Joseph Bouchardy, 1810–70, ‘le grand impresario des terreurs du boulevard’, was the author of a score of drames and a successor to Pixérécourt, whose plays he read avidly in his youth.

Bouchardy's plays cannot be examined without a look at the audiences for which they were designed. All but a handful were staged at either the Ambigu or the Gaîté. These two theatres, classified by Napoleon as places where melodramas might be performed, had originally been situated next to one another on the Boulevard du Temple. After a fire in 1827 the new Ambigu was reconstructed on the Boulevard Saint Martin, almost next door to the Theatre de la Porte Saint Martin. The Gaîté was burnt down in 1835, and the new theatre which rose again on the same site, had, like the Ambigu, an enlarged seating capacity. These new buildings were being erected at a time when the boulevards were becoming more fashionable places of resort and losing much of their earlier fairground appearance. The bourgeois take-over of the theatre of the boulevards is best symbolised by the persistent popularity and the ideological values of the plays of Eugène Scribe at the Gymnase.