Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love at all seasons, madam: that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was an 18th century French playwright and businessman who wore powdered wigs, played the harp, drank fine wines, designed pocketwatches, and hung out in the salons of Paris with all of the finest nobles and ladies of King Louis' court sipping Chandon and telling dirty jokes with Voltaire. He wrote The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, two plays so successful that Mozart ended up adapting them into operas, and, when he wasn't doing living it up in high society doing shots with the royal family and hooking up with every eligible contessa in the twenty arrondissements, he also worked as a badass undercover French spy, was once wounded in a swordfight while trying to defend the honor of Marie Antoinette, smuggled weapons to aid the American Revolution, escaped prison during the French Revolution, and was such a badass master of espionage and subversion that the CIA has a biography of him on their official website.
Let's take a minute here to appreciate how bonkers it is that the dude who wrote The Marriage of Figaro was also almost single-handedly responsible for providing an estimated 90 percent of the weapons and equipment that the American Colonial Army used to defeat the British at the Battle of Saratoga in October of 1777.
Born in Paris on January 24, 1732, Pierre Caron was the son of a humble watchmaker. Pierre was nice, fun at parties, funny, attractive, and always came across as a pretty happy dude, and pretty much everyone that met him liked him almost immediately. He grew up learning music, writing stories, and apprenticing under his father, and when he was 21 years old he invented some kind of watch gear that was much smaller and more accurate than anything that was being used in Paris at the time. His dad's shop started selling smaller-than-normal watches, and, since everyone thought this was the shit, the Royal Watchmaker for King Louis XV was like, "fuck it, I'm stealing this" and started making watches using Pierre's patent.
Naturally, Pierre responded by writing this big huge treatise about how this was bullshit, how the aristocracy is taking advantage of the little guy, and how lame it was that this Royal Watchmaker asshole was ripping off his idea. Then he published that article in the Paris newspaper and filed a formal grievance with the Royal French Academy of Sciences, arguing that his copyright was infringed, etc.
The people who read the treatise thought it was awesome. They loved him for doing it, thought he was funny, talented, a great writer, and a good dude, and suddenly Pierre became super popular across Paris – to the point where the King himself heard what was going on, and was like, "Ok, dude, how about you make a watch for the Madame de Pompadour, and we'll see how good it is."
Pierre invented and constructed a watch so small she could wear it as a ring.
The King hired him to replace the Royal Watchmaker pretty much immediately.
Beaumarchais invents the Apple Watch.
Pierre Caron made watches for the King and Queen, and then he got a job teaching their daughters how to play the harp. When he wasn't instructing the Four Princesses of France in proper instrument-fingering techniques, he was also writing plays that were doing pretty decently on the Parisian stage and writing a bunch of shit that trashed-talked any nobles who were annoyed with the fact that Pierre was rising so fast in French society (and who were also probably pretty annoyed that he kept sleeping with all their wives). He married a noblewoman, the Countess De Beaumarchais, took her title as his, and basically had gone from Average Dude to BFFs with Louis Quatorze in less than a year.
They were such good bros, in fact, that in 1773 the King started sending Beaumarchais out on some secret undercover spy missions to other countries. But, since this is France we're talking about, the French James Le Bond missions were things like, "Hey, some asshole in England is printing up a bunch of pamphlets talking about how I'm hooking up with a bunch of mistresses, so can you go shut that down?" Which, for real, was a thing Beaumarchais had to do. He traveled to London, figured out who was printing these pamphlets, broke into the building, smashed the printing press templates, set all the pamphlets on fire, and then burned the building to the ground. A few years later Beaumarchais went to Holland to track a guy who was trying to blackmail Louis' daughter-in-law, Marie Antoinette, and destroy the blackmail evidence. Beaumarchais hunted the guy down, chased him through Germany, into the forests of Austria, and ended up in a fucking swordfight that left him wounded and incarcerated in a prison in Vienna. He succeeded in his mission, however, and the King personally ransomed Beaumarchais from the Austrians and brought him back to Paris.
The way Beaumarchais tells the story, he's the guy on the right. But he's also a professional fiction writer, and we have no other account of what happend in Austria, so who knows.
When he wasn’t doing black-ops shit to avenge the honor of the French Royal Family, Beaumarchais wrote a play called The Barber of Seville. He finished it in 1773, but didn't get it on stage until 1775. When it came out, he packed the playhouse of Paris and… everyone fucking hated it and it was a total failure.
So he cut it down, took out the parts everyone got annoyed by (the entire Third Act was apparently just Beaumarchais listing off everyone he hated and airing his grievances against everyone who ever wronged him… critics said his long scenes of uninterrupted virulent ranting tended to go on a bit long), tweaked some dialogue, re-designed the Sonic the Hedgehog CGI, and re-released it to the public.
It blew everyone's balls to the back of the auditorium, everyone loved it, and to this day your significant other is still going to drag your ass to go see that shit any time some local community theater puts on a production of it.
Ok, so in 1775 Beaumarchais is up in England trying to investigate some other blackmail plot, and he starts hearing about this brewing Revolution over in the American Colonies. Beaumarchais is and has always been down with The People – he secretly thinks all aristocrats are complete thundering dumbasses, but he also wasn't stupid enough to tell them to go dry-hump themselves with an icepick when they offered him money, power and influence – and he's super on board with it. He starts going to secret meetings of anti-Royalist Londoners, realizes he has the opportunity to fuck up not just the aristocracy, but the British aristocracy, and he's super in. And when the actually shooting starts in Lexington and Concord, all Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais wants to do is help the Americans win their independence.
Unfortunately for him, the new King of France – Louis the Sixteenth – wasn't really down with the idea of France openly supporting the Americans against the British. Sure, Louie wanted to kill the English as much as any red-blooded Frenchman, but France still hadn't really recovered from the Seven Years' War, and the people were starting to get a little unhappy with the Kings of France (more on that soon), so he understandably wanted to avoid an expensive and bloody war against the most powerful nation in Europe.
Pierre argued his point, aggressively, called on his years of service to the Crown, made every convincing argument he could, and, eventually, he got a compromise:
Louis XVI would give Pierre de Beaumarchais a million francs, cash, to help the American cause. But the money would be completely under the table, and if Beaumarchais was caught, Louis would Mission Impossible disavow any knowledge of the event and Beaumarchais would be hanged as a spy or whatever.
Beaumarchais agreed. Then he went to Spain and convinced them to give him a million francs as well.
Then he built a front company that smuggled 25,000 guns to the American revolutionaries.
In 1777, a fleet of twelve merchant ships arrived in New Hampshire. In their cargo holds were 200 cannons, thousands of muskets, and enough gunpowder, blankets, uniforms, and shoes to equip an army of over twenty thousand soldiers. The Americans gave him nothing back in return, but he didn't care – he just sent those ships to the West Indies to buy rum, sugar, and indigo, which they then brought back to Holland and traded for more guns and ammo. Then they just kept doing this for the next year and a half, until Beaumarchais' fleet was 40 ships strong and carrying enough armaments and weaponry to win a war against the most dominant military force in the world. He worked with American Blockade Runners, became pen pals with Ben Franklin, and basically funded and supplied the entire Colonial Army throughout all of the American Revolution, under the table, for no real reason other than that he wanted to fuck up the aristocracy in general and the British in particular. He barely broke even on the entire endeavor.
The statistic I love the most is that when Saratoga went down – the deciding battle of the war, the one that held off an entire British column, cut off their ability to bring troops south from Canada, and secured New England from enemy occupation – nearly every American soldier was wearing a uniform and carrying a Charleyville rifle that had been shipped here by Roderigue Hortalez and Company, the fake business Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais had put together to back the Revolution. Beaumarchais loved that fact too — when he heard about the battle he got so pumped up that he jumped in his horse-drawn carriage and peeled out at max speed to tell the King what had happened. Unfortunately for him, his horses and rims hadn’t been properly tuned to drift around the sharp corners of the Parisian streets, so he flipped his cart and hurt himself in the crash.
By 1778 the French had entered the war on the side of the Americans, and Beaumarchais' fleets were now sailing around with French Royal Navy escorts, so with that more or less running itself he sat down and wrote The Marriage of Figaro. It's a comedy that makes fun of aristocrats, and when Louis XVI read it he hated it so much that he didn't let Beaumarchais put it on until 1784 – six years after he wrote it. Figaro is a sequel to the Barber of Seville, featuring the same main character (there's a third one as well, but the Figaro Trilogy is like the Terminator movies where the first two are the only ones worth talking about). It blew Mozart's mind so hard that the dude wrote an opera about it two years later, so you can imagine what it did for the regular schlubs who saw it.
After his massive success with Figaro, Beaumarchais continued to write plays, ran a bunch of businesses, and made a ton of money doing business-related things, such as, uh… endeavors. And… ventures? I don't know how people make money off business. If I did I probably wouldn't be writing these articles for a living.
Beaumarchais was also friends with the great French author Voltaire, and when Voltaire died Beaumarchais bought the guy's entire works from his family and then published all of it, even the unpublished stuff, in a huge 70-volume edition. It didn't sell well, and he lost money on the deal, but by doing this he pretty much single-handedly preserved the works of one of France's greatest literary geniuses, so I'm counting this one as a win.
The French Revolution started in 1789, backed by the same people who loved The Marriage of Figaro so much, and Beaumarchais was super on board with it. He tried to smuggle in 60,000 muskets from Holland to arm the revolution, but that didn't work out, and when the Revolution got all stabby and insane they actually even imprisoned Beaumarchais under some dumb fucking charge like that the Voltaire books had been published in Germany or some shit. One of Beaumarchais (many) mistresses found a way to spring him from Jacobin Prison, however, and they fled the country and spent two years in exile in Holland. He returned to Paris in 1796 and lived there until his death in May of 1799, one of the great behind-the-scenes heroes in French – and American – history.
Without the freedom to criticize, all praise is meaningless.
Links:
Journal of the American Revolution
Sources:
Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin. The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 2005.
Lanning, Michael Lee. The American Revolution 100. United States: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2009.
Lever, Maurice. Beaumarchais: A Biography. United States: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
McNeese, Tim. Revolutionary Spies. United States: Fall River Press, 2015.