Coppée, François (1842-1908). Now chiefly remembered as one of the Parnassian jury which in 1875 excluded work by Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Cros from the third volume of the Parnasse contemporain (1876), Coppée was one of the best-known poets and dramatists of the 1870s and 1880s. His play Le Passant enjoyed enormous success in 1869, due in part to its revelation of Sarah Bernhardt. In successive volumes of poetry, notably Intimités (1868), Poèmes modernes (1869), and Les Humbles (1872), he drew upon the descriptive realism he admired in Parnassian poetry to create a picturesque, idealized representation of working-class Paris life which helped to establish a tradition of popular poetry.

[James Kearns]

(fräNswä' kôpā') , 1842–1908, French poet and dramatist. He won fame with the one-act comedy Le Passant (1869, tr. 1881), in which Sarah Bernhardt made her first successful appearance. His early verse, as in Le Reliquaire (1866), linked him with the Parnassians; his later work, as in Les Humbles (1872), is sentimental and tells of the sorrows of the poor. La Bonne Souffrance (1898), a religious novel, was written after his return to Catholicism.