[Émile Augustin Étienne]. French educator and writer, member of the Senate, born in Paris on the 14th of November 1819. He became professor of rhetoric at the Normal College. He afterward edited, successively, La Revue Indépendante, La Revue des Deux Mondes and Le National. He became interested in the socialism of the time, and for a work on Catholicism and Socialism, in 1850, was deprived of his office in the college, and the next year exiled. He lived in Brussels until 1859, when he returned to France and devoted himself to literature, in connection with Victor Hugo. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1876 and to the Senate in 1881, and became professor of modern literature in the College of France. Among his collected writings are a number of papers on conversation and society, and in a more serious vein, The Works of Aristophanes (1867); Benjamin Franklin (1882); The Romanticism of the Classics; and the Theater of Voltaire (1886).
