Maurice Pottecher was a French author and poet, and also a theatre owner who occasionally used the pseudonym Martin Petitclerc. After graduating from the college of Epinal, he went to Paris where he met Alphonse Daudet, Romain Rolland and many other literary figures. He also became a close friend of Paul Claudel. In Paris, he started as a literature critic for La Petite République. In the 1890s, he returned to his hometown Bussang. Pottecher wrote plays for a theatre, where the voluntary actors were employed workers from the factory run by his brother, which became an amateur theatre for the local public. He also wrote plays and social character pieces for the Théâtre du Peuple in Bussang, which he founded in 1895 and still exists. Two years later, he built a second one near Gérardmer, also in the Vosges Mountains. Although he was a frequent guest at the major stages in Paris, he declined the offer to become a member of the prestigious Academy Goncourt. On the occasion of the International Olympic Festival at the Sorbonne in May 1911, Maurice Pottecher’s especially written apologetic one-act play The Philosopher and the Athletes was performed. The text was published as a 24-page supplement of the December 1911 issue of the Revue Olympique. This may also have been his entry in 1912.
France