SOURCE: "Victor Séjour, Black French Playwright from Louisiana," in The French Review, Vol. LVII, No. 2, December 1983, pp. 187-93.

In the following essay, Perret reviews the French critical reception of Séjour's plays.

Victor Séjour (1817-1874), homme de couleur libre born in New Orleans, had two plays performed at the Comédie Française and a score at other Parisian theaters. No indication of the author's racial heritage is found in them, and religion is used to plead for tolerance. His first play at the Comédie Française was Diégarias (1844), which reads like a Hugolian version of La Juive. La Chute de Séjan (1849), his second play, was his last in verse and the last on this stage. Using a sujet d'actualité, the massacre of Maronite Christians in Syria in 1860, he showed the results of Moslem fanaticism in Les Massacres de la Syrie (1860). These same...