Arsène Houssaye

Houssaye, Arsène (1815–96), French writer, editor, and theatre director. A fantaisiste (fantasist) like many other ‘Generation of 1830’ romantics, Houssaye exploited contemporary tastes for the imaginative. His popular songs, prose, poetry, and drama include fantastic and fairy themes as in La Pantoufle de Cendrillon (Cinderella's Slipper, 1851), and his Arabian Nights‐inspired Les Mille et une nuits parisiennes (The Thousand and One Parisian Nights, 1876). Although considered a second‐rate talent, he gained considerable power as director of reviews like L'Artiste and administrator of the Comédie Française (1849–56), forcing a generation of dramatists and poets, including Baudelaire, to court Houssaye while they covertly ridiculed him.

— Amy Ransom

Houssaye, Arsène (1815-96). An outstanding example of the literary entrepreneur created by the rapid expansion of the press in the 19th c., Houssaye practised every literary genre, but it was in art history and criticism that he made his most significant contribution. A member during the 1830s of the literary and artistic Bohemia of Romanticism, Houssaye founded L'Artiste, which quickly became a focus for ‘l' art pour l'art’. Appointed in 1849 director of the Comédie-Française, the Romantic bohemian became a Second Empire dandy, but maintained his commitment to the Romantic dramatists of his youth, in particular the exiled Hugo, whose works he staged despite official disapproval. He was the dedicatee of Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris.

[James Kearns]