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BRIEUX, EUGÈNE (1858- ), French dramatist, was born in Paris of poor parents on the 19th of January 1858. A one-act play, Bernard Palissy, written in collaboration with M. Gaston Salandri, was produced in 1879, but he had to wait eleven years before he obtained another hearing, his Ménage d' artistes being produced by Antoine at the Théâtre Libre in 1890. His plays are essentially didactic, being aimed at some weakness or iniquity of the social system. Blanchette (1892) pointed out the evil results of education of girls of the working classes; M. de Réboval (1892) was directed against pharisaism; L'Engrenage (1894) against corruption in politics; Les Bienssaiteurs (1896) against the frivolity of fashionable charity; and L'Évasion (1896) satirized an indicriminate belief in the doctrine of heredity. Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont (1897) is a powerful, somewhat brutal, study of the miseries imposed on poor middle-class girls by the French system of dowry; Le Résultat des courses (1898) shows the evil results of betting among the Parisian workmen; La Robe rouge (1900) was directed against the injustices of the law; Les Remplaçantes (1901) against the practice of putting children out to nurse. Les Avariés (1901), forbidden by the censor, on account of its medical details, was read privately by the author at the Théâtre Antoine; and Petite amie (1902) describes the life of a Parisian shop-girl. Later plays are La Couvée (1903, acted privately at Rouen in 1893), Maternité (1904), La Déserteuse (1904), in collaboration with M. Jean Sigaux, and Les Hannetons, a comedy in three acts (1906).
BRIGADE (Fr. and Ger. brigade, Ital. brigata, Span. brigada; the English use of the word dates from the early 17th century), a unit in military organization commanded by a major-general, brigadier-general or colonel, and composed of two or more regiments of infantry, cavalry or artillery. The British infantry brigade consists as a rule of four battalions (or about 4000 bayonets) with supply, transport and medical units attached; the cavalry brigade of two or three regiments of cavalry. An artillery "brigade" (field, horse, and heavy) is in Great Britain a smaller unit, forming a lieut.-colonel's command and consisting of two or three batteries. (See Army, Artillery, Infantry, and Cavalry.) The staff of an infantry or cavalry brigade usually consists of the brigadier commanding, his aide-de-camp, and the brigade-major, a staff officer whose duties are intermediate between those of an adjutant and those of a general staff officer.
BRIGANDAGE. The brigand is supposed to derive his name from the O. Fr. brigan, which is a form of the Ital. brigante, an irregular or partisan soldier. There can be no doubt as to the origin of the word "bandit," which has the same meaning. In Italy, which is not unjustly considered the home of the most accomplished European brigands, a bandito was a man declared outlaw by proclamation, or bando, called in Scotland "a decree of horning" because it was delivered by a blast of a horn at the town cross. The brigand, therefore, is the outlaw who conducts warfare after the manner of an irregular or partisan soldier by skirmishes and surprises, who makes the war support itself by plunder, by extorting blackmail, by capturing prisoners and holding them to ransom, who enforces his demands by violence, and kills the prisoners who cannot pay. In certain conditions the brigand has not been a mere malefactor. "It is you who are the thieves"?"I Ladroni, siete voi,"?was the defence of the Calabrian who was tried as a brigand by a French court-martial during the reign of Murat in Naples. Brigandage may be, and not infrequently has been, the last resource of a people subject to invasion. The Calabrians who fought for Ferdinand of Naples, and the Spanish irregular levies, which maintained the national resistance against the French from 1808 to 1814, were called brigands by their enemies. In the Balkan peninsula, under Turkish rule, the brigands (called klephts by the Greeks and hayduks or haydutzi by the Slavs) had some claim to believe themselves the representatives of their people against oppressors. The only approach to an attempt to maintain order was the permission given to part of the population to carry arms in order to repress the klephts.
