Eugène Brieux

But it was only two years later that he finally made his breakthrough with the play Blanchette, which was performed over a hundred times by the theater manager and actor André Antoine and also toured the provinces.

At first his works emphasized the comic, but his so-called 'Sturm und Drang [‘Storm and Stress’] period' began with the play Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont in 1897.

In plays such as Le Berceau (1898), La Robe Rouge (1900), Les Avariés (1901) and Maternité (1903), he critically examined social problems such as poverty, political corruption, divorce, venereal diseases, the death penalty and parenthood.

His villa in Agay, near Cannes, became a local tourist attraction, prompting him to move to an even more remote region in the Loire department, where he spent his time fishing and farming.

George Bernard Shaw called him "incomparably the greatest writer France has produced since Molière" and maintained that after the death of Henrik Ibsen there was no more important playwright west of Russia.

Blanchette (1892) pointed out the civic results of the education of girls of the working classes; Monsieur de Réboval (1892) was directed against pharisaism; L'Engrenage (1894) against corruption in politics; Les Bienfaiteurs (1896) against the frivolity of fashionable charity; and L'Évasion (1896) satirized an indiscriminate belief in the doctrine of heredity.

[3] Les trois filles de M. Dupont (1897) is a powerful, somewhat brutal, study of the miseries imposed on poor middle-class girls by the French system of dowry; Le Résultat des courses (1898) shows the evil results of betting among the Parisian workmen; La Robe rouge (1900) was directed against the injustices of the law; Les Remplaçantes (1901) against the practice of putting children out to nurse.

[3] Les Avariés (1901), Damaged Lives in English, was banned by the censor, due to its medical details of syphilis, was read privately by the author at the Théâtre Antoine.

It tells how a young lawyer infected with syphilis declines his physician's advice to take a long course of mercurial treatment and postpone his marriage.