Victor Séjour -- USA

Victor Séjour was a playwright born in New Orleans, Louisiana on 2 June 1817.  His parents were Louis Victor Séjour Marou, a free coloured man from Saint-Domingue, and Héloise Philippe Ferrand, a free African American quadroon from New Orleans.  Victor’s father had served in D’Aquin’s Battalion of Free Men of Colour during the defense of New Orleans in December of 1814 and January 1815.  Louis owned a tailor shop on Chartres Street and his income was substantial enough to send Victor to be taught by Michel Seligny at his Saint-Barbre Academy in New Orleans.

At the age of nineteen he moved to Paris to continue his education and find work.  There he met members of the Parisian literary elite, including Cyrille Bisette, publisher of the black-owned journal, La Revue des Colonies.  One of Séjour stories centered on Georges, a mulatto youth who’s experiences are used to convey Sejour’s thoughts on the injustices of slavery and racism. Bisette published "Le Mulâtre", Séjour's first work, in 1837.  The story of a loyal slave exacting revenge on his cruel master /father for the death of his wife, "Le Mulâtre" contains an indictment of New World slavery that is found in none of Séjour's subsequent work as he became more enamoured of France. 

Sejour’s plays proved very popular among French audiences, but he then turned away from written fiction, and composed an ode to Napoleon in 1841 and the verse drama The Jew of Seville in 1844.  The latter cemented his reputation as a playwright; he went on to write Richard III, a Shakespeare-inspired costume drama about Richard III of England that became his most acclaimed work. 

Though Sejour had many years of success, his popularity began to wane in the 1860s, in what would be his most productive but largely unrecognised years.  In 1870 the response to his work was so poor that his play Henri de Lorraine was withdrawn from the printers.  However, during this period Sejour published his only novel Le Comte de Haag that was serialised in 1872. 

The loss of popularity took a toll on Sejour’s his health, on the 11 September 1874 he was admitted into the Municipal Hospital in Paris suffering from tuberculosis, where he died in less than three weeks, on the 20 September 1874.  He had very little money so his medical fees were paid for by the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques, and he was buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery outside Paris.

Written in French, "Le Mulâtre" had little effect on American literature, and was not even translated into English until the late 20th century. Its condemnation of slavery, however, anticipates the work of later African American writers such as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.