Julien Auguste Pélage Brizeux (12 September 1803 – 3 May 1858) was a French poet. He was said to belong to a family of Irish origin, long settled in Brittany. He was educated for the law, but in 1827 he produced at the Théâtre Français a one-act verse comedy, Racine, in collaboration with Philippe Busoni.
His most important works are, first, Marie (1832, 1836, 1840), then, Les Bretons (1845, 1846). He also wrote in the Breton language, notably Telenn-Arvor and Furnez Breiz.
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.
Jean-Marie Guyau (28 October 1854 – 31 March 1888) was a French philosopher and poet.
Guyau was inspired by the philosophies of Epicurus, Epictetus, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, and Alfred Fouillée, and the poetry and literature of Pierre Corneille, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset.
Jules-Jean-Paul Fort (1 February 1872 – 20 April 1960) was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. At the age of 18, reacting against the Naturalistic theatre, Fort founded the Théâtre d'Art (1890–93). He also founded and edited the literary reviews Livre d'Art with Alfred Jarry and Vers et Prose (1905–14) with poet Guillaume Apollinaire, which published the work of Paul Valéry and other important Symbolist writers. Fort is notable for his enormous volume of poetry, having published more than thirty volumes of ballads and, according to Amy Lowell, for creating the polyphonic prose form in his 'Ballades francaises'.
Pierre Dupont (23 April 1821 – 25 July 1870) was a French songwriter.
Dupont was born in Lyon as the son of a blacksmith. His mother died before he was five years old, and he was brought up in the country by his godfather, a village priest. He was educated at the seminary of L'Argentière, and was afterwards apprenticed to a notary at Lyon. In 1839 he found his way to Paris, and some of his poems were inserted, in the Gazette de France and the Quotidienne. Two years later he was saved from the conscription and enabled to publish his first volume – Les Deux Anges – through the exertions of a kinsman and of Pierre Lebrun.
In 1842 he received a prize from the Academy, and worked for some time on the official dictionary. Gounod's appreciation of his peasant song, Les Bœufs (1846), settled his vocation as a songwriter. He had no theoretical knowledge of music, but he composed both the words and the melodies of his songs, the two processes being generally simultaneous. He himself remained so innocent of musical knowledge that he had to engage Ernest Reyer to write down his airs.
He sang his own songs, as they were composed, at the workmen's concerts in the Salle de la Fraternité du Faubourg Saint-Denis; the public performance of his famous "Le chant du pain" was forbidden; "Le chant des ouvriers" (1846) was even more popular; and in 1851 he paid the penalty of having become the poet laureate of the socialistic aspirations of the time by being condemned to seven years of exile from France.
The sentence was cancelled, and the poet withdrew for a time from participation in politics. He died at Lyon, where his later years were spent, on 25 July 1870.
His songs have appeared in various forms:
Chants et chansons (3 vols., with music, 1852–1854)
Chants et poesies (7th edition, 1862)Among the best-known are "Le Braconnier", "Le Tisserand", "La Vache blanche", "La Chanson du blé", but many others might be mentioned of equal spontaneity and charm. His later works have not the same merit.
Tristan Corbière (18 July 1845 – 1 March 1875), born Édouard-Joachim Corbière, was a French poet born in Coat-Congar, Ploujean (now part of Morlaix) in Brittany, where he lived most of his life before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 29. He was a French poet, close to Symbolism, and a figure of the "cursed poet".He is the author of a single collection of poetry Les Amours Jaunes, and of a few prose pieces. He led a mostly marginal and miserable life, nourished by two major failures due to his bone disease and his "ugliness" which he enjoyed accusing: the first is his sentimental life (he only loved one woman, called "Marcelle" in his work), and the second being his passion for the sea (he dreamt of becoming a sailor, like his father, Édouard Corbière). His poetry carries these two great wounds which led him to adopt a very cynical and incisive style, towards himself as much towards the life and world around him.
He died at the age of 29, possibly from tuberculosis, a childless bachelor with no work, entrenched in his old Breton manor, misunderstood by his contemporaries, and his innovative poetry was not recognised until well after his death.
Émile Bergerat (29 April 1845 – 13 October 1923) was a French poet, playwright and essayist. He used the pseudonyms l'Homme masqué (the masked man), Caliban and Ariel (the latter two drawn from The Tempest by William Shakespeare). A library in Neuilly-sur-Seine opposite his flat bears his name.
Henri Eugène Amédée Beauclair (December 21, 1860 at Lisieux – May 11, 1919 in Paris) was a French poet, novelist, and journalist. He was the chief editor of the daily newspaper Le Petit Journal from 1906 to 1914. He worked for a number of publications, including Lutèce, Le Chat noir, Le Procope, journal parlé (1893–1898), and Le Sagittaire, a monthly revue of art and literature (1900–1901).
He had a taste and an unquestionable talent for satire and pastiche. He collaborated with poet Gabriel Vicaire, with whom he wrote the famous Déliquescences of Adoré Floupette (1885), a parody of the Decadent movement in poetry which caused several months of vigorous debate within Parisian literary circles.
Pierre-Félix Louÿs (French: [pjɛʁ lu.is]; 10 December 1870 – 4 June 1925) was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who sought to "express pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection". He was made first a Chevalier and then an Officer of the Légion d'honneur for his contributions to French literature.
Paul Léautaud (18 January 1872 – 22 February 1956) was a French writer and theater critic for Mercure de France, signing his often caustic reviews with the pseudonym Maurice Boissard.