VICTOR DUCANGE

DUCANGE, VICTOR HENRI JOSEPH BRAHAIN (1783-1833), French novelist and dramatist, was born on the 24th of November 1783 at the Hague, where his father was secretary to the French embassy. Dismissed from the civil service at the Restoration, Victor Ducange became one of the favourite authors of the liberal party, and owed some part of his popularity to the fact that he was fined and imprisoned more than once for his out-spokenness. He was six months in prison for an article in his journal Le Diable rose, ou le petit courrier de Lucifer (1822); for Valentine (1821), in which the royalist excesses in the south of France were pilloried, he was again imprisoned; and after the publication of Hélène ou l'amour et la guerre (1823), he took refuge for some time in Belgium. Ducange wrote numerous plays and melodramas, among which the most successful were Marco Loricot, ou le petit Chouan de 1830 (1836), and Trente ans, ou la vie d'un joueur (1827), in which Frédérick Lemaître found one of his best parts. Many of his books were prohibited, ostensibly for their coarseness, but perhaps rather for their political tendencies. He died in Paris on the 15th of October 1833.