(1732-1799) playwright, spy
Pierre-Auguste Caron de Beaumarchais was a universal man of the Enlightenment who was one of the most famous playwrights of the 18th century and a secret agent who helped supply the CONTINENTAL ARMY during the Revolutionary War (1775-83). As a bourgeois social climber at the French court, he added the title “de Beaumarchais”
After he married, in his early 20s, a rich widow. Controversy surrounded almost every move in his life. He was involved in a complicated financial scheme in the early 1770s that ended in litigation and a judicial ruling against him. To win favor with the French court he handled secret negotiations for the payment of blackmail to stifle publications hostile to the French Crown in England, the Netherlands, and Germany. Although these efforts met with mixed success, Beaumarchais’s contacts in Great Britain convinced him that the RESISTANCE MOVEMENT (1764-75) and the outbreak of hostilities in North America posed a serious threat to the British Empire and a golden opportunity for France. In February 1776, Beaumarchais presented the French king with a memoranda that forcefully argued that it was in the interests of France to support the rebellion in British North America. In part influenced by this report, the French government began to aid the rebellion surreptitiously. Beaumarchais organized a private company under the name Hortalez and Cie in June 1776, which obtained one million livres from the French government, one million from Spain, and one million from investors. Despite difficulties in smuggling weapons out of France, Beaumarchais’s company sent crucial supplies to North America before the formal beginning of the FRENCH ALLIANCE in 1778, and he helped to arm the Continentals who fought at the Battles Of Trenton and Princeton (December 26, 1776, and January 3, 1777) and who compelled General John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga (October 17, 1777). By the end of the war, Beaumarchais’s company had transacted 42 million livres worth of business with the United States.
Questions, however, swirled around these transactions. To this day it remains unclear whether the initial sums provided by France were loans or grants. Moreover, although there was a settlement in 1835 with Beaumarchais’s heirs, the United States never fully paid all of its debt to Hortalez and Cie. During the war Beaumarchais worked closely with Silas Deane, who became enmeshed in accusations of profiteering and ended the conflict in disgrace.
Beaumarchais was a controversial figure for revolutionary Americans and fellow Frenchmen. About the same time that he was engaged in secret dealings and arms running, he was also writing two of the most influential plays in French history. The Barber of Seville (1773) and the Marriage of Figaro (1778), which were subsequently put into operatic form by Wolfgang Mozart, proved so inflammatory that the French government sought to stifle public performances. The plays implicitly criticized the French court and aristocracy and contributed to the explosive atmosphere of the 1780s that erupted into the FRENCH Revolution (1789-99). A republican France, however, did not make Beaumarchais’s life more settled. During the gyrations of the French government in the upheaval that followed the fall of the Bastille, Beaumarchais moved in and out of favor and was at times forced to live in exile. He returned to France in 1796 and died in 1799.
Further reading: William D. Howarth, Beaumarchais and the Theatre (London: Routledge, 1995); Brian N. Morton and Donald C. Spinelli, Beaumarchais and the American Revolution (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003).
World History
