François, vicomte de Curel (born June 10, 1854, Metz, France—died April 26, 1928, Paris) was a French dramatist and novelist, one of the brightest lights of André Antoine’s famous Théâtre-Libre, which was founded, in reaction to the established French commercial theatre, as a forum for original dramatic art.
Curel, a member of an old noble family, studied engineering, but his career was interrupted by the surrender of his native province of Lorraine to Germany in 1871, and he turned to literature.
Curel’s austere dramas show the working out of social, moral, or psychological conflicts: the destructiveness of an embittered woman in L’Envers d’une sainte (1892; A False Saint); the decadence of a noble family in Les Fossiles (1892; The Fossils); the impulses of love and revenge in L’Invitée (1893; “The Guest”); capital-labour relations in Le Repas du lion (1897; “The Lion’s Meal”); and the cult of science at the expense of human value in La Nouvelle Idole (1895; “The New Idol”). Unlike the popular “thesis plays” of his time, which emphasized abstractions, Curel’s dramas of ideas emphasized the characters’ emotions and actions. After 1906, Curel abandoned writing for several years. When he resumed, his work was comic and ironic in tone. L’Âme en folie (1919; “The Soul Gone Mad”), his only popular success, was a comedy comparing human and animal emotions. Curel was elected to the Académie Française in 1918.