Ernest Alexandre Joseph Bourget (10 March 1814 – 2 October 1864 in Thomery (Seine-et-Oise aged 50 ^[1]) was a 19th-century French playwright, lyricist and librettist. In 1847 at the Café des Ambassadeurs, Paul Henrion, Victor Parizot and Ernest Bourget refused to pay the bill as long as they would not receive anything from the performance of their works in the facility. The ensuing trial would mark the creation of the SACEM.^[2]

According to recent research^[3] it was not this legendary event that Bourget took to trial. The contemporary journal ‘Le Droit‘ tells another story. M. Bourget was refused the drink he ordered at another establishment: the Café Morel. In the evenings the proprietor, M. Morel, served only guests who ordered drinks for which the garçon could not ‘deceive the corkscrew’. The profit from a modest eau sucré was ‘too small a thing for the proprietor to be able to present music and seats through a whole evening’. Bourget was annoyed and sued M. Morel who, after two trials in Tribunal de Commerce de la Seine and one in Cour d’Appel de Paris, had been sentenced to pay a total of 800 francs. The verdicts established that the transaction costs for a systematic collection of performing right fees could be covered by amounts claimed at a level which was related to the indemnity decided on by the Parisian courts of justice. Hence, on 18 March 1850 Ernest Bourget, Victor Parizot and Paul Henrion, aided by the publisher Jules Colombier, started a mutual collecting society which later became known as La Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Éditeurs de Musique (SACEM).

Ernest Bourget is the author or co-author of several librettos for Jacques Offenbach.

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