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  • Beaumarchais’ Revolution: Genre, Politics, and Theatricality in La Mère coupable
  • Jeffrey M. Leichman (bio)

Literary switch-hitters are rare: a writer’s early experiments in genre and form most often give way to the sustained development of a readily identifiable mature style. Although Beaumarchais’ reputation as a dramatic author rests squarely, and deservedly, on the success and importance of Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro, I would like to suggest that La Mère coupable, the drame that concludes what he called “le roman de la famille Almaviva,” also deserves to be considered in the company of its comic predecessors.1La Mère coupable may seem out of place after the vibrant wit of Beaumarchais’ previous plays, but his embrace of the serious genre represents a return, after disappointing forays in this direction earlier in his career, to the form best suited to reflect the rapid changes in political circumstances during the Revolution which made a third comedy unthinkable.2 Taken together, the three Figaro plays have been characterized by Christy McDonald as a “case” that “reconfigur[es] the individual’s relationship to authority through the family and its relationship to the sociopolitical context,” particularly with respect to the juridical and moral status of women at a time of rapid and profound political change.3 In addition to affirming this essential revision of family relations, La Mère coupable uses the theatre to make an urgent claim about the importance of emotionally persuasive performance at this specific historical moment when [End Page 21] the destabilization of a millennial power structure made the conjunction of acting and politics particularly sensitive.

As both an art of performance and a register of moral reflection addressed to the entire society, the theatre is a particularly appropriate site from which to examine the importance of performance to the Revolution. With its overt emotionality and unsubtle moralism, the theatre of this period comprises an essential complement to the historical archive by offering a privileged view of how the rapid, fundamental changes wrought by the Revolution were represented to the very people creating and living through these momentous times. At once an innovative work of dramatic literature and a prescient examination of the still-unfolding Revolution, La Mère coupable allegorizes the situation of the newly created citizens of the republic, for whom the theatricality strongly associated with the Ancien Régime remains stubbornly, dangerously present in a political order whose stability is predicated on its exclusion. In the final episode of the family saga, Beaumarchais adapts the Enlightenment drame of his youth to the Revolutionary era, warning the French public that the ostentatious repression of their theatrical heritage masks its return as an essential component of an allegedly transparent new order.

A Political Genre

La Mère coupable premiered on 26 June 1792 at the new Théâtre du Marais, whose actors had been culled from the struggling Comédie Italienne. Although the play had been accepted by the Comédie Française, Beaumarchais’ relations with the official troupe were still strained by his successful lobbying on behalf of authors’ rights, and he withdrew the work from consideration in order to have it premiere in the wealthy neighborhood near his home, at a theatre in which he had made a money-losing investment.4 The critical reaction was unanimously negative; whether or not this reflects the expectation that the continuing adventures of the Almaviva family should provide an evening of laughter, this judgment has tenaciously persisted through the present. Thus La Harpe, who in 1792 proclaimed that “tout est faux, évidemment faux, et l’effet n’en est pas seulement froid, mais ridicule et repoussant,”5 finds his contemporary echo in the judgment of Beaurmachais’ biographer, Maurice Lever, who laments: “quoi de plus morne, de plus confus, de plus languissant, de plus indigeste!”6 (The one major exception to two centuries of condemnation, Charles Péguy’s 1913 dialogue Clio attempts a rehabilitation of the play as emblematic of its historical moment during the Revolution, a reading which has emerged as prescient in the eyes of modern [End Page 22] criticism.) While disappointing, this reception should not have come as...

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