later for Le Constitutionnel, where he covered politics and theatre in serialised columns.

His first works were plays, one written in collaboration with the dramatist Louis Denayrouze. Around 1881 he turned to the novel with the series «Les batailles de la vie», serialised in newspapers and magazines. Its characters are usually simple and idealistic, and his passionate style, which deliberately avoided the realism then fashionable, explored intense emotion within the conventions of melodrama. Critics dismissed the books as unrealistic and commonplace, yet readers returned to them in large numbers. His best-known novel, The Master of the Forges (1882), sold widely in France and abroad and was adapted for the stage and screen many times.

His legacy lies chiefly in the scale of his popularity rather than in any formal innovation. He was elected president of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques in 1902, and his name remains tied to an age when serialised fiction reached a mass audience.