The offending paper was suppressed for a time, and Fontan produced a collection of political poems, Odes et epîtres, and a number of plays, of which Perkins Warbec (1828), written in collaboration with MM.
To escape the inevitable prosecution Fontan fled over the frontier, but, finding no safe asylum, he returned to Paris to give himself up to the authorities, and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment and a heavy fine.
He was liberated by the revolution of 1830, and his Jeanne la folle, performed in the same year, gained a success due perhaps more to sympathy with the author's political principles than to the merits of the piece itself, a somewhat crude and violent picture of Breton history.
A drama representing the trial of Marshal Ney, which he wrote in collaboration with Charles Dupeuty, Le Proces d'un maréchal de France (printed 1831), was suppressed on the night of its production.
A sympathetic portrait of Fontan as a prisoner, and an analysis of his principal works, are to be found in Jules Janin's Histoire de la littérature dramatique, vol.