Ludovic Halévy (1 January 1834 – 7 May 1908) was a French author and playwright, best known for his collaborations with Henri Meilhac on Georges Bizet's Carmen and on the works of Jacques Offenbach.

His father, Léon Halévy (1802–1883), was a civil servant and a clever and versatile writer, who tried almost every branch of literature—prose and verse, vaudeville, drama, history—without, however, achieving decisive success in any.

Ten years earlier, he had become acquainted with the musician Offenbach, who was about to start a small theatre of his own in the Champs-Élysées, and he wrote a sort of prologue, Entrez, messieurs, mesdames, for the opening night.

The latter having abruptly retired from the collaboration, Halévy was at a loss how to carry out the contract, when on the steps of the theatre he met Henri Meilhac (1831–1897), then comparatively a stranger to him.

The decadence became still more apparent when Offenbach was no longer at hand to assist the two authors with his quaint musical irony, and when they had to deal with interpreters almost destitute of singing powers.

A solitary exception must be made in the case of Froufrou (1869), which, owing perhaps to the admirable talent of Aimée Desclée, remains their unique Succès de larmes.

M. Halévy's peculiar qualities are even more visible in the simple and striking scenes of the Invasion, published soon after the conclusion of the Franco-German War, in Criquette (1883) and The Abbot Constantine (1882), two novels, the latter of which went through innumerable editions.

Halévy remained an assiduous frequenter of the Academy, the Conservatoire, the Comédie Française, and the Society of Dramatic Authors, but, when he died in Paris on 7 May 1908, he had produced practically nothing new for many years.