Louis Énault

Born in Isigny-sur-Mer, he trained as a lawyer in Paris and then, thanks to his links with the right-wing Legitimists, was arrested after the French Revolution of 1848.

He collaborated with Gustave Doré to produce an illustrated 1876 work on the industrial revolution in London, widely admired for the realism of its over 170 woodcuts and for its text, comparing London's architecture with the neoclassical monuments Énault had visited in Valletta on Malta during his travels on French medieval crusader routes.

He prefers the polluted trickle of suburbs to the pure water of great lakes….He wallows voluptuously in all the turpitudes he cares to imagine, and drags his audience with him.

We treat these people, but we don't talk about it in good company.…We have, in fact, too much respect for our readers to condemn them to an analysis of a piece like L'Assommoir.…These promiscuities without modesty and without love, these debauches without passion, these tableaux of rudeness thats revolt the delicate, these bad mores of the lowest order, without elegance, without grace and without varnish, these bouquets of poisonous plants growing on manure, would offer them only sadness without compensation.

Celebrated in his lifetime but afterward little known, he is cited by Jules Romains as an example of a writer who knew notoriety and even glory but whose name meant nothing to the following generation.