François Ponsard

This date is notable in literature and dramatic history, because it marked a reaction against the romantic style of Alexandre Dumas, père and Victor Hugo.

Ponsard adopted the liberty of the romantics with regard to the unities of time and place, but reverted to the more sober style of earlier French drama.

Ponsard accepted the Second French Empire with no very great enthusiasm, and was given the post of librarian to the senate; he soon resigned, and fought a bloodless duel with a journalist on the subject.

[1] The play was essentially a romance drawn very loosely from the life of Galileo Galilei, the great 17th-century Italian physicist and astronomer who was forced to recant his work by the Roman Inquisition.

Most of Ponsard's plays hold a certain steady level of literary and dramatic ability, but his popularity is in the main because his appearance coincided with a certain public weariness of the extravagant and unequal style of 1830.