19th-century French dramatists and playwrights

Félix Galipaux (12 December 1860 – 7 December 1931) was a French actor, playwright, and humorist; known for his comic stage monologues, such as Communication Telephonique (Paris, 1906). A few of these monologues were recorded.

Victor Henri Rochefort, Marquis de Rochefort-Luçay (30 January 1831 – 30 June 1913) was a French writer of vaudevilles and politician. He was born in Paris and died in Aix-les-Bains.

Antoine Joseph Paul Alexis (16 June 1847 – 28 July 1901) was a French novelist, dramatist, and journalist. He is best remembered today as the friend and biographer of Émile Zola.

Frédéric Soulié (23 December 1800 – 23 September 1847) was a French popular novelist and playwright. He wrote over forty sensation novels like Mémoires du diable (1837-8).

Antoine Louis Prosper "Frédérick" Lemaître (28 July 1800 – 26 January 1876) was a French actor and playwright, one of the most famous players on the celebrated Boulevard du Crime.

Jean Lorrain (9 August 1855 in Fécamp, Seine-Maritime – 30 June 1906), born Paul Alexandre Martin Duval, was a French poet and novelist of the Symbolist school.
Lorrain was a dedicated disciple of dandyism and spent much of his time amongst the fashionable artistic circles in France, particularly in the cafés and bars of Montmartre.He contributed to the satirical weekly Le Courrier français, and wrote a number of collections of verse, including La forêt bleue (1883) and L'ombre ardente, (1897). He is also remembered for his Decadent novels and short stories, such as Monsieur de Phocas (1901), Monsieur de Bougrelon (1897), and Histoires des masques (1900), as well as for one of his best stories, Sonyeuse, which he linked to portraits exhibited by Antonio de La Gándara in 1893. He also wrote the libretto to Pierre de Bréville's opera Éros vainqueur (1910).
Manuel Orazi Illustrated his Novella Ma petite ville in 1989.Lorrain was openly gay, often citing ancient Greece as noble heritage for homosexuality and became colloquially known as 'The Ambassador from Sodom'.Due to tubercular symptoms, he started using morphine, and then moved on to drinking ether, a habit he shared with Guy de Maupassant. Under the influence of ether Lorrain wrote several horror stories, but eventually the substance gave him stomach ulcers and health problems.

Henri Léon Emile Lavedan (9 April 1859 – 4 September 1940), French dramatist and man of letters, was born at Orléans, the son of Hubert Lavedan, a well-known Catholic and liberal journalist.
Lavedan contributed to various Parisian papers a series of witty tales and dialogues of Parisian life, many of which were collected in volume form. In 1891 he produced at the Théâtre Français Une Famille, followed at the Vaudeville in 1894 by Le Prince d'Aurec, a satire on the nobility, afterward renamed Les Descendants.He had a great success with Le Duel (Comédie-Française 1905), a powerful psychological study of the relations of two brothers, which was turned into a movie—The Duel—on which he was a co-writer. It was translated into English by Louis N. Parker and performed in New York in 1906 at the Hudson Theatre.Lavedan was admitted to the Académie française in 1898.

Gabriel Jean Baptiste Ernest Wilfrid Legouvé (pronounced [ɡabʁijɛl ʒɑ̃ batist ɛʁnɛst wilfʁid ləɡuve]; 14 February 1807 – 14 March 1903) was a French dramatist.

Louis Hyacinthe Bouilhet (27 May 1821 – 18 July 1869) was a French poet and dramatist.
Bouilhet was born in Cany, Seine Inférieure. He was a schoolfellow of Gustave Flaubert, to whom he dedicated his first work, Melaenis, conte romain (1851), a narrative poem in five cantos dealing with Roman manners under the emperor Commodus. His volume of poems Fossiles attracted considerable attention for being an attempt to make science a subject for poetry. These poems were also included in his Festons et astragales (1859).
As a dramatist he was successful with his first play, Madame de Monlarcy (1856), which ran for 28 nights at the Odéon; Hélène Peyron (1858) and L'Oncle Million (1860) were also favorably received. Of his other plays, only Conjuration d'Amboise (1866) met with any real success.
Bouilhet died on 18 July 1869, at Rouen. Flaubert published his posthumous poems with a notice by the author in 1872.
Bouilhet was Flaubert's mentor and guide; Flaubert never wrote anything without his advice. A few months after Bouilhet's death in 1869, Flaubert wrote about his old friend, "When I lost my poor Bouilhet, I lost my midwife, the man who saw more clearly into my mind than I did myself." According to Starkie, Maxime Du Camp, who knew Bouilhet and Flaubert well, said of the two authors, "It was Bouilhet who was the master, in the matter of literature at least, and that it was Flaubert who obeyed." Throughout their lives, Flaubert referred to Bouilhet as "Monseigneur."

Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (7 November 1838 – 19 August 1889) was a French symbolist writer. His family called him Mathias while his friends called him Villiers; he would also use the name Auguste when publishing some of his books.