Le roi s'amuse is a play written by Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....

 in 1832. While it depicts the escapades of Francis I of France

Francis I of France

Francis I was King of France from 1515 until his death. During his reign, huge cultural changes took place in France and he has been called France's original Renaissance monarch...

, censors of the time believed that it also contained insulting references to King Louis-Philippe and banned it after one performance. The lawsuit that Hugo brought to permit the performance of the play propelled him into celebrity as a defender of freedom of speech in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

. He lost the suit, however, and the play was banned for another fifty years. Léo Delibes

Léo Delibes

Clément Philibert Léo Delibes was a French composer of ballets, operas, and other works for the stage...

 later wrote incidental music for its performance.

Giuseppe Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...

 based his opera Rigoletto on Hugo's play. Austrian authorities in Venice

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

 forced him to move the action from France to Mantua

Mantua

Mantua is a city and comune in Lombardy, Italy and capital of the province of the same name. Mantua's historic power and influence under the Gonzaga family, made it one of the main artistic, cultural and notably musical hubs of Northern Italy and the country as a whole...

.

See also Censorship in France

Censorship in France

France has a long history of governmental censorship, particularly in the 16th to 18th centuries, but today freedom of press is guaranteed by the French Constitution and instances of governmental censorship are relatively limited and isolated....

.

External links

• 1843 Frederick Lokes Slous translation at googlebooks
• Full text of the play (in French) at Project Gutenberg.