SOURCE: “Revolution: Three Changing Faces of Figaro,” in The Michigan Academician, Vol. IX, No. 2, Fall, 1976, pp. 135-46.

In the following essay, Reish demonstrates the ways in which Beaumarchais reflects a changing social order through his transformation of Figaro in the Figaro trilogy.

Revolution connotes dramatic social change. The last quarter of the eighteenth century witnessed two such manifestations of the reordering of the status quo, one in North America, another in Europe. The writing and staging of Beaumarchais' three plays in which the universally known character Figaro appears—Le Barbier de Séville (1775), Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), and La Mère coupable (1792)—occur at a time of two world revolutions in which the author took an active part. These works, composed for the stage over a score of years, illustrate dramatic artistic change in the author's literary production and particularly in the presentation of the socially conscious Figaro...