Jean-François Casimir Delavigne, a highly popular and successful dramatist of the early nineteenth century, gained fame from his series of patriotic poems, the Messéniennes (The Messinian Women, 1818), and particularly from "Waterloo," which praises the glory of France under Napoleon Bonaparte. Although committed to classical theater, Delavigne wrote tragedies and comedies that reflect the transition from Classicism to Romanticism. Considered by some a better writer than Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas père and, according to Patrick Berthier in Revue d'histoire du théâtre (1993), "un précieux rempart contre l'excès romantique" (a valued rampart against the excesses of romanticism), he has been virtually eclipsed by his more-durable contemporaries.

Born in Le Havre on 4 April 1793, Delavigne was the son of a well-to-do businessman. He was trained in the classics at the Lycée Napoleon, later Henri IV, which he...