Pierre Beaumarchais

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Pierre Beaumarchais, oil painting by Jean-Marc Nattier. (credit: Giraudon/Art Resource, New York)

(born Jan. 24, 1732, Paris, France — died May 18, 1799, Paris) French playwright. Son of a watchmaker, he invented a clockwork mechanism and became embroiled in lawsuits over its patent; a series of witty pamphlets he wrote in his defense established his reputation as a writer. His comedy The Barber of Seville (1772) was kept off the stage for three years because it criticized the aristocracy. His Marriage of Figaro (1784) similarly censured the nobility and it, too, was initially banned. The plays became famous operas by Gioacchino Rossini and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, respectively. He founded the Société des Auteurs (1777) to enable playwrights to obtain royalty payments. His wealth led, ironically, to his temporary imprisonment during the French Revolution, an event his plays were sometimes said to have sparked.

For more information on Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, visit Britannica.com.

(b Paris, 24 Jan 1732; d there, 18 May 1799). French writer. Objecting to the rules of classical French tragedy, he wrote serious plays in simple prose; his Le barbier de Séville was set as an opera by Paisiello, Rossini and others, and Le mariage de Figaro by Mozart. His libretto Tarare (set by Salieri) has a preface proposing the subordination of music to text in opera.

The French playwright Pierre August Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799) was an outstanding dramatist of his day. His plays wittily satirized the privileged classes, the professions, and the court.

Beaumarchais was born Pierre August Caron in Paris on Jan. 24, 1732. His father, André Charles Caron, was a respected watchmaker. Pierre was the only boy among five adoring sisters and grew up lively, witty, and self-assured. Entering his father's profession, Pierre invented a mechanism which brought him the honor of becoming royal watchmaker to King Louis XV.

In 1755 Pierre made the acquaintance of Marie Madeleine Franquet, the wife of an elderly man who was clerk-comptroller in the royal household. Franquet was persuaded to yield his office to Pierre, and it was then Pierre's duty to escort the royal meat to table. So noble a calling prompted him to ennoble his name; it was at this time that he added the "de Beaumarchais." A few months later, on the death of Franquet, Beaumarchais married his widow. She died 10 months later, and in 1768 he married another wealthy widow, Geneviève Leveque, who died after 2 years of marriage and the birth of a son. Later he met Marie Thérèse Willermaula, with whom he lived for 12 years. She bore him a daughter, Eugénie.

The rapid rise of the young watchmaker into royal society, plus his sharp wit and cocksure attitude, aroused much antagonism. There were numerous attempts to humiliate Beaumarchais before the royal family; and later he repeatedly became an object of public calumny. Though friends and family adored him, he was surrounded by bitter enemies most of his life.

Court Battles

Beaumarchais gained the friendship of Pâris-Duverny, one of the great financiers of Paris, and under his guidance amassed a small fortune from speculation. Shortly before his death the financier acknowledged a debt to Beaumarchais of 15, 000 francs, but since the transaction had never been legalized, Pâris-Duverny's heir refused to pay the debt. In the ensuing legal action Beaumarchais was subject to being labeled a forger if the judgment went against him. This was the first of a series of vicious court battles in which Beaumarchais was involved.

Meanwhile Beaumarchais was thrown into prison as the result of a quarrel over an actress at the Comédie Italienne. At this point Beaumarchais became immersed in yet another legal struggle. The wife of his lawyer, Goezman, had demanded a bribe. Beaumarchais had publicized this, and Goezman retaliated by bringing an action for libel. The case was the scandal of Paris. Beaumarchais wrote hundreds of pamphlets, which were distributed throughout Paris. He pleaded his case with such ingenuity and with that he was able to turn a desperate state of affairs into a great popular success. He escaped severe punishment but suffered a loss of civil rights. Though all the judgments against him were eventually reversed, it seemed that his career as a courtier was ended. But Louis XV needed a man as shrewd as Beaumarchais and made the former watchmaker a secret agent, sending him off on wild exploits in pursuit of blackmailers throughout Europe.

Two Famous Comedies

Beaumarchais's career as a playwright began with two dramas: Eugénie (1765), based on a trip Beaumarchais had taken to Spain to chastise a young Spaniard who had jilted his sister; and Les Deux amis (1769; The Two Friends), which was a failure. With his two comedies, Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Marriage de Figaro (1784; The Marriage of Figaro), Beaumarchais achieved overwhelming success. They inspired operas by Mozart and Rossini and spread Beaumarchais's fame throughout Europe.

Both plays center on the barber, Figaro, and his master, Count Almaviva; Beaumarchais's own resemblance to Figaro is striking. Figaro is a master of intrigue; he is a rogue, an adventurer, a charmer, a heartbreaker, a smooth talker, and a delightful wit. But his antics expose the avarice of the age, and he is sensitive to its injustices.

In The Barber of Seville Figaro helps Almaviva win the hand of the young heiress, Rosine, from under the nose of her guardian, old Dr. Bartolo, who has secret plans to marry her himself. This play was the last of the private theatricals held in the Petit Trianon; Marie Antoinette played the part of Rosine.

In The Marriage of Figaro Figaro is about to be married to Suzanne, maid to Countess Almaviva (the Rosine of the earlier play). The intricate plots and counterplots of this dynamic masterpiece center on Figaro's attempts to foil his master's efforts to profit from the traditional right, as supreme lord, to preempt the husband's right with the bride before her wedding night. Several of the most charming subplots center on the erotic dreams and schemes of the teen-aged page, Chérubin. Louis XVI prohibited the play, but Beaumarchais stirred up public curiosity by constant readings. Many members of the court defended the play until the King relented, and it was at last produced, meeting a glorious reception.

Irony, verbal wit, and symmetrical plots as carefully balanced as the wheels of a watch raise these comedies far above the level of farce. Among 18th-century writers only Marivaux surpasses Beaumarchais and does so by the fertility of his imagination rather than by dramatic ability.

Once Beaumarchais had gained success as a playwright, he plunged into new financial operations. For many years he equipped a fleet that supplied arms to the American colonies in the Revolutionary War. This venture, as well as his attempt to publish the banned works of Voltaire, was largely a financial failure.

Although the social satire of his two great plays seemed to anticipate the changes that were about to take place in French society, Beaumarchais found himself singularly unprepared for the Revolution. In fact, he had just finished building an enormous mansion across from the Bastille prison, and twice the mobs came in search of him.

Beaumarchais was denounced by the revolutionist Jean Marat and thrown into prison in 1792, but by an extraordinary quirk of fate he was released just before the September massacres began. He was outside France during the worst part of the Reign of Terror, carrying out an arms mission which took him to England and Holland. When he returned to France, he was impoverished, and he died suddenly of a stroke in 1799.

Further Reading

The best biography of Beaumarchais is Cynthia Cox, The Real Figaro: The Extraordinary Career of Caron de Beaumarchais (1962). See also Elizabeth S. Kite, Beaumarchais and the War of American Independence (2 vols., 1918); Paul Frischauer, Beaumarchais, Adventurer in the Century of Women (trans. 1935); and Georges E. Lemaitre, Beaumarchais (1949). The outstanding critical study is in French: Jacques Scherer, La Dramaturgie de Beaumarchais (1954). In English the best critical work is J. B. Ratermanis and W. R. Irwin, The Comic Style of Beaumarchais (1961).

Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de (1732-99). French playwright. It is rarely appreciated that the creator of Figaro was not a professional man of letters, as the 18th c. had already begun to understand that term, but an entrepreneur with a chequered career. Initially he embraced his father's profession as a watchmaker but, when his novel escapement mechanism brought him notoriety (1753), the desire to succeed on a broader stage consumed him. Ten years later he had acquired the name de Beaumarchais, three royal offices, and the protection of Louis XV's daughters, and, not least, he had reached intimate, if mysterious, business understandings with the financier Pâris-Duverney.

‘Capitalistic’ enterprises (some more honest than others) were to dominate his whole life, gaining him considerable wealth but also a reputation as an unscrupulous adventurer and a succession of enemies who caused him serious discomfort. In 1770 he became embroiled with the ill-intentioned heir of Pâris-Duverney in a resounding lawsuit which was disastrously prolonged when Beaumarchais accused the equally ill-intentioned presiding judge, Goëzman, of corruption. Though he lost both cases, it was his four Mémoires à consulter, written against Goëzman, which exonerated him with the public and which epitomize Beaumarchais's essential traits: his combative nature, his ebullience, his refusal to be intimidated by notions of birth or authority.

If Beaumarchais constantly had the temerity to dare (‘qui dit auteur dit oseur’), it was not for himself alone, though one must add that he often did dissimulate self-interest behind high principle. It was he who, having been sentenced to (pardonable) civic degradation, saved both Louis XV and Louis XVI from scurrilous pens (1774-5); he who helped persuade the government in 1776 to enter the American War of Independence on the side of ‘suffering liberty’ and who then equipped his own fleet of vessels to supply the insurgents; it was he, the dramatist, who founded in 1777 the Société des Auteurs Dramatiques in order to ensure fair remuneration for intellectual endeavours; he who created in 1780 the Société Littéraire et Typographique in order to mastermind, and to sell, the famous Kehl edition of Voltaire's works. Many other (ad)ventures later, it was he who, as a patriotic though opportunistic Revolutionary, sought to purchase 60, 000 guns in Holland so that France could face the Coalition in 1792.

His final years were equally turbulent: suspect and imprisoned (he narrowly escaped the September Massacres), suspect again and indicted, branded as an émigré (though on government business at the time), then reduced to poverty in Hamburg, it was only in July 1796 that Beaumarchais could return to Paris, to find both house and fortune devastated. After a display of typically combative tenacity, he died with his finances almost restored to their former glory.

In a life so geared to material success, there was always time for literature. For literature was another path to prominence and esteem. It was his farce-like parades (1757-63), written for appreciative society audiences, which encouraged him to produce Eugénie, a drame larmoyant (1767) which—even rehandled—prompted Grimm to make one of his less accurate forecasts: ‘Cet homme ne fera jamais rien, même médiocre.’ Three years later, though now more confident of his talent, he attempted once more, but again without success, to reproduce current social and political reality with Les Deux Amis, ou le Négociant de Lyon. Real success came, however, with the Mémoires à consulter which are remarkable for brilliant inventiveness and sheer incandescent insolence. Here we find a polemicist, a moralist, an orator, and a satirist whose command of language and style is so assured that he was likened variously to Demosthenes, Fénelon, Juvenal, and Horace, and whose sense of drama is so acute that Voltaire was moved to exclaim: ‘Il n'y a point de comédie plus plaisante, point de tragédie plus attendrissante.’ That success could only be enhanced by Le Barbier de Séville—which lifted the comic theatre to heights unknown since Molière—and then consecrated by Le Mariage de Figaro. Unfortunately, Beaumarchais's inability to attain such heights again served only to underline the much lesser achievement of La Mère coupable (1792) with which he completed the Figaro trilogy and in which personal hatreds were the guiding muse. But this, and the even less successful opera Tarare (1787), are minor blemishes on such a singular career; few people so consistently electrified the social, political, and literary life of 18th-c. France as did Beaumarchais.

[John Renwick]

Bibliography

• G. de la Brenellerie, Histoire de Beaumarchais (1888)
• R. Pomeau, Beaumarchais, l'homme et l'œuvre (1967)

Quotes:

"Vilify, Vilify, some of it will always stick."

"Because you are a great lord, you believe yourself to be a great genius. You took the trouble to be born, but no more."

"I quickly laugh at everything for fear of having to cry."

"I hasten to laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep."

"Drinking, when we are not thirsty and making love all year round, madam; that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals."

"It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them."

See more famous quotes by Pierre De Beaumarchais

"Beaumarchais" redirects here. For the radio show, see Beaumarchais (radio show).

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
Born	Pierre-Augustin Caron 24 January 1732 Paris
Died	18 May 1799 Paris
Nationality	French
Writing period	Revolutionary France
Genres	Plays; comedy and drama
Notable work(s)	Le Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro, La Mère coupable

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (24 January 1732 – 18 May^[1] 1799) was a watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, arms dealer, and revolutionary (both French and American). He was best known, however, for his theatrical works, especially the three Figaro plays.

Contents 1 Humble beginnings 2 Business, politics, arts, and entertainment 3 Court battles and the American Revolution 4 The Voltaire revival 5 More court battles and the French Revolution 6 Private life 7 The Figaro plays 8 List of works 9 List of related works 10 References and further reading 11 External links

Humble beginnings

Beaumarchais was born Pierre-Augustin Caron, the only boy among the six children of a watchmaker. The family was comfortable and Caron had a peaceful and happy childhood, in contrast to much of his adult life. Caron left school at the age of 13 to apprentice under his father. In July of 1753, at the age of 21, he invented an escape mechanism for watches that allowed them to be made substantially more accurate and compact^[2]. One of his greatest feats was a watch mounted on a ring, made for Madame de Pompadour, a mistress of Louis XV. The invention was later recognised by the Académie des sciences, but only after a dispute with M. Lepaute, the royal watchmaker, who attempted to pass off the invention as his own.^[3]

Business, politics, arts, and entertainment

In 1758-59, Caron became the harp tutor to King Louis XV's daughters. In 1759-60, Caron met Joseph Pâris-Duverney, an older and wealthy entrepreneur. The two became very close friends and collaborated on many business ventures. Shortly after his first marriage in 1756-57, Caron adopted the name "Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais", which he derived from "le Bois Marchais", the name of a piece of land inherited by his first wife.^[3]

Assisted by Pâris-Duverney, Beaumarchais acquired the title of secretary-councillor to the King in 1760-61, thereby gaining access to French nobility. This was followed by the purchase of a second title, the office of lieutenant general of hunting in 1763. The following year, Beaumarchais began a 10-month sojourn in Madrid, supposedly to help his sister, Lisette, who had been abandoned by her fiancé, Clavijo.^[4] In the mean time, he was mostly concerned with striking business deals for Pâris-Duverney. Although Beaumarchais returned to France with little profit, he had managed to acquire new experience, musical ideas, and ideas for theatrical characters.

Court battles and the American Revolution

The passing of Pâris-Duverney in July 17, 1770 triggered a decade of turmoil for Beaumarchais. A few months before his death, the two signed a statement which cancelled all debts Beaumarchais owed Pâris-Duverney (about 75,000 pounds), and granting Beaumarchais the modest sum of 15,000 pounds.^[3] Pâris-Duverney's sole heir, Count de la Blache, took Beaumarchais to court, claiming the signed statement was a forgery. Although the 1772 verdict favoured Beaumarchais, it was overturned on appeal in the following year by a judge, magistrate Goezman, whose favour La Blache had managed to win over. At the same time, Beaumarchais was also involved in a dispute with Duke de Chaulnes over the Duke's mistress, which resulted in Beaumarchais's being thrown into jail from February to May, 1773. La Blache, took advantage of Beaumarchais's court absence and persuaded Goezman to order Beaumarchais to repay all his debts with Pâris-Duverney, plus interest and all legal expenses.

To garner public support, Beaumarchais published a four-part pamphlet entitled Mémoires contre Goezman. The action made Beaumarchais an instant celebrity, for the public at the time perceived Beaumarchais as a champion for social justice and liberty. Goezman countered Beaumarchais's accusations by launching a law suit of his own. The verdict was equivocal. On February 26, 1774, both Beaumarchais and Mme. Goezman (who sympathised with Beaumarchais) were deprived of their civil rights, while Magistrate Goezman was removed from his post. At the same time, Goezman's verdict in the La Blache case was again overturned. The Goezman case was so sensational that the judges left the courtroom through a back door to avoid the large, angry mob waiting in front of the court house.^[3]

To restore his civil rights, Beaumarchais pledged his services to Louis XV and Louis XVI. He travelled to London, Amsterdam and Vienna on various secret missions. His first mission was to travel to London to destroy a pamphlet, Les mémoires secrets d'une femme publique, that Louis XV considered a libel of one of his mistresses, Madame du Barry. Beaumarchais was also remembered for his essential support for the American Revolution. Louis XVI, who did not want to break openly with England,^[5] allowed Beaumarchais to found a commercial enterprise, Roderigue Hortalez and Co.,^[3] supported by the French and Spanish crowns, who supplied the American rebels with weapons, munitions, clothes, and provisions, which would never be paid for. Beaumarchais would deal with Silas Deane, an acting member of the Second Continental Congress's Committee of Secret Correspondence. For these services, the French Parliament reinstated his civil rights in 1776.

Statue of Beaumarchais by Louis Clausade (1895), in the IVe arrondissement of Paris

The Voltaire revival

Shortly after the death of Voltaire in 1778, Beaumarchais set out to publish Voltaire's complete works, many of which were banned in France. He purchased the rights to most of Voltaire's many manuscripts from the publisher Charles-Joseph Panckouck in February 1779. To evade French censorship, he set up printing presses in Kehl, Germany. He also purchased from the widow of John Baskerville the complete foundry of the famous English type designer. Three paper mills were also purchased by Beaumarchais. Seventy volumes were published between 1783 to 1790. While the venture proved a financial failure, Beaumarchais was instrumental in preserving many of Voltaire's later works which otherwise might have been lost.

More court battles and the French Revolution

It was not long before Beaumarchais crossed paths again with the French legal system. In 1787, he became acquainted with Mme. Korman, who was implicated and imprisoned in an adultery suit, which was filed by her husband to expropriate her dowry. The matter went to court, with Beaumarchais siding with Mme. Korman, and M. Korman assisted by a celebrity lawyer, Nicolas Bergasse. On April 2, 1790, M. Korman and Bergasse were found guilty of calumny (slander), but Beaumarchais's reputation was also tarnished.

Meanwhile, the French Revolution broke out. Beaumarchais was no longer the idol he had been a few years before. He was financially successful, mainly from supplying drinking water to Paris, and had acquired ranks in the French nobility. In 1791, he took up a lavish residence across from where the Bastille once stood. He spent under a week in prison during August 1792, and was released only three days before a massacre took place in the prison where he had been detained.

Nevertheless, he pledged his services to the new Republic. He attempted to purchase 60,000 rifles for the French Revolutionary army from Holland, but was unable to complete the deal. While he was out of the country, Beaumarchais was declared an émigré (loyalists to the old regime) by his enemies. He spent two and a half years in exile, mostly in Germany, before his name was removed from the list of proscribed émigrés. He returned to Paris in 1796, where he lived out the remainder of his life in relative peace. He is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Private life

Beaumarchais married three times. His first wife was Madeleine-Catherine Franquet (née Aubertin), whom he married on November 22, 1756, but died under mysterious circumstances only 10 months following the marriage. He later married Geneviève-Madeleine Lévêque (née Wattebled) in 1768. Again, the second Mme. de Beaumarchais died under mysterious circumstances two years later, though most scholars believed she actually suffered from tuberculosis. Beaumarchais had a son in 1770, Augustin, from his second marriage in 1770, but he also died in 1772. Beaumarchais lived with his lover, Marie-Thérèse de Willer-Mawlaz, for twelve years, before she became Beaumarchais's third wife, in 1786. Together they had a daughter, Eugénie.

In his first two marriages, Beaumarchais was accused by his enemies of poisoning them in order to lay claim to their family inheritance. Beaumarchais, though having no shortage of lovers throughout his life, was known to be caring for both his family and close friends. However, Beaumarchais also had a reputation of marrying for financial gain, and both Franquet and Lévêque were previously married to wealthy families prior to Beaumarchais. While there was insufficient evidence to support the accusations, whether or not the poisonings took place is still subject of debate.

The Figaro plays

Beaumarchais's Figaro plays comprise Le Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro, and La Mère coupable. Figaro and Count Almaviva, the two characters Beaumarchais most likely conceived in his travels in Spain, were (with Rosine, later the Countess Almaviva) the only ones present in all three plays. They are indicative of the change in social attitudes before, during, and after the French Revolution. Figaro and Almaviva first appeared in Le Sacristain, which he wrote around 1765 and dubbed "an interlude, imitating the Spanish style."^[3] His fame began, however, with his first dramatic play (drame bourgeois), Eugénie, which premiered at the Comédie Française in 1767. This was followed in 1770 by another drama, Les Deux amis.^[4]

To a lesser degree, the Figaro plays are semi-autobiographical.^[3] Don Guzman Brid'oison (Le Mariage) and Bégearss (La Mère) were caricatures of two of Beaumarchais's real-life adversaries, Goezman and Bergasse. The page Chérubin (Le Mariage) resembled the youthful Beaumarchais, who did contemplate suicide when his love was to marry another. Suzanne, the heroine of Le Mariage and La Mère, was modelled after Beaumarchais's third wife, Marie-Thérèse de Willer-Mawlaz. Meanwhile, some of the Count monologues reflect on the playwright's remorse of his numerous sexual exploits.^{[citation needed]}

Le Barbier premiered in 1775. Its sequel Le Mariage was initially passed by the censor in 1781, but was soon banned from performance by Louis XVI after a private reading. Queen Marie-Antoinette lamented the ban, as did various influential members of her entourage. Nonetheless, the King was unhappy with the play's satire on the aristocracy and over-ruled the Queen's entreaties to allow its performance. Over the next three years Beaumarchais gave many private readings of the play, as well as making revisions to try to pass the censor. The King finally relented and lifted the ban in 1784. The play premiered that year and was enormously popular even with aristocratic audiences. Mozart's opera premiered just two years later. Beaumarchais's final play, La mère was premiered in 1792 in Paris. To pay homage to the great French playwright Molière, who wrote the original title play, Beaumarchais also dubbed La Mère "The Other Tartuffe". All three Figaro plays enjoyed great success, and they are still frequently performed today in theatres and opera houses.

List of works

• 1760s - Various one-act comedies (parades) for private staging.^[4]
  • Les Député de la Halle et du Gros-Caillou
  • Colin et Colette
  • Les Bottes de sept lieues
  • Jean Bête à la foire
  • Œil pour œil
  • Laurette
• 1765(?) - Le Sacristain, interlude (precursor to Le Barbier de Séville)
• 1767 - Eugénie, drama, premiered at the Comédie Française.^[4]
• 1767 - L'Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux.^[4]
• 1770 - Les Deux amis ou le Négociant de Lyon, drama, premiered at the Comédie Française
• 1773 - Le Barbier de Séville ou la Précaution inutile, comedy, premiered in Jan. 3, 1775 at the Comédie Française
• 1774 - Mémoires contre Goezman
• 1775 - La Lettre modérée sur la chute et la critique du «Barbier de Sérville»
• 1778 - La Folle journée ou Le Mariage de Figaro, comedy, premiered in Apr. 27, 1784 at the Comédie Française
• 1784 - Préface du mariage de Figaro
• 1787 - Tarare, opera with music by Antonio Salieri, premiered at the Opéra de Paris (full-text)
• 1792 - La Mère coupable ou L'Autre Tartuffe, drama, premiered Jun. 26 at the Théâtre du Marais
• 1799 - Voltaire et Jésus-Christ, in two articles.^[4]

List of related works

• 1782 - Il barbiere di Siviglia, ovvero La precauzione inutile, music by Giovanni Paisiello, revised in 1787
• 1786 - Le nozze di Figaro, opera based on the title play, libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte and music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• 1796 - Il barbiere di Siviglia, opera based on the title play, music by Nicolas Isouard
• 1816 - Il barbiere di Siviglia, opera based on the title play, libretto by Cesare Sterbini, and music by Gioachino Rossini
• 1905 - Chérubin, opera based on the title role, music by Jules Massenet, libretto by Francis de Croisset and Henri Cain
• 1950 - Beaumarchais, comedy written by Sacha Guitry
• 1966 - La Mère coupable, opera based on the title play, music and libretto by Darius Milhaud
• 1991 - The Ghosts of Versailles, opera based loosely on La Mère coupable, music by John Corigliano, libretto by William M. Hoffman
• 1991 - Den brottsliga modern, opera based on La Mère coupable, music by Inger Wikström, libretto by Inger Wikström and Mikaael Hylin.
• 1996 - Beaumarchais l'insolent, film based on Sacha Guitry's play, directed by Édouard Molinaro

References and further reading

1. ^ He died during the evening of 17-18 May [1]; the date 18 May is most frequently seen in sources.
2. ^ Hugh, Thomas. Beaumarchais in Seville: in intermezzo. Yale University Press. 2007. pg 7
3. ^ ^{a b c d e f g} Beaumarchais: The three Figaro plays, translation and notes by David Edney, Doverhouse, 2000.
4. ^ ^{a b c d e f} Beaumarchais: Le Mariage de Figaro - comédie, with preface, biography, and annotations by Pol Gillard, Bordas, 1970.
5. ^ Brian N. Morton "Beaumarchais and the American Revolution"

• Jacques Barzun "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life - 1500 to Present"
• Lion Feuchtwanger, "Proud destiny", 1947, Viking - a novel based mainly on Beaumarchais and Benjamin Franklin, and their involvement in the American Revolution.
• Benjamin Ivry's review, 2009, of English translation of biography [2] by Maurice Lever of Beaumarchais.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Pierre Beaumarchais

• "The Insolent"
• Works by Beaumarchais at Project Gutenberg
• Pierre Beaumarchais at Find a Grave

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