Late in 1844 he won the grand medal of the Académie des Beaux-Arts with a piece of sculpture, and made his debut at the Comédie-Française as Seide in Voltaire's Mahomet and Valère in Molière's Tartuffe.

He acquitted himself with credit; but, tired of the small parts he found himself condemned to play, returned again to his sculptor's studio in 1846.

In Paris for the next ten years he fulfilled a series of successful engagements at various theatres, his chief triumph being his creation at the Vaudeville on 2 February 1852 of the part of Armand Duval in La Dame aux camélias.

In 1863 he leased the Lyceum Theatre, where he opened with The Duke's Motto; this was followed by The King's Butterfly, The Mountebank (in which his son Paul, a boy of seven, appeared), The Roadside Inn, The Master of Ravenswood, The Corsican Brothers (in the original French version, in which he had created the parts of Louis and Fabian dei Franchi) and The Lady of Lyons.

Fechter's imperious temper, aggravated by indulgence in drink, involved him in private quarrels and in discussions in the press, and he left in January 1871.

The play flopped, and Fechter retired to a farm which he had bought in the little village of Richland Centre, Bucks County, near Quakertown.

[1] He married, 29 November 1847, Mlle Charlotte Eléonore Rabut (1819-1894), a pensionnaire of the Comédie Française, Paris, by whom he had a son, Paul, and a daughter, Marie, who became an operatic singer.