René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt

René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt (22 January 1773 – 27 July 1844) was a French theatre director and playwright, active at the Théâtre de la Gaîté and best known for his modern melodramas such as The Dog of Montarges, the performance of which at Weimar roused the indignation of Goethe.

He was born at Nancy into a Lorraine family of rural nobles. His parents, after the sale of the Pixerécourt estate, bought another in the Vosges, Saint-Vallier, in the hope of recovering their feudal and manorial rights, and possibly in time acquiring a marquisate. The château was in poor condition, the kind which "could make you a marquis and a mendicant in the same instant" in the words of Jules Janin. The family's hopes were ruined by the Revolution. At the age of twenty, in 1793, Pixerécourt abandoned his studies of law and left Nancy "on the day of the King's death" to meet his father at Koblenz and enter the Breton regiment as an officer in the army of Condé. At the end of the year he returned to France to make his fortune, entering via Nancy and arriving in Paris on 27 February 1794 at the height of the Reign of Terror. After the denunciations of the Committee of Public Safety, Pixerécourt owed his life to the protection of Lazare Carnot who, for nearly two years, employed him as a secretary in the Ministry of War. He then obtained two posts, one in the Administration of Domains and another in that of Registrations, both of which he was to retain for thirty years and which allowed him, particularly at the beginning, the pursuit of a career in the theatre. He would eventually become director of the Théâtre royal de l’Opéra-Comique (from 1824 to 1827) and of the Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique.

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