Jean-François ROGER

Jean-François Roger, most often known as François Roger, was born in Langres on 17 April 1776, the son of Didier Roger, a diocesan tax collector, and Marie Jolly. At the age of sixteen, he was imprisoned with his family during the Terror for composing and singing royalist songs, a detention whose length is reported differently across sources (between 17 and 20 months). Returning to Paris at the end of 1795, he began legal studies before turning to the theatre. Several of his comedies and comic operas were successfully staged, notably L'Épreuve délicate in 1798 and L'Avocat in 1806, the latter regarded as his most notable work. A civil servant, he held various administrative posts, at the Ministry of the Interior and later within the Imperial University, before being appointed secretary general of the Post Office in 1815. A general councillor of the Haute-Marne, he was elected deputy for that department from 1807 to 1812, and again from 1824 to 1827; he briefly represented Corsica from July 1830 before being removed from office four months later and withdrawing from political life. He collaborated with Étienne de Jouy on several librettos and plays published under the collective pseudonyms MM** and MM***. He was elected to the Académie française on 28 August 1817, to the seat formerly held by Suard, and was received on 30 November of that year by the duc de Lévis; he sat on the Dictionary commission and voted against the candidacy of Victor Hugo. He died in Paris on 1 March 1842 and is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, alongside his son, the physician Henri Louis Roger.