Joseph Méry (21 January 1797 – 17 June 1866) was a French writer, journalist, novelist, poet, playwright and librettist.

An ardent romanticist, he collaborated with Auguste Barthélemy in many of his satires and wrote a great number of stories, now forgotten.

[1] Nowadays he is perhaps best remembered as the co-librettist of the original version in French of Verdi's Don Carlos, which premiered in Paris in March 1867.

His novella Histoire de ce qui n'est pas arrivé (1854) is a significant exercise in alternate history, in which Méry imagined that Napoleon's life took a different turn in Egypt in 1799.

[2] Alexandre Dumas, père, in 1864, invited all the poets of France to display their skill by composing to sets of Bouts-Rimés selected for the purpose by Joseph Méry.