Henry Bataille

Who was Henry Bataille?

Félix-Henri Bataille was a French dramatist and poet. His works were extremely popular between 1900 and the start of World War I.

Bataille's parents died when he was young [1]. He went to the École des Beaux-Arts to study painting, but started writing when he was 14. Henry wrote plays and poems, but after the success of his second play, La Lépreuse, he became a playwright exclusively. Bataille's early works were about the effects of passion on human motivation and how stifling the social conventions of the times could be. For example, Maman Colibri, is about a middle-aged woman's affair with a younger man. Later, Bataille would gravitate towards the theater of ideas and social drama.

Henry Bataille was also a theorist of subconscious motivation. While he didn't use his theories in most of his own works, he helped influence later playwrights such as Jean-Jacques Bernard and the "school of silence".