Beaumarchais, the Man Between Revolutions by Miguel A. Faria, MD

The United States of America was born. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, who had covertly aided the American Revolution, had long recovered his civil rights. And in the France of the 1780s, the theater had become not only a center of major entertainment but also a political weapon, reaching all classes of Frenchmen.

In addition to his business, and scientific accomplishments, Beaumarchais had achieved tremendous notoriety as a playwright with his celebrated plays, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. (Composers Gioachino Rossini and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart subsequently transformed Beaumarchais’ plays into famous operas.) By the time The Marriage of Figaro opened in the Théâtre Français in 1784, Beaumarchais was nothing like the character Figaro, the barber turned valet, but rather “an ennobled magistrate of considerable wealth and influence.”

One enterprise had not been profitable for Beaumarchais—the first posthumous publication of the complete works of Voltaire, a formidable project since many of Voltaire’s works were banned in France. To avoid French censorship, the resolute Beaumarchais “established a printing press in Kehl, Germany—across the Rhine River from the French town of Strasbourg—imported Baskerville type from England and secured the Marquis de Condorcet as editor.” Beaumarchais even “tangled with affronted parties,” including Frederick the Great of Prussia, who did not want to have his correspondence with Voltaire made public. The project was repeatedly sabotaged, disrupted, and turned out to be a “commercial fiasco of titanic proportions. But it was also a cultural glory, perhaps the finest thing Beaumarchais ever did.”

If the French intelligentsia and aristocracy did not actively begin the French Revolution, they nonetheless contributed greatly to undermining the ancient regime and promoting revolutionary ideas. Beaumarchais’ plays also contributed to the demolition of the old regime, including The Marriage of Figaro, undermining Louis XVI, whom Beaumarchais had assisted so marvelously during the American Revolution as a secret agent and a spy. 

Simon Schama noted that, “While there had been plenty of boulevard comedies assailing the pretensions of seigneurial power, none had done so with such stinging hilarity.” The play was considered to be closer to a “people’s drama,” where the “lowly could laugh at the expense of the great.” Queen Marie Antoinette and most of the court wanted to see it. But when a private reading was organized, Louis XVI “rose from his chair and, in a rare fit of eloquence and prescience, declared that it was ‘detestable. It will never be played; the Bastille would have to be destroyed if the performance of the play is not to have dangerous consequences.’ ” Schama observed: “As usual, though, it was the eagerness of a section of the fashionable nobility to humiliate the court that undermined the latter’s authority.”

Beaumarchais did not neglect to humiliate the aristocracy either—that is, the same nobility that he had bought into in 1761, entitling him to use the name of his estate. Aristocrats were astonished at Figaro’s lengthy monologue in Act V when he turned his fury on Count Almaviva, the fictitious Governor of Andalusia, and stated:

No, my lord Count, you shan’t have her… you shall not have her! Just because you are a grand seigneur you think yourself a great genius. . . nobility, wealth, rank, offices! all this makes you so high and mighty! What have you done to have so much? You’ve hardly given yourself the trouble to be born and that’s about it: for the rest you’re an ordinary person while I, damn it, lost in the anonymous crowd, have had to use all my science and craft just to survive…

The perceptive French memoirist, the Baronne d’Oberkirch, wrote in 1789 that the grand seigneurs in attendance on opening night “smacked themselves across their own cheeks; they laughed at their own expense and what is even worse they made others laugh too…strange blindness.” Yet, when all the bravos died down, “the nobility began to grasp the significance of a polemic that was directed not at the monarchy or ministers, but at themselves.”

As a side note, the alleged Droit du seigneur (“right of the lord”) or jus primae noctis (“right of the first night”), was supposedly “a feudal right in medieval Europe giving the lord to whom it belonged the right to sleep the first night with the bride of any one of his vassals.” In Figaro, the depraved Count Almaviva exerts himself to exercise the right on the first night with Figaro’s bride, Suzanne. [“No, my lord Count, you shan’t have her… you shall not have her!”]But it should be mentioned that the farcical provocation, jus primae noctis, never existed in Spain as such, and historical investigators today question whether the right actually existed anywhere else, other than merely as a “tax” of sorts.

The King, who was still irritated and not amused by the play. One evening while playing cards, Louis decided that a humorous humbling of Beaumarchais would be appropriate. The King “scribbled on the back of the seven of spades that Beaumarchais should be confined not in the Bastille (the usual detention for insubordinate writers) but in Saint-Lazare, the correction center for delinquent boys.” Schama noted:

In the short term, this facetious humiliation took the wind out of Beaumarchais’ sails…In the very last years of the old regime he himself became the whipping boy of radicals and reactionaries alike.

The French Revolution came, and Beaumarchais was no longer idolized as he had been in the 1780s. He made the mistake of decrying the excesses of the Revolution, which in his view were now endangering liberty, inciting the worse side of human nature, and bringing forth violence. On August 10, 1792, the same day as the storming of the Tuileries Palace, the Paris Commune ransacked Beaumarchais’ grand house in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Beaumarchais was arrested later in the month.

Times were indeed dangerous; and many revolutionaries used police action to settle old scores. Jean Paul Marat, who hated Beaumarchais, had been the one who maneuvered to have him arrested for counter-revolutionary activities. When Beaumarchais was about to be released, Marat walked in and dispatched him to the Prison de l’Abbaye St. Germain. Once again, though, fortunate smiled on the Frenchman, and his life was saved when he was released four days before the September massacres commenced.

Beaumarchais survived the Reign of Terror and lived to see the rise of Napoleon. By the late 1790s, Beaumarchais was worn out by protecting his family from the harassment and persecution of the French revolutionary governments. He had lost most of his fortune and spent considerable time and effort attempting to get reimbursement for his out-of-pocket expenses incurred while assisting the American Revolution. In 1799, an exhausted Beaumarchais, age 67, died of an “apoplectic stroke.”

During his lifetime, he had been “magistrate and prisoner, courtier and rebel, diplomat and spy, businessman and bankrupt, publisher and playwright, insider and outsider.” Will Durant acknowledged that, “Seldom even in French history had a man led so full and varied and adventurous a life.”

In 1790, the American government began making payments on the loans owed to the French government. And in 1795, “the United States was finally settled its debts with the French government.”

Congress had also asked Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton to re-evaluate Beaumarchais’ claim of money owed to him. In a footnote, author Georges Lemaitre summed up the ending in a nutshell and wrote:

America’s debt to Beaumarchais was finally settled, after protracted and complicated negotiations, in 1835. That year, Congress gave Beaumarchais’ heirs the choice of accepting 800,000 francs as full settlement of the claim or getting nothing at all. The heirs took the 800,000 francs.

Dr. Miguel A. Faria is Associate Editor in Chief in world affairs of Surgical Neurology International (SNI) and the author of numerous books. This article is excerpted and updated from his book, Contrasting Ideals and Ends in the American and French Revolutions.

This article may be cited as: Faria MA. Beaumarchais, the Man Between Revolutions. HaciendaPublishing.com, May 23, 2025. Available from: https://haciendapublishing.com/beaumarchais-the-man-between-revolutions-by-miguel-a-faria-md/.

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