[In the essay below, McDonald considers the rights of the individual and the concepts of political and social change as dramatized in The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro, and La Mère coupable. McDonald also addresses problems relating to a modern reader's interpretation of an eighteenth-century text.]

Si j'étais professeur d'histoire de France, (dit l'histoire), et peut-être d'histoire du monde, je ferais lire [La Mère coupable] à mes élèves. … Je leur lirais d'abord les deux comédies; et ensuite je leur lirais le drame. … Rien ne permettrait autant de mesurer la différence de temps, la différence de ton, enfin ce qui fait proprement l'histoire et l'âge et l'événement d'un peuple et du monde. Je voudrais donner à mes élèves le goût même, la saveur pour ainsi dire physique de ce que c'était que 1775, 1784, 1792: je leur lirais simplement ces trois pièces.¹

—Histoire, in Péguy's Clio

I would like to frame what follows in the cross-current between literary, philosophical, and juridical discourses as they are worked out, not in systems but in the particularities of cases, experiences, and events (always textual) and in the transference among these discourses. In the eighteenth century, the passage from rational to experimental philosophy saw an epistemological and ethical shift that allowed for reflection about the importance of the individual within the social order. In the twentieth century, following the exhaustion of European structuralism, which highlighted the systematic character of linguistic approaches, poststructuralism, especially in North America, refocused interest on the relationship of particulars to theory and systematic thought and on the change in character and conditions of thought. By considering the polemical and differential sides of thought, the singularity of texts and events, and their integration into a theory not founded upon reason alone, I hope to determine how the transference among discourses and disciplines effects a change in thought. This line of study presupposes that literature accompanies political, philosophical, and even juridical thought by evoking, investigating, or creating singular stories or cases that reveal the impasses and contradictions of rational discourse. The individual is subsumed into a discourse of singularity whose force goes beyond a single voice or position; both author and individual become part of a cultural identity that includes but is not limited to them. In Beaumarchais's three plays, Le Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro, and La Mère coupable, one passes from individual discourse, in conflicting value systems, to a discourse that lays bare the premises of conceptual metaphors for reproductive and family relations. At issue also is the problem of how twentieth-century readers read eighteenth-century narratives.

Contemporary philosophical debates concerning the concept of Enlightenment are polarized between the ideas that rationality and rational consensus found thought and life in society (Habermas) and that thought is at once constituted and questioned through rhetorical analyses of binary thought and writing as a performative act (Derrida). Questioning the primacy of reason has prompted some, like Lyotard, to situate disappointed hopes of redemptive social discourse within a “story about the death of a ‘meta or master narrative’” taken to be that of the Enlightenment.² Those who have introduced gender centrally into the debate see a fundamental transformation in Western culture. As Jane Flax suggests, “[A] ‘shape of life’ is growing old. The demise of the old is being hastened by the end of colonialism, the uprising of women, the revolt of other cultures against white Western hegemony, shifts in the balance of economic and political power within the world economy, and a growing awareness of the costs as well as the benefits of scientific and technological ‘progress’” (5). One of the most controversial issues is that of impartiality, a striving for consensus based on universal reason, and the ability to speak in the name of a totality. Often a part (or a particular interest group) represents the whole and is mistaken for it; the problem is that any pretense to universality is always situated, contextual, and local.³

In eighteenth-century discussions concerning change, the effort to comprehend and bring about cultural as well as political transformations demanded, and was accompanied by, a questioning of the principles upon which such transitions would be based. The Enlightenment was more than the sum of any one thinker's philosophy, and certainly more than the story of abstract thought alone, as Ernst Cassirer made clear: it was the spontaneity of thought creating a new order.⁴ But how that order was to come about, where it could come from, how it could be legitimated, and where it was going were problems rooted in the contemporary anxiety about change. To shed tutelage—defined by Kant as minority in both the chronological and juridical sense—means, in the texts to which I will allude, reconfiguring the individual's relation to authority through the family and its relationship to the sociopolitical context.

A critique of the past and of past assumptions connects the discourse of the end of the eighteenth century with that of the late twentieth century. Where these discourses perhaps differ most is on the meaning of change and progress—whether any teleology is at work in the stories told.⁵ The issues of legitimacy, dependence, and social transformation configured in them become at once fascinating and unnerving when one can no longer measure progress or regress from any model or fixed landmark in the tradition. “Tout est changé, et doit changer encore,” wrote Abbé Raynal. “Mais les révolutions passées et celles qui doivent suivre ont-elles été, seront-elles utiles à la nature humaine? L'homme leur devra-t-il un jour plus de tranquillité, de bonheur et de plaisir? Son état sera-t-il meilleur, ou ne fera-t-il que changer?”⁶ [Everything has changed, and will change again. Will past revolutions and those to follow prove useful to human nature? Will man enjoy greater tranquillity, happiness, and pleasure because of them? Will he be better off, or will his circumstances simply go on changing?]

In his trilogy Beaumarchais steers an uncertain course on the high seas of political and cultural debate about what is now infamously referred to as “family values.”⁷ As a number of historians have shown, the eighteenth century constructs a family romance from its anxiety about change, in variants on Freud's familiar scenario. Calling upon the story of an “original social contract that would explain the genesis of ‘the law of male sex-right,’” Lynn Hunt explains how with the death of the king the “break in the family model of politics” occurred in the passage from “deference and paternal authority” to a “new basis for political consent.” “[T]he French had a kind of collective political unconscious that was structured by narratives of family relations.”⁸ Hunt reintroduces women into the equation to show how “[t]he female figure occupied most of the symbolic space once taken by the father/king's body” (84). Carole Pateman discusses the conflict contained in the language of paternalism, as it harks “back to the traditional patriarchal model of the political order,” in which patriarchy is understood as paternal power—“all rulers are like fathers”—and as contract theory. She puzzles over the “question of conjugal right and natural freedom and equality,” in particular the “question of how the classic contract theorists began from premises that rendered illegitimate any claim to political right that appealed to nature, and then went on to contruct the difference between men and women as the difference between natural freedom and natural subjection.”⁹

The work of Hunt and Pateman testifies to the conflict between old status and rank and a new world of contractants, from which emerged a social reorganization that bore with it new anxieties about kinship lines. Rights that had been based on unequal social and economic status (rank, heredity, family) were now redistributed according to a social contract.¹⁰ The ethical differences of reason and feeling were contested in the theater, where, prior to the killing of the father/monarch in the person of Louis XVI/Louis Capet, anxieties played themselves out in representations of changing family relations.

Serious drama encompassed the philosophical period of the 1750s and 1760s and, as a newly developing aesthetic, stimulated the debate around so-called family values through a mixed genre. During and prior to the Revolution, intellectuals problematized in a discontinuous but productive fashion many of the issues still haunting us today: the relation of the individual to the collectivity in the family and society, as well as the “sexual contract” between women, men, and children. How did the family model furnish both the basis of a harmonious contractual life in society and the narratives of conflict that showed how very fragile any consensus was to be?

Only the drame bourgeois, also called the genre sérieux, the tragédie bourgeoise, and simply the drame, seemed able to accommodate the two. Theorizing began with Diderot's Entretiens sur le Fils naturel (1757), De la poésie dramatique (1758), and Eloge de Richardson (1762); Beaumarchais followed up in Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (the preface to Eugénie [1767]) and the prefaces to his trilogy; and Mercier continued with his essay Du théâtre ou nouvel essai sur l'art dramatique (1773).¹¹ The new genre, in which virtue and goodness triumph without recourse to a foundational truth, repositioned the function of individuals within the family and seemed to offer, beyond any explicit moral schematization, the possibility of an ethical practice of fiction.

Beaumarchais's criticism is in some ways the strongest articulation of the drame bourgeois. He claims to write serious drama, which he situates between heroic tragedy and light comedy, in order to persuade the audience through feeling or sentiment, not reason, and to substitute the example for the precept or abstraction.¹² The human heart, rather than the faculty of reason, is his model. Because feeling grounds the particulars of the action, the reader or spectator—so goes the argument—will empathize or commiserate with the character.¹³

While Diderot viewed sensibility as an “affection sociale,” Rousseau argued that pitié (identification between sentient beings) was an innate social virtue prior to reason, and was, paradoxically, the only natural faculty to allow for the equalizing of social relationships. The stories of individuals, which considered the unexceptional and mundane, were meant to serve as models for moral judgment and conduct. Yet the models applied only if everyone was conceived as fundamentally alike. They presented idealized social relationships, but they could not account for the particulars of life and circumstance. Generalizing a life story became a problem analogous to that of the social contract: how, in Diderot's terms, to generalize the ungeneralizable, or, in Rousseau's, to voluntarily submit individual desire to a social order for the collective good. The ability to “feel with” ordinary people transfers Rousseau's social principle of pitié to the theater.

Beaumarchais acknowledges Diderot as his model, pointing to the strength and vigorous male tone of one of Diderot's plays, Le père de famille, and suggests that through the connection between the characters and the spectator, serious drama offers moral standards more directly than heroic tragedy.¹⁴ Oedipus and Orestes might inspire terror, for example, but as blind instruments of the gods' anger or fancy they frighten rather than touch by their destiny. Instead, Beaumarchais seeks to provoke a reaction to an event so “real” that one might mistake it for reality and experience the desired emotional effect. Representation of what happens in the world demands a faithful picture of real objects, by which Beaumarchais meant ordinary people rather than kings or nobles.¹⁵ Identification through feeling “sert de base à ce principe certain de l'Art, qu'il n'y a moralité ni intérêt au théâtre sans un secret rapport du sujet dramatique à nous” [underlies the basic principle of art: there can be neither morality nor interest in theater without a secret relationship between the dramatic subject and ourselves] (Essai, 126). Feeling transferred by analogy touches and thereby changes the spectator.¹⁶

Beaumarchais asks whether dramatic force arises from character or from civil status. He then answers that nature imbues ordinary people with as much character as princes, and that serious drama should have the same impact as heroic tragedy (Essai, 129-32). Bourgeois drama was tragedy brought down into the everyday, domestic realm, whereas tragedy relied on extraordinary individuals and comedy on types.¹⁷

Two images emerge from the conception of identification in theater; both are drawn from the family constellation. The first, paternal image indicates authority and comprehends not only fathers and husbands within the plays but the very act of writing. In a letter concerning Les Deux amis, Beaumarchais compares himself and the actors at the Comédie-Française to adoptive parents with shared paternal responsibilities: “Par la nouvelle adoption que vous venez d'en faire … vous partagerez désormais avec moi tous les soucis de la paternité” [With the new adoption that you have just undertaken (with my play) … you share all the worries of paternity with me] (Œuvres, 1272).¹⁸ Louis-Sébastien Mercier adds that the poet resembles a legislator who, because of his exquisite sensibility, would expand the moral code and judge not according to written laws but according to those imprinted within the structure of consciousness.¹⁹

Beaumarchais also likens himself to a mother when he describes theatrical works as “concus avec volupté, menés à terme avec fatigue, enfantés avec douleur et vivant rarement assez pour payer les parents de leurs soins, ils coûtent plus de chagrins qu'il ne donnent de plaisirs” [conceived in sensuality, brought to term with fatigue, borne with pain, and rarely alive long enough to repay their parents for their care; they cost more in grief than they return in pleasure] (272). The masculine creator therefore co-opts not only a paternal but a maternal role to legitimate the autonomy of his creation.²⁰ This second, maternal image becomes for others a quasi-transcendental concept.

Diderot, asserting that what he calls a tableau is the presentation of a state of mind, cites Iphigénie's mother in Racine's play. Her importance is not that she is queen of Argos and wife of the Greek general; rather, she embodies “le tableau de l'amour maternel dans toute sa vérité” [the picture of maternal love in all its truth] (Diderot, Entre-tiens, 118). Clytemnestra is also a model, because her grief is common to all mothers. Within the bourgeois drama, as Peter Szondi points out, the notions of woman and mother come not out of the bourgeoisie but out of an antique, mythologized Greek nature.²¹ The inherited sense of maternal feeling then undergoes an intensification leading to the concepts of justice and equality.

Critics agree that the theater of the drame bourgeois was unsuccessful, but no consensus exists on the importance of this mostly forgotten genre. I suggest that the attempt at a “moral” genre not only conveys the revolutionary changes implicit in the theory and practice of the plays but tells us something about the recent need for ethical guides within criticism today. Tragedy and comedy had failed in their depictions of ordinary people because Diderot wished to focus on conditions rather than character: “Pour peu que le caractère fût chargé, un spectateur pouvait se dire à lui-même, ce n'est pas moi. Mais il ne peut se cacher que l'état qu'on joue devant lui, ne soit le sien” [So long as the character was exaggerated, a spectator could still say, this is not me. Yet he could not fail to see that the condition before him was his own] (Entretiens, 144). To the insistence on conditions Beaumarchais added the representation of choice and plurality, which brings this distant genre closer to contemporary preoccupations.

The discourses on family and state were interconnected and more than rhetorically bound in the eighteenth century: they were interchangeable at the level of language, belief, and daily experience. Just how they were related concerned philosophers, especially Diderot and Rousseau, in search of a model for society. Both had attempted to write narratives of the origin and the development of the family and society: Le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville and Le Discours sur les origines et les fondements de l'inégalité permi les hommes. The distinction between natural law and the conventions of culture permeated the fictional status of any such narrative. For Diderot, no natural hierarchical order confers the right to command others; the only natural authority is paternal. He distinguishes clearly between the family and society, however, in the concept of a social contract.²² In the Fragments politiques, he writes that a father may be king in the family, but no king (not even a good one) can be a father of society—the king is only a steward.²³ Rousseau, pondering the relationship between the family and society, at one point eliminated the family altogether only to restore it as the primary model for society in Du contrat social. The philosophical questions concerning the foundation of society and the development of the family were not questions of fact; they were hypothetical, and the arguments about natural right and natural law laid down the basis for the social contract. Yet the portrayals of individuals in the family pitted the particulars of life stories against a long-standing tradition of marriage and family and began to effect a transformation.

The article “Mariage,” listed under theology in the Encyclopédie, evokes in the marital relationship a natural contract, a civil contract, and a sacrament.²⁴ Basic Christian doctrine concerning the governance of the family is found in Ephesians: women, children, and servants must obey the master of the house in the same way that Christians obey God (5.22, 6.9). Historian of the family Jean-Louis Flandrin adds that “[f]rom the very beginning of Christianity the family was considered as the monarchy of divine right.”²⁵ The authority of the father of the family and that of God legitimate not only each other but all other authority. Here the genre bourgeois must contend with what happens when a new, diffused authority supplants the father. The drame bourgeois and its successors replace the father's weakened sense of authority with a family based on the reciprocal relations of its members, whose support and actions make possible a new family structure. A sequence of stories in Beaumarchais's trilogy renders the new order. Le Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro, and La Mère coupable constitute what I have loosely called a case; a text, event, or trial becomes the point of reference for a sequence extending over time. The trilogy functions as a roundhouse, with several intersecting sequences. The first involves the three plays themselves, in which the characters remain the same and the preface of each play comments upon and announces the plays to come.²⁶ The second concerns the tradition of “exogamous imitations” (Michel Delon's term), based upon Beaumarchais's trilogy and written following Le Barbier and Le Mariage. Some were prolongations of Le Mariage, which added little to the model; others attempted to follow Le Mariage as it followed Le Barbier, with modifications, progressions, mutations, and after-the-fact follow-ups; then there was a sequence of operatic writings, most notably by Mozart and Rossini; and Beaumarchais's rereading of the Miss Polly Baker affair in Marceline's speech.²⁷ All of them focus on bastardy and the family constellation. Many eighteenth-century authors, including Olympe de Gouges, attempted to create a sequel for the charming child-adolescent Chérubin, but no one engages the character Marceline, for several reasons.

In Beaumarchais's Aeschylean trilogy the Almaviva family undergoes considerable change. He describes the relationship among the three plays in his 1797 preface to La Mère coupable. “[Dans] le roman de la famille Almaviva … les deux premières époques ne semblent pas, dans leur gaieté légère, offrir de rapport bien sensible avec la profonde et touchante moralité de la dernière; mais elles ont, dans le plan de l'auteur, une connexion intime, propre à verser le plus vif intérêt sur les représentations de La Mère coupable” [In the novel of the Almaviva family … the light gaiety of the first two periods does not seem to have much in common with the profound and touching morality of the last period; but in the author's plan they do have an intimate connection, guaranteed to shed light on and create interest in the performances of the La Mère coupable] (599). Both Le Barbier and Le Mariage are called comedies and take place in Spain, while La Mère coupable is listed as a drame and is set in France in 1790.

In the spirit of continuity, the original actors, with Beaumarchais's approval, had intended to present the play in three consecutive performances: the first day, one would laugh during Le Barbier; the second day, one would view the foibles of man's virility; the third day, one would see that most men end up good by the inexorable wear and tear of age, particularly if they are fathers. Beaumarchais planned to reveal certain other issues as well, some of which seem today the most innovative and revolutionary of all: the ability of servants, mothers, and women in general, for example, to recast the events of their lives through a redistribution of roles within the family constellation. In more contemporary, less good-humored terms, one could describe these three days somewhat differently: during the first day an illegitimate child finds work and a family, and love gives the illusion of equality in social relations; during the second, the male sex-right is foiled and a family discovered; during the third, equality of rights is not borne out by the portrayal of the “facts” of the characters' lives when feeling reconfigures a family.

Finding a master in the person of Count Almaviva, Figaro helps him to marry, thus creating a family into which he himself will be integrated. The concept of the family in the ancien régime included the servants, and the family in which a valet worked was considered his real one, for his raison d'être and legitimacy derived from his master. At a time when, as Philippe Ariès has shown, a new feeling and sense of the family were developing, Figaro discovers himself to have a biological as well as a social family.²⁸

In the prefatory letter to Le Barbier, Beaumarchais fills in Figaro's background: Before abandoning him and his mother, Marceline, Bartholo the doctor branded Figaro's right arm with a hieroglyph. A Bohemian chief kidnapped Figaro, and a celebrated astrologer whom his mother had consulted prophesied:

Après avoir versé le sang dont il est né,
Ton fils assommera son père infortuné:
Puis, tournant sur lui-même et le fer et le crime,
Il se frappe, et devient heureux et légitime.

(275)

[After shedding the blood that bore him, your son will fell his unfortunate father: then, turning the criminal blade upon himself, he wounds himself and becomes happy and legitimate.]

Destiny weighs lightly in this alternative to the story of Oedipus, who was “destined by fate to kill his father and take his mother to wife.”²⁹ The plays carry out the prophecy: Marceline, Figaro's birth mother, now an old governess in the house of Doctor Bartholo, fulfills the first part when her foot is bled offstage;³⁰ Figaro innocently thrashes the Doctor, fulfilling the second; later, Figaro cuts himself on his chin or throat; and ultimately, the Doctor marries Marceline in Le Mariage, making Figaro legitimate and, presumably, happy.

In Le Barbier, the Count has fallen in love with and desires to marry Rosine, an orphan of noble extraction imprisoned in the care of her tutor/guardian, Bartholo. As such, Bartholo has a seigneurial and legal hold over her, as well as a familial function.³¹ With his philosophy of “le droit du plus fort” [the law of the jungle], he plans to marry Rosine despite abusing her.³² Rejecting the power of rank and position (“le rang doit être ici sans force” [348]), the Count claims Rosine through love, focusing on their equality and her freedom to choose a partner. He challenges Bartholo by proclaiming Rosine's emancipation, protection under the law, and recourse to just magistrates.³³

The preface to Le Barbier begins a network of familial images and a sequence continued in the other plays. Not only is the action based on disguised identity, deception, and recognition, as well as changing roles and sexual identity, but language constantly crosses sexual boundaries and kinship lines. When the Count asks Figaro if he knows Bartholo, who is actually his biological father, Figaro replies, “comme ma mère” [As if he were my mother] (298). Elsewhere accusing Bartholo of being a bad father, Figaro calls him a “père marâtre” [a father like a stepmother].³⁴ Beyond biological ties, Rosine refers to Figaro affectionately as “un bon parent” [a good relative], and even as her son, as does Suzanne in Le Mariage.

In Le Barbier the Count abolishes what is referred to throughout the trilogy as the droit du seigneur. The many rights of seigneury included a quasi-feudal law that had become common practice: the right of the lord to deflower his vassal's wife on her wedding night.³⁵ In the Dictionnaire philosophique, this right appears under the heading droit de cuissage ou culage. None of the general dictionaries or treatises on the rights of seigneury from the period specifically refer to it; Voltaire, pointing out that this tyrannic excess had never passed into law, applauds the evolution from culage to cuissage. Beaumarchais, however, prefers the generic euphemism, droit du seigneur, as a touchstone for criticizing privilege in general and the power of men over women in particular.³⁶

Having staked a claim for equality and liberty through love in Le Barbier, the Count does an about-face in Le Mariage once he and Rosine are married: in the second play, he intends to take advantage of the outmoded right to seduce Suzanne on her wedding night. The Count thereby repeats claims to the male sex-right that he himself had formerly denounced. As the Countess, Figaro, and Suzanne try to prevent the Count from exercising his privilege, it becomes clear that the Count, vacillating in his attitude toward power and privilege, will not challenge traditional authority.

The turning point comes in the third act of Le Mariage: family relations are realigned through the revelations of Marceline and Figaro's trial. In the transformation of the family house to a courtroom, the Count becomes the judge, as was his seigneurial right by the law of the land. At issue are a contract and a marriage, an absurd revamping of the droit du seigneur with the sexual roles reversed. Figaro had borrowed money from Marceline, promising to marry her if he defaulted. Now he wants to break the contract, but Marceline wants to keep the contract because of her love for Figaro, which she has misconstrued as passionate rather than maternal. The Count's conflict of interest disposes him to want Figaro to marry Marceline in order to clear his way to Suzanne. Everyone has a particular interest in breaking or holding to the contract, even those who should be the most impartial.

At the trial, the play on family names and genealogy indicates the force of tradition and the need to resist it to bring about change. Marceline answers to names that characterize her as a surrogate and a passionate adult female: Barbe-Agar-Raab-Madeleine-Nicole-Marceline de Verte-Allure. Figaro leaves his Christian name blank and marks his family background as “anonymous,” apparently positioning himself as a self-created hero.³⁷ He evokes the belief that he is from a lost noble family, is a gentleman or even a prince—the belief that Freud later analyzed in Moses and Monotheism as a revolutionary fantasy. In this case, however, the Oedipal trio is involved in a trial over a breach of contract.

The first issue is to reach a consensus on the correct reading of the contract; is it “Laquelle somme je lui rendrai, et je l'épouserai” or “laquelle somme je lui rendrai ou je l'épouserai,’ ce qui est bien différent” [Which sum I will repay her and I will marry her; which sum I will repay her or I will marry her] (Le Mariage, 442). As both judge and interested party, the Count interprets the contract as an either/or clause, condemning Figaro to marry Marceline. Wriggling to avoid the sentence, Figaro recalls the parental authorization necessary for marriage, recounts how he was stolen as a child, and reveals the proof of his identity: the hieroglyph on his arm. Marceline and Bartholo recognize him as their son, Emmanuel. But when Bartholo points to Marceline, saying, “Voilà ta mère” [Behold your mother], Figaro balks in disbelief, asking if she isn't rather his mother substitute, or wet nurse (Le Mariage, 445). His dream of noble parents ends with the recognition of a resistant bourgeois father and a mother who has pursued him in marriage.

The reinstatement of a genetic line dissolves the judgment and the contract and fulfills the prophecy of legitimacy.³⁸ The recognition of filiation suggests that Figaro has based his sense of personal merit on the false assumption of nobility, but it averts the threat of Oedipus's tragic crime to the natural and social order. In the end, it is the wrong contract, based on wrong assumptions at the wrong time, and biology is there to dispel it. Moreover, Figaro's identifying hieroglyph proves paternity where it is usually surmise, since only the mother is known for certain in the tradition. Yet Marceline's transformation is perhaps most crucial. Initially portrayed as a ridiculous, unlikeable hag, she gains, by acknowledging her status as mother, a grace and a sensitivity that her demeanor, actions, and the rest of the play bear out.³⁹ As farce turns into serious drama, Figaro too shows sensitivity. Unlike Diderot's notion of an ideal model, Figaro is unique not only because of his brilliance and agility but because as a child who is lost, found, and reintegrated with both his biological and his social family, he occupies a doubly legitimate place. In giving up the dream of noble parents, Figaro moves out from his personal family romance to that of society at large, demonstrating how one might live with equality among individuals in a cohesive bond where differences also prevail.

During the trial itself Marceline is defended by, and has as her judicial counsel, the very man who had abandoned her, Bartholo. She uses her own voice only after being recognized as a single mother. With the legal case dissolved, change now occurs. Marceline condemns in general the way men abandon women, although Beaumarchais carefully cut out an entire passage in which she characterizes herself as a victim of a derelict past. In it Marceline argues that although she was born to be wise and make use of her reason, inexperience could not withstand the pressure of vile seducers.

Hommes plus qu'ingrats, qui flétrissez par le mépris les jouets de vos passions, vos victimes! c'est vous qu'il faut punir des erreurs de notre jeunesse; vous et vos magistrats, si vains du droit de nous juger, et qui nous laissent enlever, par leur coupable négligence, tout honnête moyen de subsister.

[You men, lost to all sense of obligation, who stigmatize with your contempt the playthings of your passions—your victims! It's you who ought to be punished for the errors of our youth—you and your magistrates so vain of their right to judge us, who by their culpable negligence deprive us of all honest means of existence.]⁴⁰

Marceline's plea that justice in equality prevail recalls another famous speech: that of Miss Polly Baker, whose legal case was first published in 1747. She denounced the inequality of a judicial system that punished only the mother for the birth of bastard offspring, and her story—like that of the contemporary television character Murphy Brown—had an extraordinary life in the media.⁴¹ Widely publicized for over forty years, it became the subject of debate, from Diderot and Voltaire in France to the common readers of the press in Europe and the New England colonies. It was followed passionately for many years as a factual case and accepted as authentic by Abbé Raynal in l'Histoire des deux Indes (1770), until Benjamin Franklin confessed to having invented and written it, as Thomas Jefferson attested in 1818.⁴² The latest reprint of Franklin's piece appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times on 15 June 1992 as an ironic comment on the Dan Quayle-Murphy Brown controversy about single parenthood and family values. In Franklin, the passage is humorous; in Raynal, acerbic; in Diderot, light; and in Beaumarchais, serious again.

In pleading her case, Marceline not only goes beyond Miss Polly's stance but also shows a solidarity among women not found among the male characters of Beaumarchais's trilogy:

Dans les rangs mêmes plus élevés, les femmes n'obtiennent de vous qu'une considération dérisoire; leurrées de respects apparents, dans une servitude réelle; traitées en mineures pour nos biens, punies en majeures pour nos fautes! ah, sous tous les aspects, votre conduite avec nous fait horreur ou pitié!

[Even in the more exalted walks of life you accord us women no more than a derisory consideration. In a state of servitude behind the alluring pretenses of respect, treated as children where our possessions are concerned we are punished as responsible adults where our faults are in question! Ah! Whatever way one looks at it your conduct towards us must provoke horror or compassion!]

(Le Mariage, 446-7; The Marriage, 176)

The problem of social and sexual inequality runs throughout the three plays—a girl must obey her tutor, a wife and servant must obey the master of the house, and only a woman may be punished for an illegitimate child. Marceline's speech addresses the public, though the story is not hers alone. If she is an ordinary woman, her ability to speak—like Miss Polly's—is not at all an ordinary occurrence. Women had no legal status or right to public speech, according to scholars of jurisprudence; the system of authority did not center on the individual, and dignity derived from being nothing in oneself.⁴³ Beaumarchais proposes, in Marceline's name, a new set of values about the individual, although they remained largely unexplored because Marceline's words were suppressed in performance until the 1950s.

The model for her exceptional discourse comes from criticism leveled at the feudal system, since her inability to speak, her status as juridical minor, could only be considered scandalous in a world where the individuality of a woman—like that of a man—was valued (Guilbert-Sledziewski, 38). Marceline's message is clear: “sois belle, si tu peux, sage si tu veux; mais sois considérée, il le faut” [Be fair if you can, wise if you will, but be circumspect you must] (Le Mariage, 388; The Marriage, 113-4). Perhaps what rendered Marceline's speeches unacceptable for so long was the force of this outraged female cry, this maternal call for dignity. Indeed, there was a considerable reaction against the character: her speeches were not performed; actresses did not want to play the part; and even today few analyses of the character exist. Does her speech possess a force far surpassing the condition of the character? Beaumarchais had suggested as much in his Mémoires contre Goëzman, when he denounced the defense of a woman—Mme Goëzman—who justified her having accepted money from him by saying that she was weak and inexperienced. On the contrary, he contended, her discourse was strong, provocative, insulting, and seductive—full of “mâles injures.” With Marceline, however, Beaumarchais spins the same argument positively to show that moral discourse always centers on the woman's role.⁴⁴

With newfound maternal force, Marceline advises looking ahead, not back; Bartholo, in contrast, brushes off the past, avoiding responsibility by pleading youthful insanity in both his promises and actions. Thus rehabilitated through the maternity that formerly condemned her, Marceline reconstitutes her family: Figaro as her son, Suzanne as her future daughter-in-law, and Bartholo, who finally gives in to become her husband. Marceline's fate stands as a warning to the Count about the injustice of misplaced power and conduct toward women. What Figaro expresses to him about the inequity between merit and birthright, women could transpose to men: “Qu'avez-vous fait pour tant de biens? vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître, et rien de plus” [What have you done to deserve such advantages? Put yourself to the trouble of being born—nothing more] (Le Mariage, 469; The Marriage, 199).

In two important speeches, Marceline and Figaro address the audience and society, moving to a larger court of social jurisprudence, which, as Anne Ubersfeld suggests, is the goal of all theater. For each, the issue is the condition of their identity. Marceline's speech is as revolutionary as Figaro's, yet while both concern the accidents of birth, Figaro focuses on general inequities of rank and fortune in society, whereas Marceline criticizes the inequality between the sexes in reproduction and in family matters. Clearly, the plea for equality and justice still can be posed in two separate and paradoxical arguments, the first through a definition in which all parties are equal, the second through a conception of equality based on the complementarity of difference. The problem with the first argument is that universal equality may be firmly rooted in a specific set of parameters, whereas the problem with the second is that no addition of single identities or interests adds up to a universal principle. The ideal falls short because it cannot reconcile universality and difference.

Figaro's speech gained celebrity; Marceline's was silenced until recently, as seen in the history of the play's performances. Starting in 1785, Marceline's speech from act 3, scene 16, has been bracketed in almost all editions; Beaumarchais indicates in a note that it was eliminated from the first performance in Paris by the actors themselves.⁴⁵ Editions used by directors at the Comédie-Française show that throughout the eighteenth century, and during the twentieth century until 1956, Marceline's speech was never performed. In 1953, Jean Meyer invoked the same tradition.⁴⁶ Jean Vilar's inclusion of the speech in 1956 at the Théâtre National Populaire marked a turning point, because it has been performed ever since. Why this suppression? The inappropriateness of dramatic tone (it was said to spoil the comic momentum)? The story of a woman with doubtful mores (the argument of the censors)? Or the “ridiculousness of the character”? All of these arguments have been used, but none satisfactorily explains the continued suppression of a passage that Beaumarchais cared about deeply; he not only insisted on restoring it to the written text of the play but quoted from it extensively in his preface.

In addressing questions of inequality through birth, fortune, and rank, does Figaro ask a broader, more inclusive question about injustice and inequality than Marceline, justifying in some sense the suppression of her speech within the play? Or is the concept of equality different for men and for women, in which case a tradition of performance repeated this difference until the 1950s? To answer this question, we must first see how La Mère coupable completes the trilogy.

La Mère coupable takes place in 1790, twenty years after Le Mariage de Figaro. The Count and Countess have lost a first biological son, and both have illegitimate children, though neither is aware of the other's child; nor do the children, who are in love with each other, know their situation. At the beginning of the play, the family consists of the Count and Countess, Léon, Florestine, and the servants, Suzanne and Figaro. Léon is the “natural child” of Chérubin and the Countess. The Count has named himself godfather and guardian of Florestine, who is really his love child. The action concerns the recognition of kinship lines and the moral consequences of reconfiguring family relations in this context.

L'Autre Tartuffe, ou La Mère coupable, takes the first half of its name from the character Bégearss, a traitorous Tartuffe figure. Hovering between drama and incipient melodrama, its major themes are the status of illegitimate children and a sympathetic if damning analysis of women's place in society. Bégearss's power comes from knowledge, not religion, a weapon he wields first to scare Léon and Florestine into believing they have the same father, and then to trick the Count into allowing him, rather than Léon, to marry Florestine and inherit the Count's fortune. Although the title suggests that Bégearss and Rosine figure symmetrically in their immorality, it is the Count and the Countess—Beaumarchais belabors the point—whose lives are parallel, as the libertine parents of illegitimate children.

Beaumarchais presses the asymmetrical judgment of their symmetrical roles, calling on the spectator to mix tears with the pain and pious repentance of the unfortunate Countess. “Les larmes qu'on verse au théâtre, sur des maux simulés qui ne font pas le mal de la réalité cruelle, sont bien douces” [The tears shed at the theater because of simulated evils, which hurt no one in reality, are quite sweet]. Through identification in feeling Beaumarchais seeks a moral end: “On se trouve si bon après la compassion” [It feels so good to have been compassionate] (“Un Mot sur La Mère coupable,” 600). Compassion defines being as fundamentally sentient rather than rational, and Beaumarchais links himself with Rousseau in adapting this essential, presocial faculty to the notion of mixed gender: “j'[ai] composé [La Mère coupable] dans une intention droite et pure: avec la tête froide d'un homme et le cœur brûlant d'une femme, comme on l'a pensé de Rousseau” [My intention in La Mère coupable was straight and true: to write with the cool head of a man and the burning heart of a woman, just as Rousseau is thought to have done].

Beaumarchais thus uses the metaphor of the hermaphrodite to show that an aesthetic and moral alliance must be constructed between feeling and thought.⁴⁷ Sensibility may be primarily a female attribute, but its appropriation by men becomes a humanizing force.⁴⁸ Beyond the immediate moral lesson of La Mère coupable, Beaumarchais promotes the centrality of the woman's story for all moral discourse. By putting the errors of adultery in the past, he writes that he can concentrate on a woman's grave betrayal of her duties as a wife; otherwise, he would have had to call his play L'Epouse infidèle or, more equally, Les Epoux coupables. Although libertine man and woman have been returned to the family economy, adultery is still a more serious offense for women than for men. The Count laments:

Nos désordres, à nous, ne leur enlèvent presque rien; ne peuvent du moins leur ravir la certitude d'être mères, ce bien inestimable de la maternité! tandis que leur moindre caprice, un goût, une étourderie légère, détruit dans l'homme le bonheur … le bonheur de toute sa vie, la sécurité d'être père. Ah! ce n'est point légèrement qu'on a donné tant d'importance à la fidélité des femmes! Le bien, le mal de la société, sont attachés à leur conduite; le paradis ou l'enfer des familles dépend à tout jamais de l'opinion qu'elles ont donnée d'elles.

[Our own disorders take almost nothing away from them; at least they cannot rob them of the certainty of being mothers, the invaluable property of maternity; whereas the least whim or careless fancy destroys happiness in men—the happiness of their own lives—the security of being fathers. It is not without good reason that the fidelity of women has been accorded so much importance. Social good and evil are related to their behavior; familial paradise or hell is forever dependent on the opinion that they project of themselves.]

(La Mère coupable, 620-1)

Here the Count announces that women carry the burden because of the certitude of maternity and the anxiety of uncertainty surrounding paternity. They are at the center of the family, the ones on whom the cohesiveness of the whole depends. Even Marceline does not dispute that the nature of woman differs from that of man with respect to children. In a variant she rejects the very possibility of abandoning her child: “L'abandonner! Oui, l'homme en est capable. Mais une mère! Un fils! … la femme inexperte ou sensible peut quelquefois manquer aux lois de la décence ou de la société, jamais à celles de la nature” [Abandon him! Yes, man is capable of such an act. But a mother! A son! … Being unskilled or sensitive, a woman sometimes fails before the laws of decency or society, but never before those of nature] (Le Mariage, 1385).

In the search for a more democratic family contract than the ancien régime had allowed, the clinging to a definition based in nature creates a dislocation in the concept of equality. Natural law was not considered to have been transgressed when men and women could follow a so-called natural vocation: power and public life for men, motherhood and the family for women.⁴⁹ The division between men as the principal authorities and women as the subordinate agents of natural regeneration of the family and society is borne out by the very different reactions of the Count and Countess to the discovery of the illegitimacy and true identity of Léon and Florestine. Whereas the Count had pleaded for equality in love in Le Barbier, in Le Mariage he contradicts himself concerning the Countess's infidelity and even threatens divorce. The Countess, who had pardoned the Count in Le Mariage in a way she says he never would have done, pleads in La Mère coupable for equal indulgence and caring for all. Acknowledging their respective transgressions of an outdated marriage arrangement, she proposes a renewal of marriage in reciprocity: “Faisons, sans nous parler, l'échange de notre indulgence!” [Silently, let us exchange forgiveness!] (La Mère coupable, 639).⁵⁰

Attempting to make the characters accountable for their destiny, Beaumarchais, throughout these plays, heightens the role of mothers and diminishes the authority of fathers. Bartholo is the only father in the first two plays; as a “père marâtre,” he is no role model at all. The Countess, however, chooses to “serve … as mother” to Florestine, whom she likens to her own flesh. Occupying the double position of biological and substitute mother, she brings the illegitimate child into a new structure that fuses both a “natural” and a social family. Despite her own liberal view, the Countess still acquiesces to an unequal vision of the moral drama, crying out abjectly that the guilt is hers:

Mère coupable! épouse indigne! Un instant nous a tous perdus. J'ai mis l'horreur dans ma famille! J'allumai la guerre intestine entre le père et les enfants! Ciel juste! il fallait bien que ce crime fût découvert! Puisse ma mort expier mon fortfait!

[Guilty mother! Unworthy wife! An instant has caused us to lose everything. I put horror into my family! I ignited an internecine war between father and children. Just heaven, this crime had to be discovered! May my death expiate (atone for) this infamous crime!]

(659-60)

By the contrast between the Count and the Countess, and her assumption of guilt (evident in the title of the play), Beaumarchais tacitly asks whether the Countess is any guiltier than the Count. The answer may be no in twentieth-century terms, and even according to Rousseau's social contract, but the myth of natural regeneration through the mother was doubly threatening with the progressive loosening of the father's role, and may have made the answer, in the eighteenth century, yes, she is guiltier. If it then seems clear that there is some “natural vocation” attached to a notion of “nature” that none of the characters quite relinquishes, it is unclear how anxiety and guilt play themselves out in the context of these changing roles and political determinations.

Freud suggested that the fraternity of the primal horde had created the collective guilt that life in politics and the family seemed constantly to revive. To alleviate anxiety, he argued that women had to remain pure; neither the Countess nor Marceline had, yet their mistakes were no worse than those of the men. But Freud made the “sense of guilt of the son” fundamental, corresponding to one of the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex: parricide and the taboo of incest as the inauguration of social organization.⁵¹ Two points are of interest in this regard. La Mère coupable premiered in 1792, the year of the arrest and condemnation of the king.⁵² By showing the Count in the role of benevolent father and making him repent, Beaumarchais suggested that it was unnecessary to condemn the father/authority/aristocrat; it was only necessary to condemn and exclude Bégearss. We can then say of this drama what Hunt says of the French Revolution, that it is “about conflict between father and son and about the threat of violence to the community.”⁵³ After all, the last line of La Mère coupable is Figaro's: “Ne plaignons point quelques moments de trouble; on gagne assez dans les familles, quand on en expulse un méchant” [Let us not regret a few moments of turmoil; the family gains considerably when a villain has been expelled] (672). Second, when Figaro ultimately figures out the strategy deployed by Bégearss to evoke fear of recognition and the horror of incest within the family, he states the biological facts: Léon and Florestine are in fact not kin to each other; they endanger no one, and nothing at all. So the two “children” are free to marry.

Whereas the trial between Marceline and Figaro in Le Mariage removes incest by recognizing mother, father, and son and leads paradoxically to the legitimation of the biological family through a marital contract, in La Mère coupable incest is never really a problem. In a curiously regressive move, nature prevails over convention; it is the contract between Marceline and Figaro that seemed to threaten the order of nature and society by institutionalizing incest. When the three plays end, Marceline, the Count, and the Countess have all experienced a similar problem—the illegitimacy of a child. This symmetry permits the passage from the old, hierarchical family to a new, perhaps even harmonious, family; the Count assumes his legal role as father of Léon, and the Countess chooses the function of substitute mother for Florestine. The new family contract redomesticates conflict by basing order on a feeling that extends the concept of mother and father beyond biological to social bonds.

Marceline's demand for equality in Le Mariage is reinforced by the Countess's plea for mercy in La Mère coupable. Not only tone but position differentiates them: Marceline rises in status from an old maid to a single, unwed mother (one of whose names is that of the biblical surrogate Hagar) to wife and legitimate mother; the Countess, on the other hand, harbors her illegitimate son in the privacy of her “legitimate” family. Prior to the scenes of recognition, these two women play out two opposed forms of action. Marceline can speak out in the name of equality and rights because she has nothing to lose; viewed as neither wife nor legitimate mother, she is not subject to the former laws of the family. Speaking out ran deeply counter to a wife's function in the ancien régime; although a woman agreed to marriage as a free contractant, she lost that status the moment she entered into the contract and became defined once again as a minor.⁵⁴ The Countess, however, tries to cope within an outdated feudal structure; her “natural” vocation as woman is obscured by the tradition of punishing adultery in women alone by up to three years' confinement in a convent at the husband's behest.

La Mère coupable was staged just as discussions of the marriage contract began in 1792. The Constituent Assembly fundamentally upset the theoretical and actual status of women in an article from 3 September 1791, decreeing that marriage was no longer a sacrament but a contract based purely on civil right. The contractual partner was made equal in capacity, consistent with the principles of freedom and equality pronounced in 1789. Women ceased to be Eve or Mary, at least before the law; they were no longer viewed as creatures determined according to their species, designed to marry and conceive children (Guilbert-Sledziewski, 34). Thus, the ability to marry as equal partner contained in theoretical germ the ability to divorce.

The equalizing of positions was a step toward the democratization of the family hierarchy; now a combination of reason and sensibility held the structure together. In the discussions surrounding the causes for divorce, M. Aubert-Dubayet proclaimed the equality of partners in their right to separate:

Il est temps de le reconnaître, le contrat qui lie les époux est commun; ils doivent incontestablement jouir des mêmes droits, et la femme ne doit point être l'esclave de l'homme. L'hymen n'admet point l'asservissement d'une seule des parties.

[It is time to recognize that the contract that binds spouses is common; they must unquestionably enjoy the same rights, and a woman must not be the slave of a man. Marriage does not admit the subservience of either party.]

(Moniteur universel, 30 August 1792)

In another speech, Léonard Robin traced this right to a universal law of freedom:

La Déclaration des droits et l'article de la constitution, qui veut que le mariage ne soit regardé, par la loi, que comme un contrat civil, vous ont paru avoir consacré le principe, et votre décret n'en est que la déclaration. … Le comité a cru devoir conserver ou accorder la plus grande latitude à la faculté du divorce, à cause de la nature du contrat de mariage, qui a pour base principale le consentement des époux, et parce que la liberté individuelle ne peut jamais être aliénée d'une manière indissoluble par aucune convention.

[The declaration of rights and the article of the constitution which says that marriage must only be regarded as a civil contract in the eyes of the law has appeared to you to have sanctioned the principle, and your decree is the declaration of that. … The committee felt that it had to maintain or award the greatest latitude to the right of divorce because of the nature of the marriage contract, which has as its basic principle the consent of spouses, and because individual liberty can never be alienated indissolubly by any convention.]

(Moniteur universel, 7 September 1792)

The advocates of divorce abandoned the sacred view of marriage in a return to natural law, which would then ground conventional rule. But M. Sédillez warned about the discrepancy between rights and facts: “Il est à craindre que dans les mains du mari ce ne soit un moyen de plus d'abuser de sa puissance; car, oserai-je le dire? la liberté et l'égalité n'existent pas encore en France pour les femmes. Le divorce ne sera jamais pour elles qu'un triste remède” [It is to be feared that in the hands of the husband (divorce) may become yet another means of abusing his power; for—dare I say it?—liberty and equality do not yet exist for women in France. For women, divorce will never be more than a meager remedy] (Moniteur universal, 15 September 1792). The clarity of purpose in the speeches cited from Le Moniteur was not always followed by the stories of individuals, as La Mère coupable demonstrates poignantly. Beaumarchais situates the play in 1790, prior to the decrees on divorce and marriage, but the Count invokes divorce on several occasions. Neither he nor the Countess seems to understand that they have become more equal, for not only is there reticence about the new law, but the Count misconstrues its consequences, seeking in his jealousy to blackmail and wreak vengeance upon the Countess. Neither grasps that the decree on divorce effects a juridical and political change from a state of incapacity to one capable of action (Guilbert-Sledziewski, 45).

Women and men were thus empowered to exert their will, and women were no longer minors but adults. Neither the model for moral conduct in the drame bourgeois nor the happy endings of Beaumarchais's plays could quell the emerging question of the individual in relation to all others: Who am I? And who are you (the spectator)? The characters can no more answer these questions than restore order to an increasingly disordered world. If these plays grew out of the drame bourgeois, they unraveled the model for a moralizing stance. What followed was the cultural explosion of the Revolution, as Anne Ubersfeld has shown.⁵⁵ The absurdity of the action nullifies any pretense to political positioning. It is not clear, for example, which is more threatening: the droit du seigneur as a specter of power from the past or the uncalculated risk and unknown damage that the civil contract may bring.

The dissolution of what had been up until then an indissoluble contract awarded legal symmetry to both men and women in non-foundational principles of civil law (Guilbert-Sledziewski, 42). The fear remained, however, that the family would explode, so that individuals, encouraged to make their differences explicit, would be atomized under civil rule. Women gained a new status as the sacred institution of marriage yielded to the will and rights of the individual. As family cohesion under the authority of the father weakened, both the individual and the state gained strength.⁵⁶ This fragmentation continued with the decree on succession (August 1791) and was radicalized during the Legislative Assembly with the suppression of patria potestas (the power of life and death over sons) in August 1792.

A great deal of conflict still surrounds these questions and similar topics as the end of the twentieth century approaches. Today's reader of Beaumarchais must glean the movement toward civil and human rights from stories fraught with contradiction and human flaw. As Flax has suggested, “[A]mbivalence is an appropriate response to an inherently conflictual situation. The problem lies not in the ambivalence, but in the premature attempts to resolve or deny conflicts. The lack of coherence or closure in a situation and the existence of contradictory wishes or ideas too often generate anxiety so intense that aspects of the ambivalence and its source are repressed” (11). Is that what happened to Marceline's speech? Both Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro have survived in the repertory of the Comédie-Française and live on in the works of Rossini and Mozart, among others. But it was not until 1964, when Darius Milhaud set Madeleine Milhaud's libretto to music, that La Mère coupable found its operatic voice. The 1990 performance of the play by the Comédie-Française was the first since 1850. La Mère coupable had been criticized in much the same terms as Marceline's speech: it was not comic or light enough, and its tone was “wrong.” But the director articulated its modernity through its melodrama and its ability to bring the great themes of the Oresteia to everyday life.⁵⁷ By questioning “the temptation to construct a ‘successor project’ to fill the void left by the failures of the Enlightenment” (11), Flax recognizes the need to resist shutting out a troubling scenario or grasping at new metanarratives; it is important to stay with the anxiety that individual stories may create.

Péguy was right to align the movement of the Beaumarchais's trilogy with the changing temper and concerns of the years from 1775 to 1792. The connection with our own times has now been fancifully mapped out in the opera commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera Company for its hundredth anniversary: composer John Corigliano and librettist William M. Hoffman's Ghosts of Versailles, Suggested by “La Mère coupable” of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, performed in 1992. Because a single voice, theory, or solution, like one politics or politician, may dominate at a given time, one can hope that the political correlative of change might be tolerance for other voices as well as the creation of new solutions and forms—be they philosophic, literary, or social. A new social form rooted in an identity willed from a rereading of the past renews and recombines received patterns in a dialogue with that past. Literature's function in effecting change and literature's changing affect allow anxiety to reconstruct imaginative scenarios that create, sustain, and accompany us, however discontinuously, on our journey.

Notes

1. If I were a professor of French history, says history, and perhaps of world history, I would have my students read La Mère coupable. … I would first read them the two comedies, then the drama. … There is no better measure of the difference in times, in tone, indeed in everything constituting the history, the period, and the incident[s] of a people and of the world. I would like to give my students the very taste, the physical sensation, as it were, of 1775, 1784, 1792: I would simply read them these three plays (Œuvres en prose complètes, ed. Robert Burac, 3 vols. [Paris: Gallimard, 1992], 3:1072 [cited in L'Autre Tartuffe, ou La Mère coupable, Comédie-Française 183 (February 1990)]). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

   I have written this paper with the help of a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to thank my assistants for their support and good cheer: Marie-Pierre Maybon and Ilhame El Himdy. I would also like to thank Michel Delon for his valuable suggestions in finding material; Mme Noëlle Guilbert, curator-archivist of the Library of the Comédie-Française, for her help in tracing the history of performance of Le Mariage de Figaro; Francis Duphil for finding a recording of Darius Milhaud's opera La Mère coupable; and my colleague, Walter Moser, for his critical reading of the paper.

2. Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 7.

3. “Much of the world seems to be seeking meaning in ethnic, national, and other traditions, and casting aspersions on the Enlightenment demand for impartiality” (Martha Nussbaum, “Justice for Women!” New York Review of Books, 8 October 1992, 44).

4. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951), 163.

5. Flax states that her use of the word transitional or transformative is not “meant to imply that changes in Western culture are moving us in any particular preset (much less ‘progressive’) direction” (5).

6. Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes (Paris: Maspero, 1981).

7. If the political inflation of this term wore out the patience of the American public during the 1992 presidential campaign, the detailed analyses of the problem in contemporary literary and historical terms began some time ago and must be continued through serious research and analysis, as Stephanie Coontz pointed out in “Let Scholars Bring Realism to the Debates on Family Values,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 October 1992, B1-B2.

8. Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), xiii. The family romance shows “the collective, unconscious images of the familial order that underlie revolutionary politics” (xiii). Hunt wants to find a middle way between Freudian and Girardian analyses of the foundation of society.

9. Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 54, 222. During the 1992 electoral campaign, Americans in search of a reason why their country was in such dire straits “hit on a new theory: ‘the absent man.’ Even before Dan Quayle gave the theory his official imprimatur, by berating a television heroine for choosing to bear a child out of wedlock, the Los Angeles riot had been blamed on a lack of responsible male authority-figures in the ghettos of America. Now the theory can be taken further. America itself is fatherless, struggling along under the wing of ‘Granny’ Barbara Bush, kid brother Quayle, and two households of feckless uncles bent on spending income they don't have. The man who should be shouldering his paternal responsibilities has become a deadbeat. Unless he pulls himself together the family may conclude it is better off without him” (Economist, 15 August 1992, 11-12).

10. Paul de Man contends that Rousseau misreads his text as a promise of political change largely because language dissociates cognition from act. See “Promises,” in Allegories of Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 246-78.

11. The drame bourgeois created a stir from 1757 to 1771. Its defenders were Mme d'Epinay, Grimm, and Voltaire; its enemies were Fréron, Pallisot, and Collé. The great success of Sedaine's Philosophe sans le savoir (1765) anticipated that of Diderot's Père de famille (1769).

12. Beaumarchais, Œuvres, ed. Pierre Larthomas, with Jacqueline Larthomas (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 119. All quotations from Beaumarchais refer to this edition. Here Beaumarchais follows the Eloge de Richardson, in which Diderot praises Richardson for putting into action what Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, and others left in maxims: “Une maxime est une règle abstraite et générale de conduite dont on nous laisse l'application à faire. Elle n'imprime par elle-même aucune image sensible dans notre esprit” [A maxim is a general abstract rule of conduct whose application is up to us. It does not imprint any sensory image on our mind] (Œuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière [Paris: Garnier, 1965], 29).

13. Diderot asserts that the world is divided into those who take pleasure in life and those who suffer; he identifies only with those who suffer (Eloge, 33). About truth and lies he writes: “O Richardson! j'oserai dire que l'histoire la plus vraie est pleine de mensonges, et que ton roman est plein de vérités. L'histoire peint quelques individus; tu peins l'espèce humaine: l'histoire attribue à quelques individus ce qu'ils n'ont ni dit, ni fait; tout ce que tu attribues à l'homme, il l'a dit et fait. … Le cœur humain, qui a été, est et sera toujours le même, est le modèle d'après lequel tu copies” [“O Richardson! I daresay the truest history has many lies and your novel many truths. History portrays individuals; you portray the human species. History attributes to a few individuals what they have neither said nor done; everything that you attribute to man he has said and done. … The human heart, which has been and always will be the same, is the model from which you copy”] (39-40).

14. “Vouloir arrêter les efforts du génie dans la création d'un nouveau genre de spectacle, ou dans l'extension de ceux qu'il connaît déjà, est un attentat contre ses droits, une entreprise contre ses plaisirs” [To attempt to stop a genius in the act of creating a new kind of entertainment or developing one already known is an attack on his rights, a venture against his pleasure] (Essai, 121).

15. “Le véritable intérêt du cœur, sa vraie relation, est donc toujours d'un homme à un homme, et non d'un homme à un roi. … Plus l'homme qui pâtit est d'un état qui se rapproche du mien, et plus son malheur a de prise sur mon âme” [The true interest of the heart, its true connection, is always from man to man, not man to king. The closer a suffering man comes to my condition, the greater hold his misfortune has on my soul] (Essai, 125).

16. “Tout objet trop neuf pour présenter en soi des règles positives de discussion se juge par analogie à des objets de même nature, mais plus connus” [Any object too new to introduce its own positive rules of discussion is judged by analogy to objects of the same kind, but better-known] (Essai, 129).

17. Diderot, Entretiens sur le Fils naturel, Classiques Larousse (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1975), 159, 171; Le Drame bourgeois. Fiction 2, ed. Jacques Chouillet and Anne-Marie Chouillet (Paris: Hermann, 1980), 129-46.

18. “La part que nous avons à cet enfant commun a cela de différent que je l'ai conçu avec plaisir dans le silence, et qu'il y a tout à craindre que vous ne l'enfantiez avec douleur parmis les cris et le tapage” [The share that each of us has in this common child is different in that I conceived it with pleasure in silence, and there is every reason to fear that you may deliver it in pain amidst shouting and uproar] (Les Deux amis, 1272).

19. Mercier, Du théâtre, ou nouvel essai sur l'art dramatique (Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), 152-3.

20. I would like to thank Walter Moser for his remarks to this effect.

21. Szondi, “Tableau et coup de théâtre,” Poétique 9 (1972): 3.

22. See Diderot, “Autorité politique,” Encyclopédie 1, vol. 5, ed. John Lough and Jacques Proust (Paris: Hermann, 1976), 540.

23. Diderot, “Pensées détachées ou fragments politiques échappés du portefeuille d'un philosophe,” Œuvres complètes 10:74-5.

24. “Mariage considéré en lui-même et quant à sa simple étymologie, signifie obligation, devoir, charge et fonction d'une mère. … A le prendre dans son sens théologique et naturel, il désigne l'union volontaire et maritale d'un homme et d'une femme contractée par des personnes libres pour avoir des enfants. … Une union volontaire, parce que tout contrat suppose par sa propre nature le consentement mutuel des parties contractantes. … Autrefois les esclaves ne pouvaient se marier sans le consentement de leurs maîtres, et aujourd'hui, dans les états bien policés, les enfants ne peuvent se marier sans le consentement de leurs parents ou tuteurs, s'ils sont mineurs. … La naissance des enfants est le but et la fin du mariage” [Marriage considered in itself and with respect to etymology alone signifies obligation, duty, burden and function of the mother. … Taking it in its theological and natural sense, it designates the voluntary marital union of a man and a woman contracted by free persons in order to have children. … [It is] a voluntary union because all contracts presuppose by their very nature the mutual consent of the contracting parties. … In the past slaves could not marry without the consent of their masters, and today, in many civilized states, children cannot marry without the consent of their parents or guardians if they are minors. … The birth of children is the goal and end of marriage] (Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences et des arts, vol. 10 [Stuttgart: Friedrich Fromman Verlag, 1966], 103).

25. Flandrin, Familles: Parenté, maison, sexualité dans l'ancienne société (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 117. From the 1500s to the 1700s, reinforcement of paternal and marital power was accompanied by that of private property; the exchange remained obedience in return for protection. On the juridical front, women had lost ground after the 1200s, according to Flandrin, with the affirmation of patrilinearity and by their inability to fulfill vassal obligations. In the 1300s there came the use of the patronym, the exclusion of women from the French throne, their inability to transmit the right of the throne, and especially the juridical restrictions variously imposed on them from this century on (117-24).

26. For analyses of Beaumarchais's works, see M. Descotes, Les Grands rôles du théâtre de Beaumarchais (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974); René Pomeau, Beaumarchais ou la bizarre destinée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987); and Jacques Scherer, La Dramaturgie de Beaumarchais, 2d ed. (Paris: Nizet, 1980). See also Europe (April 1973) and Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France (September-October, 1984) for special issues on Beaumarchais and Le Mariage de Figaro.

27. See Michel Delon, “Figaro et son double,” Revue de l'histoire littéraire de la France 5 (1984): 774-84.

28. Ariès, L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 251. In 1948, with his groundbreaking study Histoire des populations françaises et de leurs attitudes devant la vie depuis le dix-huitième siècle, Ariès began to reveal what had until then remained family secrets.

29. Sigmund Freud, “Some Thoughts on Development and Regression—Aetiology,” in New Introductory Lectures, trans. James Strachey (New York: Penguin, 1976), 373.

30. In Sophocles' Oedipus it was Oedipus's foot that bled.

31. Marcel Garaud, La Révolution française et la famille, ed. Romuald Szramkiewicz (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), 145.

32. Since Bartholo is a bourgeois professional, not a noble, his power over Rosine could be disputed. “Conjugal power is not paternal, but part of masculine sex-right, the power that men exercise as men, not as fathers” (Pateman, 22).

33. “Les vrais magistrats sont les soutiens de tous ceux qu'on opprime” [True magistrates are ever the defenders of the oppressed] (Le Barbier, 349); Beaumarchais, “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro,” trans. John Wood (New York: Penguin, 1964), 102.

34. As a category beyond sexual definition, Rétif de la Bretonne calls the bad mother “marâtre” in La Mauvaise Mère, in Les Contemporaines, ou aventures des plus jolies femmes de l'âge présent (Geneva: Slatkine, 1988).

35. It has been argued that the lord could claim this as a penalty only if his vassal had failed to pay some fee. See Vivienne G. Mylne, “Le Droit du seigneur in Le Mariage de Figaro,” French Studies Bulletin 11 (1984): 4-5; Robert Niklaus, Le Mariage de Figaro (London: Grant and Cutler, 1983), 32-3. See also Antoine Laplace, Introduction aux droits seigneuriaux (Paris, 1749); M. Renauldon, Dictionnaire des fiefs et des droits seigneuriaux (Paris, 1765).

36. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 18 (Paris: Garnier, 1878), 299-302. One of Voltaire's characters in Le Droit du seigneur calls it an “impudent custom” (Œuvres complètes, 5:10), 10. Desfontaines wrote a play of the same title in 1783.

37. See Beaumarchais, Œuvres, 441. For an analysis of the fundamental stheme of the bastard and the foundling, see Marthe Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman (Paris: Grasset, 1972).

38. For an elegant historical analysis of literary recognition, see Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990) and Marshall Brown's perceptive discussion of this trial as a moment in the breakdown of classical unity in Le Mariage (Preromanticism [Stanford: University of California Press, 1991], 252-60).

39. See Agnes G. Raymond, “Figaro, fils naturel de Polly Baker? ou la réhabilitation de Marceline,” Comparative Literature Studies 12 (1975): 36, concerning negative criticism about this passage for its cynicism and bouffonnerie.

40. Le Mariage, 446; The Marriage, 175-6. In a longer earlier version, intended for act 4, scene 11, Marceline first pleads that women without money and manners are slaves. Then she painfully recounts the events of her past: While working as a domestic, she fell ill and was treated by a doctor, who bled her; he took advantage of her weakness, and she was thrown out when Figaro was born. What had been her loss became her gain, her son, until he was stolen. She went to a judge who threw her in prison, but once his father became rich, the judge took her in as his servant.

41. I would like thank Walter E. Rex for pointing out this convergence to me while I was working on the versions of the Baker story by Franklin, Diderot, and Raynal.

42. For a detailed account of this case, see Max Hall, Benjamin Franklin and Polly Baker: The History of a Literary Deception (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990).

43. Elisabeth Guilbert-Sledziewski, “Naissance de la femme civile: la Révolution, la femme, le droit,” Pensée 238 (1984): 37. A woman's judicial incapacity was clearly stated in the Etablissement de 1270 by Louis IX: “De response de fame—Nule fame n'a response en cour laie, puisque ele a seigneur” (Guilbert-Sledziewski, 38).

44. “Mais que nous font, mon fils, les refus d'un homme injuste? ne regarde pas d'où tu viens, vois où tu vas: cela seul importe à chacun” [But what if an unjust man denies us justice, my son? Think no more about whence you came but whither you are bound. That is all that matters to any of us] (Le Mariage, 447, The Marriage, 176). “Nos jugements sur les mœurs se rapportent toujours aux femmes” (Beaumarchais, “Préface,” Le Mariage, 362).

45. See Beaumarchais, “Préface,” 367-8.

46. Beaumarchais, Le Mariage de Figaro, ed. Jean Meyer (Paris: Seuil, 1953).

47. “J'ai remarqué que cet ensemble, cet “hermaphrodisme” morale, est moins rare qu'on ne le croit” [I have noticed that this whole, this moral hermaphroditism, is not as rare as one might think] “Un Mot sur La Mère coupable,” 600-1.

48. In the Encyclopédie, sensibility is called “mother of humanity”; in L'Orphelin de la Chine (1755), Voltaire's character Idamé changes the warrior despot Genghis into a just leader, proving that her apparent weakness, maternal compassion, was in fact a virtue (Œuvres complètes [Paris, 1877], 4:303-54). For the architect Le Doux the effects of feminization were so positive that he erected columns upon which the virtuous stories of mothers were inscribed, so that fathers and sons might praise them (L'Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l'art, des mœurs et de la législation [Paris, 1804], 160).

49. See Elke Harten and Hans-Christian Harten, Femmes, culture et révolution, trans. Bella Chabot, Jeanne Etoré, and Olivier Mannoni (Paris: Des Femmes, 1988), 22.

50. See also La Nourrice républicaine, ou les plaisirs de l'adoption: Répertoire du théâtre républicain ou recueil de pièces imprimées avant, pendant, et après la République Française, vol. 7 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1986).

51. The other was sparing the totem animal as the undoing of parricide (Totem and Taboo, trans. A. A. Brill [New York: Vintage, 1918], 185).

52. Written in 1790, finished in January 1791, La Mère coupable was first presented at the Théâtre du Marais in 1792, for fourteen performances. In 1797, there were only five performances; the critics were harsh, and the audience was bored (see Beaumarchais, 1476).

53. Hunt threads her way between a Freudian and a Girardian analysis of the foundation of society (12).

54. Nadine Bérenguier points out this transformation in her unpublished manuscript “L'Infortune des alliances: Contrat, mariage, et roman au dix-huitième siècle,” (1993), 79. Not until 1792 was the concept of equality between married partners put forth.

55. The above commentary rephrases Ubersfeld's argument in “Un Balcon sur la Terreur: Le Mariage de Figaro,” Europe (April 1973), 105-15.

56. Legislation on bastards is a good example, as I have argued in “Legitimating Change: The Decrees on Bastardy during the French Revolution,” University of Toronto Quarterly 61 (1992): 449-59.

57. “Cette légère irréalité si familière: Un Entretien avec Jean-Pierre Vincent,” Comédie-Française 183 (1990): 21.