Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin-Caron de

Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin-Caron de (1732–99), French dramatist, whose first play, Eugénie (1767), had a moderate success (after rewriting) at the Comédie-Française, as did Les Deux Amis (1770). His first important play, Le Barbier de Séville, originally intended as a play with music, and later used as the basis of an opera by Rossini, was refused by the Comédie-Italienne, which thought its hero a caricature of their leading actor, formerly a barber. It was, however, accepted by the Comédie-Française soon after its completion in 1772, but constantly delayed and not acted until 1775, before an audience which still felt secure from the Revolution which it presaged, and which forced Beaumarchais himself into temporary exile. Nine years later, after an even harder struggle with the censorship because of its provocative political satire, Le Mariage de Figaro (1784)—on which Mozart based his opera—was finally seen by a public which was beginning to realize the dangers that lay before it. Figaro, older and wiser, no longer criticizes an individual, as in the earlier play, but society as a whole.

These two plays sum up Beaumarchais's whole life and character. He is himself the precocious page, the handsome Almaviva—he was three times married—and above all Figaro, the jack-of-all-trades. His later dramatic works are less interesting, though he completed the Figaro trilogy with La Mère coupable (1795). More important was the part he played in breaking the stranglehold of the actors on their authors, and in instituting, through the Société des Auteurs, of which he was the founder, the system of payment for plays by means of a fixed percentage on takings (see ROYALTY).