Pierre Beaumarchais: Master Playwright of The Marriage of Figaro

Pierre Beaumarchais was one of the most remarkable French writers, a brilliant satirical playwright. He wrote very few comedies: only two out of the six plays that make up his entire dramatic legacy.

But those two comedies are The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. There is not a single literate person in the world today who does not know these jewels of the world's comedic classics.

The popularity of these two comedies by Beaumarchais rests on the fact that they are written with extraordinary liveliness, gaiety, wit, and charm. Together with the later The Guilty Mother (La Mère coupable), they form the celebrated Figaro trilogy, whose characters — Figaro, Count Almaviva, Suzanne, and the page Chérubin — later travelled far beyond the stage into the world of opera.

How did the Enlightenment shape Beaumarchais's work?

The life and work of Pierre Beaumarchais fell within one of the most momentous periods in the history of France, the age known as the Enlightenment. The central content of that age was a stubborn ideological struggle against feudalism and its manifestations across every sphere of public life. This ideological struggle unfolded throughout the eighteenth century in many European countries.

The Enlightenment found its brightest and fullest expression in France, where its historic task was the intellectual preparation of the French bourgeois revolution. Because that revolution carried a pan-European significance and opened a new era in human history, the French Enlightenment that prepared it became a major stage in the history of world culture. The audiences of French eighteenth-century theatre were increasingly mixed — nobles, the rising middle class, and ordinary Parisians alike — and Beaumarchais wrote directly for that broad, socially aware public.

The revival of French comedy was the achievement of Beaumarchais. Yet by the time he turned to writing comedies he was already a mature author, rich in life experience and literary practice.

Biography of Pierre Beaumarchais

The biography of Pierre Beaumarchais is especially interesting because it is intimately bound up with his creative work. Few playwrights lived a life that so closely resembled the plots of their own plays.

Early years and the family of Caron the watchmaker

Beaumarchais's real name was Pierre-Augustin Caron. He was born on 24 January 1732 in Paris, into the family of a watchmaker. Beaumarchais never received a complete education: at the age of thirteen his father took him out of school to train him in the family trade.

The young Beaumarchais felt little inclination toward the watchmaker's craft. He was drawn to poetry and music and led a frivolous life that did not sit well with the respectable master Caron. Quarrels began, ending with the father throwing his son out and only allowing him back home once the eighteen-year-old Beaumarchais gave a written pledge to devote himself to the watchmaker's trade.

Beaumarchais as inventor and master watchmaker

Beaumarchais was extraordinarily gifted: everything he set his hand to succeeded. His talent for craftsmanship and mechanics was matched by an equally restless curiosity that would later make him seem a true Renaissance man — watchmaker, musician, businessman, spy, and dramatist all in one lifetime.

Improving the mechanism of the pocket watch

Beaumarchais introduced an important improvement to the mechanism of the pocket watch — a refinement of the watch escapement mechanism that allowed for slimmer, more accurate timepieces and earned him a large clientele among the highest nobility. His customers included King Louis XV and the king's favourite, the Marquise de Pompadour. This gave Beaumarchais the right to advertise himself in 1755 as the "royal watchmaker." The invention sparked a bitter public credit dispute: the older watchmaker Jean-André Lepaute claimed the escapement as his own, and the young Caron appealed to the Royal Academy of Sciences, which ruled in his favour — an early demonstration of his gift for winning a fight against established figures.

Beaumarchais as musician and harp teacher

Beaumarchais was also a talented musician, and it was music that opened the doors of the court to him. His court career began with an invitation to give harp lessons to the four elderly princesses, the daughters of Louis XV. He proved himself an accomplished harpist and instructor, and his closeness to the princesses, who admired him, gave him a foothold at Versailles that he was quick to exploit.

Dreams of a court career and a noble title

The more successes Beaumarchais achieved as a watchmaker, the stronger grew his thirst for high standing. He dreamed of a court career, and since in the France of that time this required a noble title, he set out to acquire one.

In November 1755 he purchased a minor court office from Pierre-Augustin Franquet, the husband of one of his clients. Two months later Franquet died suddenly, and Beaumarchais married his widow. Because his wife owned a small estate called "Beaumarchais," he attached the name of this estate to his surname Caron and began to sign himself "Caron de Beaumarchais." Yet although a noble particle "de" now appeared before his name, he had not truly become a nobleman. In 1761, however, he bought the office of royal secretary for 56,000 francs, and his right to consider himself a nobleman was recognised — the decisive step in his rise from the working class into the aristocracy.

The start of Beaumarchais's court career under Louis XV

Beaumarchais used his position at court to render a service to the great financier and army contractor Pâris-Duverney, who had built a military school. For nine years Pâris-Duverney had failed to bring the king to visit his school. Beaumarchais invited his royal pupils to inspect it; the princesses praised it to the king, who soon "deigned" to visit it himself. Duverney rewarded Beaumarchais by taking him on as a partner and introducing him into the world of financial dealers. Pierre Beaumarchais learned the mechanics of monetary speculation and acquired a taste for it.

Around the same time Beaumarchais obtained the post of vice-president of a court dealing with poaching, in which he — a plebeian only yesterday — had to sit in judgment over wilful aristocrats who broke the laws of the royal hunt. Despite this, the aristocrats continued to look on him as an upstart and never missed a chance to prick him with reminders of his former trade. This lifelong tension between his humble origins and his acquired rank sharpened the class consciousness that would run through all his plays.

Beaumarchais as businessman and dealer

Beaumarchais built a substantial career as a businessman, moving with ease between the theatre, the courtroom, and international commerce. His pursuits ranged from financial speculation with Duverney to ambitious overseas ventures, and this commercial energy would later make him uniquely capable of financing a foreign war.

In 1764 an episode occurred in his life that Goethe later immortalised in the drama Clavigo. The Spanish writer José Clavijo had courted Beaumarchais's sister Lisette, who lived in Madrid, and promised to marry her once he obtained the post of royal archivist. Having secured the office, Clavijo went back on his word. On learning of this, Beaumarchais rushed to Spain to defend his slighted sister. The frightened Clavijo promised to marry Lisette but then claimed Beaumarchais had set a trap for him. Beaumarchais then disgraced his opponent so thoroughly that Clavijo lost his post and fled Madrid. The episode reveals the essential features of Beaumarchais's character — his furious energy, persistence, and ability to reach a set goal.

Beaumarchais used his stay in Spain for more than defending his sister's honour. He busied himself there with every sort of project and speculation: a plan to establish a French trading company in Louisiana; a scheme to colonise the Sierra Morena; a memorandum requesting the exclusive right to supply enslaved Africans to all the Spanish colonies; and a new plan for provisioning the Spanish armies. At the same time he launched a major political intrigue aimed at influencing the policy of the Spanish king Charles III in France's interest. None of Beaumarchais's projects succeeded, and he left Spain with nothing but musical and theatrical impressions.

Those impressions were not wasted. It was in Spain that Beaumarchais would later set the action of his comedies. The soil of Spain gave his plays their distinctive colour, and this trip proved the true source of inspiration for the Figaro plays.

Lawsuits and the famous Memoirs of Beaumarchais

The legal battles of Beaumarchais transformed him from a court careerist into a national hero, and his account of them — the Memoirs — revealed the satirical genius that would soon produce Figaro. To be believed by the progressive public, Beaumarchais had to show his attitude toward the order prevailing in France, and this only happened once he had tasted the charms of that old-regime order for himself.

A few months after the staging of his early drama The Two Friends, his patron Pâris-Duverney died, leaving his fortune to Count La Blache, his great-nephew through the female line. He did not forget Beaumarchais, bequeathing him 75,000 francs and instructing his heir to pay 23,000 francs still owed from their joint financial dealings. But La Blache, who detested Beaumarchais, not only refused to pay but accused him of forging the document, which bore only Duverney's signature.

The case went to court and dragged on. Beaumarchais won in the first instance. La Blache then appealed to the Parlement of Paris, the supreme judicial body of old France. The rapporteur assigned to the case was one of the leading jurists of the day, Goëzman. Knowing that no lawsuit proceeded without bribes, Beaumarchais tried to pay Goëzman, but the judge — already paid by La Blache — avoided him. Beaumarchais then acted through Goëzman's wife, passing her, through an intermediary, 215 gold écus and a diamond-studded gold watch. The bribe failed: the Parlement decided in favour of La Blache and ordered Beaumarchais to pay 50,000 francs plus costs. Lacking the cash, he saw his property seized.

Beaumarchais's position was desperate, and even the princesses ceased to protect a man who had acquired a bad reputation. He therefore chose to appeal to public opinion. The Parlement of Paris, long an independent body opposed to royal power, had shortly before been crushed by Chancellor Maupeou and turned into a purely bureaucratic organ, against which every progressive person in France protested. No one had the civic courage to speak openly against the Maupeou parlement — no one, that is, except Pierre Beaumarchais.

He began telling everyone that Goëzman took bribes. Alarmed, the parlement charged him with slander to defend its honour. Beaumarchais wrecked their plans by exposing the affair to the widest public. He issued his Memoirs against Councillor Goëzman, published in five installments in 1773–1774. In them he described what went on behind the scenes at the parlement and set out a chronicle of the trial in a sharp, pamphleteering style. Here Beaumarchais revealed the gift of a first-class humourist and satirist that no one had suspected in him. In brilliant satirical portraits, Count La Blache, the Goëzman couple, the venal journalist Marin, and others paraded before readers, each growing into a typical figure.

The witty and biting book won enormous success among the broadest circles of readers. It earned rapturous praise from that greatest master of the pamphlet, Voltaire:

"I have never seen anything bolder, stronger, more comic, more interesting, or more crushing to an opponent than the Memoirs of Beaumarchais. He fights ten or twelve enemies at once and lays them low as easily as, in the farce, Harlequin the Savage thrashes a whole squad of policemen."

The Memoirs brought Beaumarchais the recognition of every progressive person in France, who now ceased to see in him a court sycophant. He became a famous writer who had dared to strike a terrible blow at the French state order — and yet he had not written a single one of his celebrated comedies. When the parlement finally had to rule on his case, it settled on a formal "censure" of both Beaumarchais and Goëzman's wife, but the reading of the verdict was met with the indignant cries of the crowd. Beaumarchais became the hero of the day, greeted with applause on the streets; the Prince de Conti called him a "great citizen" and invited him to dinner. Soon Goëzman resigned and the Maupeou parlement was dissolved. Above all, the writing of the Memoirs had revealed the true nature of Beaumarchais's talent.

Beaumarchais as playwright and the creator of Figaro

Beaumarchais confirmed his gift by writing a genuine comedy, The Barber of Seville, and with it he gave the world Figaro — the resourceful barber whose name became a byword for the quick-witted man of the people. The character of Figaro is, in many ways, Beaumarchais himself: a commoner of dazzling ingenuity who out-manoeuvres his social betters, the same energy and defiance that carried the author through his own courtroom battles. The name Figaro, evoking the barber's trade with its long tradition of the clever servant, gave the eighteenth-century stage one of its most original creations.

The Barber of Seville

The Barber of Seville has a long creative history, and after many revisions it was warmly received by Voltaire, Diderot, and even Grimm, who had spoken so hostilely of Beaumarchais's first two plays. The comedy immediately entered the golden stock of the French classical repertoire in France and has remained there to this day. In Russia, The Barber of Seville was first staged in Moscow, at the Maddox Petrovsky Theatre, in 1782.

In its plot, The Barber of Seville offered nothing new. The story of how a young rake falls in love with a beautiful girl living in the house of a jealous guardian who intends to marry her himself, and how, with the help of a clever servant, the youth wins the girl away from the guardian and marries her, had been worked out many times in the theatres of various countries. But if the plot scheme is commonplace, the characters are wholly original. The play later inspired the celebrated opera Il barbiere di Siviglia by Gioacchino Rossini, whose Figaro remains one of the best-known figures in all of opera.

The Marriage of Figaro

The critical, exposing features sketched in The Barber of Seville are greatly intensified in Beaumarchais's second comedy, The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro. He drafted the plan of his second comedy while publishing The Barber of Seville; in the preface to that first play he speculated about how the story of Figaro might be continued, setting out everything that would later fill The Marriage of Figaro. The Prince de Conti, having read the preface, advised Beaumarchais to put it on the stage.

In its construction, The Marriage of Figaro is far more complex than The Barber of Seville, blending elements of farce, comedy of intrigue, comedy of manners, and even sentimental bourgeois drama. This does not mean, as many bourgeois critics claim, that The Barber of Seville is the finer play; such a conclusion ignores the chief element of The Marriage of Figaro — its profound social and satirical content, its bold servant characters and its critique of aristocratic privilege. With this comedy Beaumarchais stepped beyond Enlightenment drama and heralded the beginning of revolutionary drama, which is why The Marriage of Figaro may justly be called the stormy petrel of the French Revolution.

Beaumarchais waged an exceptionally long and stubborn struggle to have his play staged. If The Barber of Seville reached the stage only after three years, the battle over The Marriage of Figaro lasted a full five. The comedy passed through the hands of several censors who persistently forbade its production, and these bans only inflamed the audience's curiosity, which Beaumarchais skilfully fanned by sharing its most striking satirical scenes.

He drew even the very figures the comedy mocked into taking an interest, and won as supporters of its production Queen Marie-Antoinette and several members of the royal family. Yet the comedy also had authoritative opponents, including the whole senior administration and police, as well as King Louis XVI. Loathing the comedy, he declared in 1782:

"This is detestable; it will never be played."

When Beaumarchais was told of the king's attitude, he is said to have exclaimed:

"Ah, if the king is against my play, then it will certainly be staged."

The tireless author's efforts were at first fruitless. In June 1783 the actors of the Comédie-Française were invited to perform The Marriage of Figaro at the court theatre in Versailles, but the king cancelled the performance just before the curtain rose. Some time later, however, a private performance took place at the mansion of de Vaudreuil, attended by the entire court. This was preceded by a fresh review of the play by the historian Gaillard, who declared it too merry to be dangerous, since all uprisings and political conspiracies, in his view, had always been

"conceived, prepared, and carried out by men who were restrained, gloomy, and secretive."

After this performance, permitted by the king himself, it became difficult to keep insisting on the ban. Following a new review by three censors, the long-awaited premiere finally took place on Tuesday, 27 April 1784. An audience worked up by the long wait kept vigil for a full day before the Comédie-Française; the barriers were broken, and the guards pushed aside. The success was gigantic. The censorship ordeal had sharpened the comedy's political edge in the eyes of the audience. The slightest phrase that could be read as a political hint drew demonstrative applause; the public received the comedy as a defence of liberty and equality against despotism and the outworn privileges of rank. The play ran 68 times in a row and brought the theatre nearly half a million livres — record figures for the eighteenth century.

The revival of French comedy

With Figaro, Beaumarchais accomplished the revival of French comedy, restoring to the genre a wit and social force it had lacked since the age of Molière. His comedies stand comparison, in their lasting popularity, with the works of the greatest dramatists — a French counterpart, in comic register, to what Shakespeare achieved on the English stage.

Beaumarchais was now at the height of his fame; the watchmaker of yesterday had become a political tribune. This could not go unpunished in old-regime France. The Count of Provence, the future king Louis XVIII, attacked him anonymously with vile slanders, to which Beaumarchais sharply replied, guessing the source. The Count of Provence complained to his "august" brother, and the king, sitting at the card table, scribbled on the seven of spades an order to imprison Beaumarchais in Saint-Lazare, where young debauchees were confined. This crude insult to the greatest writer of France provoked an outburst of public indignation. Frightened by the resonance, the king ordered his release after five days. Audiences applauded Figaro's words rapturously:

"Because they cannot destroy the mind, they take revenge on it by humiliating it."

Beaumarchais as secret agent and diplomat of France

Beaumarchais served the French crown as a secret agent, undertaking delicate diplomatic and espionage missions for both Louis XV and Louis XVI. Trusted with the King's secret service, he travelled across Europe to suppress libellous pamphlets aimed at the court and to gather intelligence, moving between London, Vienna, and Amsterdam under various guises. His combination of theatrical cunning, financial skill, and personal daring made him an ideal agent, and it was this reputation for discreet effectiveness that prepared his greatest secret undertaking of all — the covert support of the American Revolution.

Beaumarchais and the financing of the American Revolution

Beaumarchais helped finance and arm the American Revolution, outfitting ships at his own expense and dispatching them across the Atlantic to aid the North American colonies in their revolt against the British Empire. To conceal the French government's involvement, he set up a fictitious trading house, Rodrigue Hortalez et Cie, through which muskets, cannon, gunpowder, and supplies flowed to the rebel armies — a covert arms-smuggling operation on a vast scale that reached the Americans in the crucial early years of the war.

Beaumarchais actively assisted the birth of the young bourgeois republic — the United States of America. In January 1779 he received a letter of thanks from John Jay, president of the United States Congress, who wrote:

"You have won the esteem of a rising republic; you have earned the applause of the New World."

Nonetheless, Congress refused to reimburse Beaumarchais for his expenses in supplying the insurgent armies, and the debt owed him for that aid remained unsettled long after his death.

A second undertaking on the eve of the revolution related directly to literature: the publication of the complete works of the great Enlightenment thinker Voltaire. Since Voltaire's writings were banned in France, Beaumarchais printed them at his own press in the small border town of Kehl and smuggled them into France. He used the fine typefaces of the English printer John Baskerville for the edition, which played an important role in propagating Voltaire's ideas.

Beaumarchais during the French Revolution and the Terror

When the long-awaited French Revolution broke out, Beaumarchais — though he had been its herald — was groundlessly suspected of sympathies for the royal house and was even imprisoned together with a group of royalists. On his release he petitioned the revolutionary government to make use of his experience in supplying the army with weapons. During a trip to Holland on this business, however, his name was placed on the list of émigrés, and his wife and daughter were arrested during the height of the Terror.

Beaumarchais returned to Paris only under the Directory, in 1796. His resilience — the same energy that had carried him through lawsuits, prison, and exile — allowed him to survive the most dangerous years of the Revolution when many of his contemporaries perished. Having played a substantial part in preparing the revolution, Beaumarchais drew back from it once the revolutionary initiative passed into the hands of the people. This weakening of his revolutionary mood is reflected in his last works — the opera Tarare and the drama The Guilty Mother.

Tarare, composed two years before the revolution in 1787, is an opera saturated with anti-despotic sentiment, in which Beaumarchais set the popular hero Tarare against the eastern despot Atar, much as Figaro is set against Almaviva. The Guilty Mother (La Mère coupable), written during the revolution, differs in genre from the first two parts of the trilogy: where those were comedies, this is a sentimental family drama, and at a moment when great social and political questions gripped France, its retreat into private life led to failure at its first performance in 1792. Five years later, under the Directory, when family dramas came back into fashion, it was performed with great success by the finest actors of the Comédie-Française. Moderate in tone, it preaches the reconciliation of the higher and lower estates, yet its defence of the rights of women shows that Beaumarchais remained faithful to the humane, progressive traditions of the Enlightenment to the end.

The death of Beaumarchais and his legacy

Beaumarchais died in 1799, a few months before Napoleon seized power, and was later buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. He passed away at the height of his reputation as a writer, businessman, and public figure — the watchmaker's son who had risen to argue with kings, arm a revolution across the ocean, and give the world one of its most enduring stage characters.

Although Beaumarchais himself did not find the strength to follow the revolution's most advanced, plebeian elements, he did not become a renegade to the liberating ideas of the Enlightenment either. Until the end of his days he remained faithful to the best moral and ethical ideals of that age. The revolutionary comedies he wrote have lost none of the fighting force they had at the moment they first appeared on the stage; they entered the golden stock of revolutionary classics and will always hold one of the foremost places within it.

The historical significance and cultural impact of Beaumarchais

The historical significance of Pierre Beaumarchais lies in the way his life and work mirrored the whole epoch of preparing and carrying out the greatest of all bourgeois revolutions — the French. As a truly great artist, he captured in his trilogy some essential aspects of revolutionary reality, above all the enormous role that the popular masses played in the revolution. His Figaro became a symbol of the common man's challenge to the privileges of the Ancien Régime, whose emblem, the fleur-de-lis, adorned the very court that Beaumarchais served and subverted at once.

The cultural legacy of Beaumarchais extends far beyond the theatre through the operatic adaptations of his plays. The Barber of Seville became Il barbiere di Siviglia by Gioacchino Rossini, and The Marriage of Figaro became Le nozze di Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — two of the most beloved operas ever written. Through Mozart and Rossini, the characters Beaumarchais invented reached audiences across the world, and companies such as English Touring Opera keep them alive on the stage to this day.

Beaumarchais as a man of the Renaissance

Beaumarchais embodied the ideal of the Renaissance man, mastering an astonishing range of pursuits in a single lifetime: watchmaker and inventor, musician and harp teacher, courtier and financier, secret agent and diplomat, publisher and, above all, dramatist. Few figures of the eighteenth century combined such practical ingenuity with such literary brilliance, and this versatility — captured in fictionalised form in works of popular culture, much as Mozart's era was dramatised in the film Amadeus — is what makes Beaumarchais one of the most fascinating personalities of his age. If you enjoy exploring how great lives intersect with the sweep of the past, our wider History collection and our Stories offer many more portraits of remarkable people and their times.