His surname was Fabre, the d'Églantine being added in commemoration of his receiving a silver wild rose (French: églantine) from Clémence Isaure from the Academy of the Jeux Floraux at Toulouse.

On its publication, the play was introduced by a preface, in which the author satirises L'Optimiste of his rival Jean François Collin d'Harleville, whose Châteaux en Espagne had gained the applause which Fabre's Présomptueux (1789) had failed to win.

He found his justification and framework in Rousseaus’s critique of theatricality and advocated transparency as the critical transformative element that could generate theater worthy of and in keeping with revolutionary culture.

D'Églantine voted for the death of King Louis XVI, supporting the maximum and a law which allowed for summary executions, and he was a bitter enemy of the Girondins.

"[2] Early on the morning of 14 November 1793, the Montagnard and former friar François Chabot burst into Maximilien Robespierre's bedroom dragging him from bed with accusations of counter-revolution and conspiracy, waving a hundred thousand livres in assignat notes, claiming that a band of royalist plotters gave it to him to buy Fabre d'Eglantine's vote, along with others, to liquidate some stock in an overseas trading concern.

[3][better source needed] The fraud that he spoke of regarding Fabre had been carried out in early October, when the French East India Company had been liquidated in accordance with the anti-capitalist legislation of the summer.

On 12 January 1794 Fabre was arrested by order of the Committee of Public Safety on a charge of malversation and forgery in connection with the affairs of the French East India Company.

Among Fabre's other plays are Le Convalescent de qualité (1791), and L'Intrigue épistolaire (1791, supposedly including a depiction of the painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze).