Georges Ohnet

Born in Paris in 1848, Georges Ohnet trained in law but turned instead to journalism and literature. After the Franco-Prussian War, he worked as editor of Le Pays and then Le Constitutionnel, building the public voice that would support his later career as a novelist and dramatist.

Ohnet became famous for his cycle Les Batailles de la vie, a series of moral and emotional novels centered on idealized characters and social conflict. His best-known work, Le Maître de forges (1882), was an enormous success with readers and was adapted for the stage, helping make him one of the most widely read French authors of his day.

Though many critics dismissed his books as conventional or overly sentimental, ordinary readers embraced them. He remained a major popular writer for decades and died in Paris in 1918, leaving behind a body of work that shows what captivated a large reading public in fin-de-siècle France.