French novelist, poet and man of letters, born at Bruyères (Aisne), near Laon, on the 28th of March 1815. His real surname was Housset. In 1832 he found his way to Paris, and in 1836 he published two novels, La Couronne de bluets and La Pécheresse. He had many friends in Paris, among them Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier, and he wrote in collaboration with Jules Sandeau. He produced art criticism in LHistoire de la peinture flamande et hollandaise (1846); semi-historical sketches in Mlle. de la Vallière et Mme. de Montespan (1860) and Galerie de portraits du XVIIe siècle (1844); literary criticism in Le Roi Voltaire (1858) and his famous satirical Histoire du quarante et unième fauteuil de lacadémie française (1855); drama in his Comédiennes (1857); poetry in his Symphonie des vingt ans (1867), Cent et un sonnets (1873), &c.; and novels, Les Filles dÈve (1852) and many others. In 1849, through the influence of Rachel, he was entrusted with the administration of the Théâtre Français, a position he filled with unfailing tact and success until 1859, when he was made inspector-general of works of art. He died on the 26th of February 1896.
His Confessions, souvenir; dun démi-siècle appeared in 18851891. See also J. Lemaître, Arsène Houssaye (1897), with a bibliography.
His son, Henry Houssaye (18481911), the historian, was born in Paris. His early writings were devoted to classical antiquity, studied not only in books but on the actual Greek sites which he visited in 1868. He published successively Histoire dApelles (1867), a study on Greek art; LArmée dans la Grèce antique (1867); Histoire dAlcibiade et de la république athénienne depuis la mort de Périclès jusquà lavènement des trente tyrans (1873); Papers on Le Nombre des citoyens dAthènes au Vème siècle avant lère chrétienne (1882); La Loi agraire à Sparte (1884); Le Premier Siège de Paris en 52 av. J.-C. (1876); and two volumes of miscellanies, Athènes, Rome, Paris, lhistoire et les murs (1879), and Aspasie, Cléopatre, Théodora (6th ed., 1889). The military history of Napoleon I. then attracted him. His first volume on this subject, called 1814 (1888), went through no fewer than forty-six editions. It was followed by 1815, the first part of which comprises the first Restoration, the return from Elba and the Hundred Days (1893); the second part, Waterloo (1899); and the third part, the second abdication and the White Terror (1905). He was elected a member of the French Academy in 1895. The fifty-fifth edition of his Waterloo appeared in 1906, and after his death were published Jéna et la Campagne de 1806 (1912), and La Patrie Guerrière (1913). He died in Paris on the 23rd of September 1911.
See L. Sonolet, Henry Houssaye (1905).