Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai
| Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai | |
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| Born | 12 June 1760 Paris |
| Died |
25 August 1797 (aged 37) Paris |
| Occupation | Novelist, playwright, journalist |
| Nationality | French |
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Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai (12 June 1760 – 25 August 1797) was a French novelist, playwright, journalist, politician, and diplomat.
Born in Paris as the son of a stationer, he became a bookseller's clerk, and first attracted attention with the first part of his novel Les Amours du chevalier de Faublas (Paris, 1787; English translation illustrated by etchings by Louis Monzies in 1898); it was followed in 1788 by Six semaines de la vie du chevalier de Faublas and in 1790 by La Fin des amours du chevalier de Faublas. The heroine, Lodoiska, was modelled on the wife of a jeweller in the Palais Royal, with whom he had an affair. She divorced her husband in 1792 and married Louvet in 1793. His second novel, Émilie de Varmont (1791), was intended to prove the utility and necessity of divorce and of the marriage of priests, questions raised by the French Revolution - all his works tended to advocate revolutionary ideals.
He attempted to have one of his unpublished plays, L'Anoblié conspirateur, performed at the Comédie-Française, and records naïvely that one of its managers, d'Orfeuil, listened to the reading of the first three acts impatiently, exclaiming at last: "I should need cannon in order to put that piece on the stage". A sort of farce at the expense of the army of the Royalist émigrés, La Grande Revue des armes noire et blanche, had, however, better success: it ran for twenty-five nights.
Louvet was first brought into notice as a politician by his Paris justifié, in reply to a truly incendiary pamphlet in which Jean Joseph Mounier, after the removal of King Louis XVI from the Palace of Versailles to Paris in October 1789, had attacked the capital (which was still relatively peaceful), and argued that the court should be established elsewhere. This led to Louvet's election to the Jacobin Club, for which, as he wrote bitterly in his Memoirs, the qualifications were then a genuine civisme and some talent.
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