Improbable Patriot

by Harlow Giles Unger

  Your nephew spent several weeks with me, but is now commanded with his general to join the army. … He is a brave young man who makes himself loved very much. … He has all the vivacity of his age and desires to distinguish himself. General Conway assures me that he conducted himself like a young hero at the battle of the Brandywine. I take the liberty of entering into these details because I know they will delight his mother, since bravery has been a powerful recommendation to the fair sex, and she will be charmed to find so much in her own son.24

  The ships in the Beaumarchais fleet that had not been seized by the British continued carrying arms to America, and to replace his missing ships, he chartered or bought ever-larger ships, with more guns to protect themselves against privateers and warships. “I struggle against obstacles of every kind,” Beaumarchais complained to Francy,

  but as I struggle … I hope to conquer with patience, and courage, and very much money.

  I still hope that … you will send me … a cargo that will deliver me from the horrible pressure in which I find myself. I do not know whether I flatter myself, but I count upon the honesty and equity of Congress. … Mr. Deane … was ashamed and sorry … at the conduct of his colleagues with me, of which the blame belongs entirely to Mr. Lee. … Among all these annoyances, the news from America overwhelms me with joy. Brave, brave people!25

  On June 17, 1778, a naval battle left France and England at war with each other and Benjamin Franklin exulting, “All Europe is for us. … Tyranny is so generally established in the rest of the world, that the prospect of an asylum in America for those who love liberty, gives general joy, and our cause is esteemed as the cause of all mankind. … Glorious is it for the Americans to be called by Providence to this post of honor.”26

  The onset of open warfare between France and England ended any need for the last shreds of secrecy that still enveloped Roderigue Hortalez et Cie. and the Beaumarchais monopoly. The French government could now feed arms directly to the Americans on its own ships and, whenever possible, eliminate costs of intermediaries. If it needed additional capacity to supplement its navy, it asked for competitive bids by private shipowners. Roderigue Hortalez et Cie. would now have to compete with other shippers for French government contracts. The company was now free to engage in normal commercial trade outside the military sphere, however, and no one in France was more skilled in trade than Beaumarchais. He had learned from the master, Pâris-Duverney.

  He now limited his military cargoes to the highest-priced items, such as brass cannon, and he armed his ships with as many guns as they could carry without diminishing their capacity to haul profitably large loads. He decided his ships would be safer traveling in packs, with a powerful ship-of-the-line to protect them. He commissioned an agent to scour French navy yards for a vessel that could serve as both battleship and cargo ship — large enough to carry profitably large loads and enough cannons to protect its own cargo and the rest of the Beaumarchais fleet. His agent located a ship appropriately named the Hippopotame — a 900-ton behemoth with fifty cannon that was deteriorating in the harbor at Rochefort, 150 miles north of Bordeaux. Although the French Navy estimated its value at more than 190,000 livres ($760,000 today), by keeping the Beaumarchais and Hortalez names secret, Beaumarchais’s agent was able to buy it for 70,000 ($280,000). Cost of repairs raised the total price to about 110,000 livres ($440,000), including appropriate emoluments to overseers at the Rochefort royal arsenal for replacing twenty-six of the oldest cannon with the French Navy’s newest twelve-pounders. At the time, a Beaumarchais competitor paid 400,000 livres ($1.6 million) for a much smaller thirty-six-gun frigate.

  The port at Rochefort, north of Bordeaux, where Beaumarchais found the 900-ton ship-of-the-line Hippopotame, which he renamed the Fier Roderigue. With a 300-man crew and fifty powerful cannons, the ship protected the playwright’s fleet of fifty cargo ships from attack by pirates and privateers.

  CABINET DES ESTAMPES, BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE, PARIS

  With a 300-man crew and fifty powerful guns, the Fier Roderigue (Proud Roderigue), as Beaumarchais renamed it, set sail for Chesapeake Bay with a full cargo of military supplies on board — and an angry minister of the navy on shore, raging at the director of the royal arsenal for letting Beaumarchais talk him into giving away the navy’s newest cannon. “It is incredible that you made such a decision,” the minister of the navy ranted. “Make good this mistake if there is still time!”

  It was far too late.

  In the months that followed, Beaumarchais extricated himself from debt by ordering his captains to refuse to offload military cargoes in America until substantial quantities of tobacco and other commodities were at dockside in Francy’s legal possession ready to be loaded. For every 100 livres of military supplies unloaded, the Americans had to load 100 livres of produce to replace the offloaded arms before any more arms were sent ashore. By then, Francy had discovered — and took advantage of — a curious flaw in the American political system that made each colony independent of the Confederation Congress. As a result, he set up a system of competitive bidding between Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Congress for Beaumarchais cargoes and greatly increased the prices — and profits — Hortalez extracted from each shipment. With the Fier Roderigue to protect them, other Beaumarchais ships widened the range of their trading operations to include merchants on the sugar islands. Privateers had increased the risks to cargo ships at sea and sent sugar prices soaring in Europe. Beaumarchais now reaped greater profits trading military supplies to sugar merchants on the islands and letting them try to resell arms to the difficult Americans.

  As European demand increased for tobacco, sugar, and other New World commodities, Beaumarchais expanded his fleet to fifty ships and became one of the richest men in France. The protective guns of the powerful Fier Roderigue kept losses to a minimum, and to confuse the British, he constantly changed the names of his other ships — even the configurations of their decks. On one crossing, his “navy,” as he called his fleet, captured a British ship — the Marlborough — and brought her into a French port. A cheering crowd looked on — and mocked the English crew by bursting into the early eighteenth-century French folk song “Malbrough” — a song with a purposely misspelled title (and mispronounced as “Malbrugg”) that mocks the battlefield exploits of John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, who was obsessed with fighting the French. After Beaumarchais’s merchant ship captured the English fighting ship, “Malbrough” became the most popular song in France. Even Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, and their sycophants joined in the national fun. “Malbrough” remains a part of the central body of children’s folk songs in France to this day.

  It begins, “Marlborough goes off to war, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha; Marlborough goes off to war, who knows when he’ll return . …” The song feigns sorrow at its end, revealing that Monsieur Malbrough est mort (My Lord Marlborough is dead). Although mironton means “funny (laughable) person,” it was also selected because of its mellifluous sound, which made for easy repetition in the refrain.

  Malbrough

  Words and music to the French folk song “Malbrough,” composed in 1709 but made widely popular after Beaumarchais’s “navy” captured the British ship Marlborough and sailed her into a French port — to the cheers, mockery, and singing of the crowd at the pier.

  AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

  In July 1779, the Fier Roderigue was escorting part of the Beaumarchais “navy” to Granada when it encountered a French war fleet under Admiral Comte d’Estaing — on his way to confront a British fleet. Seeking every advantage he could get, he commandeered the Fier Roderigue and her sixty guns. In the battle that followed, the British killed one-third of the Fier Roderigue crew and its captain and left the ship so riddled by cannon shot that it had to be towed into port in Granada. Although the French won the battle, the unarmed cargo vessels in the Beaumarchais navy, left unprotected by the Fier Roderigue, fell prey to British raiders, who sank or captured ten of
the eleven ships and cost Beaumarchais more than 2 million livres.

  “I have only time, Monsieur, to write you that Le Fier Roderigue held fast her post in the line of battle and contributed to the success of the King’s arms,” d’Estaing wrote to Beaumarchais, pledging that “your interests will not suffer. … Brave [Captain] M. de Montaut, unfortunately, was killed. I shall soon send the Minister a statement of the privileges and favors I ask, and I hope you will let me have the necessary information to help me solicit those your Navy so justly deserves.”27 Elated by his ship’s heroic participation in a French naval victory over the British, the irrepressible Beaumarchais got a loan of 400,000 livres from the French government, acquired four more ships, and by the end of 1779 had restored his huge trading business to levels reached before he lost the Fier Roderigue.

  By then, too, New York’s John Jay had become president of Congress, and, succumbing to Deane’s pleas and Francy’s implied threats to end Hortalez et Cie. arms shipments, he wrote to Beaumarchais:

  The Congress of the United States, recognizing the great efforts which you have made in their favor, presents you its thanks, and the assurance of its esteem.

  It laments the disappointments which you have suffered. … Disastrous circumstances have prevented the execution of its desires; but it will take the promptest measures to acquit itself of the debt which it has contracted towards you. The generous sentiments … which alone could dictate a conduct such as yours, are the eulogy of your actions and the ornament of your character. While, by your rare talents, you have rendered yourself useful to your prince, you have gained the esteem of this young Republic and merited the applause of the New World.28

  “I felt my courage revived,” Beaumarchais responded after reading Jay’s letter. “My pains, my work, and my advances were immense. … Working day and night … I exhausted myself with fatigue. … I thought that a great people would soon offer a sweet and free retreat to all the persecuted of Europe; that my fatherland would be revenged for the humiliation to which it had been subjected by the treaty of 1763 … that the sea would become open to all commercial nations … that a new system of politics would open in Europe.”29

  President of Congress John Jay was the first American leader to publicly acknowledge America’s debt to Beaumarchais for supplying the Continental Army with arms, ammunition, and other essential supplies.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  In February 1778, eighty-four-year-old Voltaire arrived in Paris and sent word to Beaumarchais that he needed to see him. Although the two had had an occasional but superficial correspondence, the playwright was both puzzled and pleased by the legendary philosopher’s invitation, hoping it might relate to Voltaire’s position as president of the Académie Française, the association of so-called French “immortals.” Voltaire’s visit, however, had nothing to do with the Académie. Apparently sensing his impending death, Voltaire sought to arrange publication of his complete works and insisted, “All my hopes are centered on Beaumarchais.”30 Although almost all his hundreds of formal works — histories, plays, novels, essays, poems — had been published in one form or another here and there, so many governments had banned them that they had yet to be collected and published in a set of complete works in one language, and, indeed, his volumes of letters — especially the revealing correspondence with Frederick the Great — had yet to be published in any language. Although Beaumarchais agreed in principle to publish Voltaire’s works, Voltaire died late that spring before the two could arrange a formal method of working together.

  Although speculators flocked like vultures with offers to buy Voltaire manuscripts from his heirs, the sheer volume of his works made it unlikely that their publication could generate any profits. And even if a publisher took the risk of publishing them, half the works had been banned in France, thus making their publication in Voltaire’s native land all but pointless. French publisher Charles Panckoucke ignored such risks and won the bidding war for Voltaire’s manuscripts, but when he realized the volume of material he would have to publish, he concluded that their publication would ruin him financially and offered them to Beaumarchais. Then Catherine the Great of Russia briefly stepped into the picture. Eager to offset the czarist reputation for mindless brutality and present herself as an enlightened monarch, she offered to subsidize their publication. Beaumarchais was incensed and rushed to Versailles to convince Prime Minister Comte Frédéric de Maurepas that Voltaire and his works were an integral part of French heritage. Having flirted on the sly with Voltairian Freemasonry and having read many of Voltaire’s works, Maurepas agreed and offered Beaumarchais some discretionary royal funding to publish the works in French, on the condition that he print them outside France.

  Now a publisher for the first time in his life, Beaumarchais plunged into his new profession with his customary zeal, confident as always that another fortune awaited him. He paid Panckoucke 160,000 francs for all of Voltaire’s unpublished manuscripts and letters and sent 150,000 livres to England to buy all of the type, ink, and paper from the estate of John Baskerville, who had been the world’s master producer of quality printing materials before his death in 1775. He arranged with the Margrave of Baden to lease an unused fort in Kehl, just across the French border in Germany, as his printing plant. After contracting to buy the output of three paper mills, he set to work studying and learning every aspect of printing and publishing before hiring a team of workers to begin publishing. Enthralled by Voltaire’s writing and wide range of knowledge, Beaumarchais did much of the editing and transcribing himself, with help from a team of skilled proofreaders. By the end of 1780, Beaumarchais was ready to issue a prospectus that he sent to potential subscribers across the face of Europe, England, and America. Although he could not advertise in France, he flooded the press of other European countries with so many advertisements and so much publicity that word of his offering reached every potential subscriber in his native land.

  Bust of Voltaire by contemporary French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon. In February 1778, the eighty-four-year-old Voltaire asked Beaumarchais to arrange publication of his complete works.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  When Maurepas died in 1781, the French Catholic Church began a relentless campaign against Beaumarchais, publishing a widely circulated “Denunciation to the Parliament of the Subscription for the Works of Voltaire.” Exhilarated by the free publicity the church attacks were generating, Beaumarchais expanded his publishing efforts to include the works of the equally controversial Jean-Jacques Rousseau. By 1783, he completed printing and binding the first Voltaire books. Expecting buyers across the world to snap up copies of the master’s works, Beaumarchais published 15,000 complete sets of Voltaire’s works in two editions — one deluxe edition of seventy volumes and a less costly edition of ninety-two volumes. He barely managed to sell 2,000 copies. He closed his publishing plant and shipped the tens of thousands of remaining unbound sheets to his home in Paris, where they filled every unused space in his attic, his basement, and under the beds and furnishings of every room.

  Bright People Are So Stupid

  ALTHOUGH LESSER nobles at Versailles still scorned him, Beaumarchais had, in fact, become all but indispensable to the comte de Vergennes and other ministers. Ignoring — and all but mocking — the sneers, stares, and unvented fury of envious sinecures, sieur de Beaumarchais strutted into the palace, along its endless corridors and into private apartments and offices, all but singing as he went, carrying himself like the heir of an old and noble family visiting his castle in the country.

  His unorthodox schemes had revitalized French government policies. Bound by conventional thinking and tied to tradition, the high lords of government invariably opposed his schemes when they first heard them, but almost always succumbed to his convincing arguments and, if they succeeded, embraced them as their own. And his schemes almost always succeeded — often in spectacular fashion. Indeed, he had proved himself a policy genius. He had provided the American
s with secret French military aid that had ensured a critical American military victory at Saratoga, revived American morale, and turned the course of the war against the British. By maintaining tight secrecy over the source of the military aid, he had allowed France to stay out of the war long enough for her to rebuild her military to near parity with England. By supporting the Americans with French arms, Beaumarchais had also erased residual American hatred for France from the French and Indian War, and by convincing the French government to be first in recognizing American independence, he had ensured France a major share in the lucrative American trade that had hitherto been England’s exclusive preserve.

  With these policy triumphs to Beaumarchais’s credit, Vergennes and other ministers at Versailles — as well as the king himself — consulted Beaumarchais on a wide range of economic, military, and political policies. “If you will come here, sir, tomorrow, Thursday evening,” the comte de Vergennes asked Beaumarchais, “we can have a long interview of the work we commenced last week.” With that, Beaumarchais went to Versailles to discuss a problem of international trade that “I have explained in an elementary form, so that when Monsieur le Ministre shows it to the king, his inexperience in such complicated affairs may not prevent him from understanding all its aspects.”1

  In the days that followed, Finance Minister Jacques Necker consulted Beaumarchais on the American tobacco trade and methods of supplying French troops sent to America. Another minister consulted him on financing projected government loans, while the minister of the navy called on him to discuss the financing of ship construction. And Foreign Minister Vergennes — an avid bibliophile — asked him if he could not come up with a scheme to halt the epidemic of theft that was fast emptying the archives of the Bibliothèque du Roi of the most precious, irreplaceable parchment deeds, some dating back centuries. Over the next five years, Beaumarchais invested 100,000 livres (the monetary units “pounds,” not “books”), commissioning agents to locate and secretly buy back the documents for the government — and, by threatening to identify those petty noblemen who had “borrowed” the documents, he embarrassed and frightened them into ending their practice of removing materials from the library.