Gustave Pierre Drouineau (22 February 1798 – 19 April 1878) was a 19th-century French novelist, poet and playwright.
Coming from a family of doctors of La Rochelle, he moved to Paris to study law and live from poetry.
In 1826 he obtained a great success with his romantic drama Rienzi which would tour Europe, experience numerous translations and may have been a source of inspiration to Richard Wagner for his opera Rienzi (1828).
His novel Ernest ou le travers du siècle published in 1829 by Timothée Dehay became a best-seller, inspiring even Balzac for his Illusions perdues (1837).
In 1833, he founded a sect which he named neo-Christianity and stopped definitively writing in 1835.