[In the following excerpt, Hayes examines Beaumarchais's general perspective on the theater and assesses the influence of Diderot's theories on Beaumarchais's works.]

Beaumarchais's publicly acknowledged debt to the author of Le Père de famille brought him cruel raillery from Palissot: ‘Beaumarchais, trop obscur pour être intéressant, / De son dieu Diderot est le singe impuissant.’¹ However, although Eugénie and Le Père de famille enjoyed roughly equal popularity, both were displaced in the 1780's by Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro and today it is as the creator of Figaro that Beaumarchais is accounted the dramatic luminary of late eighteenth century France. In this paper, however, I should like to look at Beaumarchais's ideas on the theatre in general and his practice in the drame in particular, consulting for the most part the serious plays and their prefaces, but glancing on occasion at the better-known Figaro plays as well. I am concerned here with probing the relationship between Beaumarchais's dramaturgy and Diderot's and the extent to which Diderot's dramatic theories either remain inscribed in Beaumarchais's text or have been overwritten by it.

To resume briefly: I would propose that the poetics of the drama developed by Diderot in his plays and critical writings can be seen as an extension of the theory of rapports which informs all areas of his thought. Diderot borrows from eighteenth-century interest in natural and aesthetic relationships to posit a reality that is comprehensible only insofar as it is perceived in terms of relational systems. Unlike many other thinkers, Diderot sees nothing inherently meaningful in those relationships, since they may well be imposed through the act of perception itself. Among the ramifications of this idea is a fundamental unsettling of any possible absolute of truth, authority, or even identity. Reality is purely relational, differential, and arbitrary.² The effect in terms of the drama is to emphasize the persistence of relations in many forms. Diderot is very concerned, particularly in the last of the Entretiens sur le Fils naturel, with showing the connections between acting style, scenic design, and text and with emphasizing those connections through perfectly transparent plots: all must be clear for the spectators, who are freed from suspense to ponder the relationships displayed before them. The theme of universal relatedness has its visual correlate in the tableau. Diderot's treatment of dramatic character is particularly striking. Appropriately, he sees character as a function of relationships; the drama is based on social and familial ‘situations’ rather than on individually identifiable, analysable characters. The drame has no psychology as such; instead it seeks to examine the workings of the social system. In general, in the world of eighteenth-century dramaturgy, Diderot's theories mark a kind of liberation, an opening of new spaces for discussion. It is he who consciously formulates the breakdown of the classical opposition of Comedy and Tragedy;³ even if he was reluctant to explore the political and social dimensions of his proposed reforms, others such as Mercier⁴ and to a certain extent Beaumarchais were willing to make pointed applications.

In the well-known Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux published with Eugénie, Beaumarchais begins by sounding an odd theme which recurs throughout his discussion: ‘Je n'ai point le mérite d'être Auteur.’⁵ He presents himself as having been ‘trop sérieusement occupé’ to be anything other than a literary dilettante, even as he underscores the originality of his thoughts on the drame by antedating his work to around 1759 or 1760.⁶ He recounts how the experience of Le Père de famille (first performed in 1761) fired him with the enthusiasm necessary to complete his own work and launch a career in the theatre. The Essai thus situates itself very neatly both as a compliment to Diderot and as a disclaimer, since the only ‘source’ Beaumarchais recognizes is an anecdote in Le Diable boiteux. As we will see, Beaumarchais's procedure here is symptomatic. Consciously respectful of the work of his predecessors, he cannot help, apparently, rewriting it, although to occasionally paradoxical results. In the following discussion, it will become clear that this form of ‘duplicity’—which one might assimilate to what he referred to as ‘le double plan’ in La Mère coupable—characterizes many aspects of his writing.

Beaumarchais's ambivalent approach to Diderot is only part of an ongoing quest for originality. In the preface to Le Mariage de Figaro he mentions with some pride that Le Barbier de Séville was criticized for its ‘espèce de nouveauté’ (237) and Le Mariage de Figaro, ‘parce que j'entreprends de frayer un nouveau sentier à cet art’ (233). La Mère coupable, containing ‘une intrigue de comédie, fondue dans le pathétique d'un drame’ (460), represents something new as well.⁷ Beaumarchais's relationship to Diderot's genre sérieux is an extremely complex one, marked by a constant va et vient: admissions of influence, declarations of independence, persistence of influence.

In the early dramas, for example, one is struck by the fact that, the author's claims to originality notwithstanding, both Eugénie and Les Deux amis appear to be extremely conventional exercises in the popular sentimental genre. Given the author's stated intention of using ‘un style simple, sans fleurs ni guirlandes’ which would render Eugénie ‘aussi vrai que la nature’ (16), the heroine's style exalté near the end of the play seems out of place. One suspects that Beaumarchais foresaw this difficulty, since he warns readers in the Essai that Eugénie's grandiloquent chagrin reflects the exaltation of a soul near death. One might also term incongruous the heavy use of asides, those curious moments when all characters become deaf to what is said to the audience. Earlier comic writers had made less elaborate claims as to the truth or naturalness of their representations; Diderot, who had made such claims, stripped Le Fils naturel of asides and left relatively few in Le Père de famille—a play which he considered closer to traditional comedy than the first play.⁸ Beaumarchais's most serious moments are interrupted by characters talking to no one in particular, a device which might lead an audience to comic ecstasy in Le Mariage de Figaro, but whose presence in Eugénie returns us to the stylized world of earlier tearful comedy and comedy of manners. Following Diderot, Beaumarchais renders his plot emphatically transparent; all is revealed as early as possible. It is important ‘d'instruire le spectateur de l'état respectif et des desseins de tous les personnages’ (19); the transparent intrigue has its charm for the omniscient spectator who is thereby flattered and freed from suspense.

Still, the older techniques and Beaumarchais's new ambitions occasionally produce odd results, as in the scene from Eugénie where Clarendon overhears (and takes offense at) his valet's monologue (I, 6-7). Diderot had retained the use of the monologue, but respected its implicit convention as artificially presented ‘spoken thought’ meant only for the audience. Beaumarchais's insistence on faithful representation (i.e., when Drink speaks alone, he is ‘really speaking’) leads him to present behavior which is anything but natural. The difficulty stems in part from a predilection for mixing genres, a practice he calls particular attention to: despite its sentimental framework, Eugénie contains comic elements in its characterizations and plot twists reminiscent of comedy; Le Barbier de Séville allies two types of comedy, ‘l'ancienne et fraîche gaieté … avec le ton léger de la plaisanterie actuelle’ (237); the exuberant Mariage de Figaro touches more than once on the genre sérieux; and La Mère coupable features a double plot, a ‘comédie d'intrigue … [qui] marche tout au travers du drame’ (461; italics Beaumarchais's).

I will have more to say about the practice later, but first let us focus attention on Beaumarchais's approach to the problems of identity and character. Here he repeats the gesture of the Essai's opening paragraph—simultaneously acknowledging Diderot and moving away from him. Beaumarchais spends considerable time on two subjects which also interested Diderot: the place of caractère and condition and the salutary effects of sensibilité, but the result is somewhat different.

That Beaumarchais was intrigued by the possibilities of dramatic characterization based on condition is evident to some extent in Eugénie's implied—if extremely attenuated—class struggle, but it is clearest in his second play, Les Deux amis. Here the imbroglio exists purely in terms of the situation created by the business dealings of the two friends, Aurelly and Mélac père. The cast of characters suggests the importance of the individual état civil; personality as such is reduced to varying degrees of sensibilité and honnêteté.

Aurelly, riche Négociant
de Lyon, homme vif, honnête, franc et naïf
Melac Pere, receveur général
des Fermes, à Lyon, philosophe sensible
Pauline, nièce d'Aurelly,
jeune personne au-dessus de son âge
Melac Fils, élevé
avec Pauline, jeune homme bouillant, et d'une sensibilité excessive
Saint-Albans, fermier général
en tournée, homme du monde estimable
Dabins,, caissier d'Aurelly …

Obviously there are no villains here, and aside from the inevitable pair of young lovers, it is already clear that the action of the play evolves from a quidproquo of friendship and finance. (Even in its day, the play's lack of success in all but provincial financial centers was attributed to the rather technical nature of the problems.) In any event, Les Deux amis is the only play in which ‘condition’ is taken so literally. In speaking of Eugénie, for example, Beaumarchais took the term situation to refer to plot only.

… Ce n'est pas assez que la masse des incidents pèse sur cette infortunée; pour accroître le trouble et l'intérêt, je veux que la situation de tous les personnages soit continuellement en opposition avec leurs désirs et le caractère que je leur ai donné, et que l'événement qui les rassemble ait toujours des aspects aussi douleureux que différents pour chacun d'eux.

(18)

Diderot had also called for the opposition of dramatic situation and character but felt excessive contrast to be detrimental to the genre sérieux.⁹ Again, the critical vocabulary of the two is similar, but the use of that vocabulary, rather different.

The attention given to professions in Les Deux amis does not begin to measure up to another social distinction which evidently interested Beaumarchais much more: social class, the war between ‘bourgeoise intégrité’ and ‘noble infidélité’ (238). In the Essai he denounced the moral value of tragedy, for example, partly because the spectacle of a hero assailed by indifferent fate is hardly an edifying one, but principally because the situations appeal more to the amour propre of common people than to their cœur.

Nous aimons à nous croire les confidents d'un Prince malheureux, parce que ses chagrins, ses larmes, ses faiblesses, semblent rapprocher sa condition de la nôtre, ou nous consolent de son élévation; sans nous en apercevoir, chacun de nous cherche à agrandir sa sphère, et notre orgueil se nourrit du plaisir de juger au Théâtre ces Maîtres du monde, qui partout ailleurs peuvent nous fouler aux pieds.

(9)

It is true that Beaumarchais promptly attenuates his cynical observation by noting that we do take an emotional interest in tragic figures, but only through identification with their humanity as suffering lovers, parents, and children. This ambivalence regarding representations of the aristocracy is clearly in evidence in Eugénie, where despite the slurs cast by the heroine's father on aristocratic morality, he himself is a baron; Clarendon, the libertine with a heart of gold, is a count.¹⁰

Beaumarchais's class characterizations are ambiguous, but such a stance would not have been atypical of the pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie. There is, however, a conservative strain which cannot be overlooked. By ‘conservative’ I want to suggest a certain desire for stability and for the preservation of some of the structures shaken by Diderot's brand of playful anarchy. This strain manifests itself most clearly in Beaumarchais's weakening of the primacy of rapports in the constitution of identity, a weakening that is particularly evident in his ambivalence regarding condition and in a recurring perplexity over whether characters are determined by innate caractère or socially imposed état civil: ‘Tout homme est lui-même par son caractère; il est ce qu'il plaît au sort par son état, sur lequel ce caractère influe beaucoup …’ (13-14). His answer represents a dogged attempt to come down squarely in the middle, but in the final analysis it appears that the entity caractère remains largely untouched and intact.

Something similar seems to be going on, it might be remarked in passing, with Beaumarchais's idiosyncratic mixtures of dramatic genres. Although in some respects he seems to be following the course of others who would break down the barriers of generic classifications, his manner of so doing nonetheless reveals a persistence of old identities—his double plan suggests a painter who added blue to yellow, but instead of green achieved only the juxtaposition of blue and yellow.¹¹

Identity can nevertheless be compromised. One might consider the passage of the Essai describing the spectator's reaction to the drame. Beaumarchais begins by echoing Diderot's notion that virtue consists in the loss of the self, but he soon abandons the idea that the genre sérieux should permit one to ‘leave oneself’ to commune with society.

La gaieté légère nous distrait; elle tire, en quelque façon, notre âme hors d'elle-même, et la répand autour de nous: on ne rit bien qu'en compagnie. …

Il n'en est pas ainsi de l'effet d'un Drame touchant, puisé dans nos mœurs. Si le rire bruyant est ennemi de la réflexion, l'attendrissement, au contraire, est silencieux; il nous recueille, il nous isole de tout. Celui qui pleure au Spectacle est seul. …

(11)

Paradoxically, Beaumarchais seems to echo Rousseau's anti-theatrical diatribes (‘L'on croit se rassembler au spectacle, et c'est là que chacun s'isole,’¹²), but the social imperative emerges even in the intimate interior self: je will feel self-satisfaction only ‘si j'ai rempli tous mes devoirs envers la société’ (12). Beaumarchais's positing of a real identifiable entity, ‘caractère,’ capable of acting on the arbitrary happenstance of one's état indicates not, I think, the total abandonment of the idea that the social network (l'état civil) is implicit in identity, but it suggests nevertheless an attempt to recuperate a certain solidity and autonomy from the vertiginous slippage of Diderot's moi. If the new sensibility had seen fit to reveal the limitations of older aristocratic models of heroic individuality, it soon found itself faced with the necessity of reconstructing the monument, if in an altered architectural style. The ‘alterations’ are interesting. Even though Beaumarchais proposes a descent into the solitary self, the journey produces a ‘bon parent, maître équitable, ami bienfaisant, homme juste et citoyen utile’ (12), i.e., a being inextricably bound to relationships.¹³

The persistence of relationships manifests itself as well in the preponderance of contractual arrangements and decisions which influence the development of each play. Les Deux amis is the most obvious example, since its entire action depends on transactions, debit and credit both moral and monetary. The play ends with joyful exchanges of children, money, and ‘admiration.’

Saint-Alban. Aurelly, rendez-moi votre Mandat, je pars; soyez tranquille. Vos effets de Paris me seront remis promptement, ou je supplée à tout.

Aurelly. De vos biens?

Saint-Alban. Puissent-ils être toujours aussi heureusement employés! Vous m'avez appris comme on jouit de ses sacrifices. En vain je vous admire, si votre exemple ne m'élève pas jusqu'à l'honneur de l'imiter.—Nous compterons à mon retour.

(Chacun exprime son admiration.)

Aurelly, transporté. Monsieur … je me sens digne d'accepter ce service, car à votre place j'en aurais fait autant. Pressez donc votre retour; venez marier ces jeunes gens que vous comblez de bienfaits.

Melac Père. Pourquoi retarder leur bonheur? Unissons-les ce soir même. Eh! quelle joie, mes amis, de penser qu'un jour aussi orageux pour le bonheur n'a pas été tout à fait perdu pour la vertu!

(V, 11)

Everything can be exchanged in these happy transactions, as can be seen in the preponderance of such verbs as ‘rendre,’ ‘remettre,’ ‘suppléer,’ and ‘imiter.’ Aurelly and Saint-Alban themselves are interchangeable (‘j'en aurais fait autant’). Saint-Alban's possible financial loss is redeemed by his ‘élévation’ and his goodness to the young people recompensed by the honor of officiating at their wedding; virtue compensates for happiness and balances the account books.

Marriage contracts are at issue elsewhere to such an extent as to suggest that the proper ending for the comic plot is not marriage itself, but the marriage contract, properly drawn up and suitably witnessed. Clarendon's mockery of the process prior to Act I of Eugénie very nearly costs his beloved her life; only public embarrassment and sacrifice restore to him ‘le bonheur avec Eugénie, la paix avec moi-même, et l'estime des honnêtes gens’ (V, 9). The Baron emphasizes the equitable nature of the exchange: ‘Mes enfants, chacun de vous a fait son devoir aujourd'hui: vous en recevrez la récompense. N'oubliez donc jamais qu'il n'y a de vrais biens sur la terre que dans l'exercice de la vertu.’

Eugénie's ‘reward’ is less brilliant than the Count's. Having all but disappeared in the final scenes save to express her ‘horror’ of the world, she gives herself to her repentant seducer, first silently, since ‘Le Comte lui coupe la parole,’¹⁴ and then only in the name of ‘le père d'un enfant si désiré’ and her family. She stays at the center of the final tableau, but remains silent, a mute reminder that woman's role in all too many social systems is to maintain the benefits of exogamy by performing as objects of desire and elements of exchange.¹⁵

Beyond Beaumarchais's serious plays, contractual agreements dominate much of the action in Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro; especially in the earlier play, exchanges of money seal the arrangements—generally to men's advantage. One such exchange has its effect much later, when Almaviva's generosity with Rosine's inheritance in Le Barbier de Séville leaves her facing poverty in La Mère coupable: ‘Il m'épousa sans biens; n'exigeons rien de lui. Le travail de mes mains soutiendra ma faible existence,’ (IV, 18).

Relationships and the necessity of untangling them form the gist of the sentimental plot in La Mère coupable, but the resolution remains murky and marred by apparent contradictions. Duped by the villain Bégearss, Léon and Florestine believe themselves both to be children of Count Almaviva (she being revealed as illegitimate) and as half-brother and sister must renounce their love. Nonetheless, the Count, the Countess, Suzanne, Figaro, and of course Bégearss himself are all aware that since Léon is the Countess's illegitimate son he is no relation to Florestine; and Léon himself learns who his father is by overhearing a discussion between the Count and Countess. Unaccountably, it is only in the final scene, after Bégearss's parting shot (‘Vous aurez l'impudeur de conclure un mariage abominable, en unissant le frère avec la sœur’) that Figaro steps in to state (what should be) the obvious: ‘… que par la nature et la loi, ces jeunes gens ne se sont rien, qu'ils sont étrangers l'un à l'autre’ (V, 8). The surprised reactions of the Count (‘O Figaro! … Madame, il a raison’) and Léon (‘Dieux! Maman! quel espoir!’) are quite unjustified. Only Florestine has the right to be confused, but the Count apparently feels no compulsion to enlighten her: ‘Mes enfants, nous y reviendrons; et nous consulterons, sous des noms supposés, des gens de loi discrets, éclairés, pleins d'honneur’(V, 8). Relationships again determine identity. Here the social element is further reinforced by the reliance on ‘gens de loi’ who will verify relationships ‘par la nature’ and ratify them ‘par la loi.’

It has been argued that Figaro's refusal to accept a monetary reward in the final speech of the play represents a proclamation of his caractère and autonomy and a rupture of the chain of commercial exchanges. His discourse, however, remains entrenched in the system of exchange: ‘que ce jour acquitte ma vie! … On gagne assez dans les familles quand on en expulse un méchant’ (528; emphasis added). The situation is analogous to that of the Essai sur le genre sérieux, in which Beaumarchais's profession of faith in an authentic, intact caractère is undermined by the degree to which social relationships participate in the constitution of that caractère.

I have suggested that Beaumarchais's double plan is an attempt to recuperate and pin down what Diderot proposed as a moving ‘identity’ of interaction and differentiation, even if, in the final analysis, the persistence of mobile relationality eventually undermines the process of recuperation. Beaumarchais would restore solid selves to the intersections of the social network. This conservative stance also informs some of his remarks concerning theatrical representation. He returns several times in the Essai to the idea that the serious genre should be ‘aussi vrai que la nature,’ but his argument leads in a different direction than Diderot's claims of vérité in Le Fils naturel. Diderot's vérité went beyond the vraisemblable—even ran counter to it—and eventually came to reside in complex, changing relationships. Beaumarchais proposes nothing less than ideal transparent representation: ‘le premier objet de l'Auteur doit être de me transporter si loin des coulisses, et de faire si bien disparaître à mes yeux tout le badinage d'Acteurs, l'appareil théâtral, que leur souvenir ne puisse pas m'atteindre une seule fois dans tout le cours de son Drame’ (16). His comments on the difference between drama ‘to be spoken’ and drama ‘to be read’ privileges the former; for the latter to succeed, it must be innocent of any ‘literariness’: ‘Ayez la vertu d'être moins élégant, vous en serez plus vrai’ (21). As I have indicated, this will to truth meshes rather ill with certain aspects of Beaumarchais's practice, especially his retention of various comic conventions in the context of a one-to-one correspondence with ‘la nature.’ The ‘double plan, que l'on peut appeler complexé appears to be his preferred style, whether in acknowledging predecessors, choosing genres, or making claims regarding truth and verisimilitude, selves and social systems.

Notes

1. Cited by Louis de Loménie, Beaumarchais et son temps: Etudes sur la société en France au XVIIIe siècle (1880; Genève: Slatkine 1970) 1:228.

2. James Creech gives a similar reading of the rapports in Diderot: Thresholds of Representation (Columbus: Ohio Univ. Press 1986).

3. For a social interpretation of such breakdowns, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press 1977) 180.

4. Mercier makes this point most clearly in his treatise Du théâtre ou Nouvel essai sur l'art dramatique (1773; rpt. Genève: Slatkine 1970).

5. Beaumarchais, ‘Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux,’ Théâtre complet, ed. Maurice Allem and Paul Courant (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 1957) 5. All further references to this edition will appear in the text.

6. Although some doubt was cast on Beaumarchais's chronology, the discovery of an early edition of Eugénie would seem to bear him out. See Brian M. Norton, ‘Beaumarchais's First Play, Eugénie,’ Romanic Review, 57 (1966): 81-7.

7. Curiously, the older Beaumarchais of this last play lacks his earlier brashness and laments his own ‘faible exécution’: ‘j'essaye encore d'être peintre du cœur humain; mais ma palette est desséchée par l'âge et les contradictions’ (462). He contents himself with the thought that some future writer may do justice to his idea and that critics will stay within the limits of the very ‘bon goût’ he had satirized in the preface to Le Mariage de Figaro. Originality, apparently, was not enough.

8. Diderot, De la poésie dramatique, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 10, ed. Dieckmann, Proust, Varloot, et al. (Paris: Hermann 1975) 332. All subsequent references to Diderot will be from this edition. Jacques Scherer notes the traditional association between aside and comedy in La Dramaturgie classique en France (Paris: Nizet [1950]), and observes that, whereas the seventeenth-century public was ‘friand d'apartés’ (263), critics were generally hostile to such intrusions on vraisemblance.

9. Diderot, 10:376-80.

10. The uncalled-for ennobling of the cast is carried over to Les Deux amis, where Aurelly is about to receive letters of nobility. That the recently gentrified M. Caron de Beaumarchais never really worked out his feelings toward the aristocracy is apparent in the Figaro plays as well when the servants' radical statements on the meaninglessness of class distinctions in the first two plays are co-opted in La Mère coupable by Count Almaviva, who sternly refuses to let a frustrated Suzanne call him ‘Monseigneur.’ J. S. Spink notes that unmotivated gentrification is one of the traits distinguishing French from English drama. ‘A propos des drames de Beaumarchais,’ Revue de littérature comparée, 37 (1963): 216-26.

11. Mercier, on the other hand, feels strongly that the breakdown of classifications should lead not merely to confusion among the old entities, but to the creation of something new. Du théâtre, 94-103ff. For further discussion on the aesthetic significance of Beaumarchais's fondness for genres mixtes, see Martine de Rougemont, ‘Beaumarchais dramaturge: Le substrat romanesque du drame,’ Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 84 (1984): 710-21; and Jack Undank, ‘Beaumarchais' Transformations,’ MLN, 100 (1985): 829-70.

12. Rousseau, Lettre à d'Alembert, ed. with introduction by Michel Launay (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion 1967) 66.

13. In a finely-drawn study, Gabriel Conesa also observes that, Beaumarchais's statements to the contrary notwithstanding, ‘la portée psychologique de son œuvre n'est pas au centre de ses préoccupations.’ Speaking principally of the first two Figaro plays, Conesa sees Beaumarchais's art as realizing new possibilities inherent in language: ‘En détournant le langage de sa finalité psychologique traditionnelle, en le débarrassant de sa tension pour lui confier une fonction ludique, il a pu le placer au centre de sa dramaturgie et en faire une fin en soi …’ La Trilogie de Beaumarchais (Paris: P.U.F. 1985) 180. Conesa's conclusions help explain actors' traditional preference of Molière to Beaumarchais and the lack of caractère that leads Maurice Descotes to ask ‘Figaro est-il un véritable personnage? Ou n'est-il qu'un rôle vocal?’ Les Grands rôles du théâtre de Beaumarchais (Paris: P.U.F. 1974) 200-1.

14. Actually, she is cut off by a higher authority; a variant of the text shows that originally Eugénie was encouraged to ‘parler librement’ and that she even expressed a personal pleasure in the dénouement—‘le plaisir de lui faire grâce m'en a ravi tout le mérite’ (724; my emphasis)—but that Beaumarchais dropped the passage during revisions.

15. Michel Delon underlines the interchangeability of women and money in the Figaro plays in ‘La mère coupable ou la fête impossible,’ Les Fêtes de la révolution, Colloque de Clermont-Ferrand, juin, 1974, ed. Jean Ehrard and Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Société des études robespierristes 1977) 380.