Written in 1778 but created only in 1784 following many setbacks with censorship, The Marriage of Figaro (preceded in the title by a shortcut, crazy day, which flourished under various artistic skies) earned its author the status of revolutionary for having questioned the legitimacy of aristocratic power. “What have you done for so many goods? », launches Figaro in the long monologue that he ruminates for Count Almaviva before issuing an opinion as sharp as a scaffold: “You took the trouble to be born, and nothing more. »
If this prophetic aspect of the play is well known, the one that invites a reconsideration of the woman is less so. Especially by giving her the floor, as in Marceline, in scene XV of Act III. “I was born, me, to be wise and I became so as soon as I was allowed to use my reason”, proclaims the one who was a mother too early and who lost sight of her child, Figaro. The indignation does not take long to designate its target. “Men more than ingrates, who stigmatize with contempt the playthings of your passions, your victims! It is you who must be punished for the errors of our youth; you and your magistrates, so vain of the right to judge us, and who allow us to take away, by their culpable negligence, all honest means of subsisting. » Like the social demands of a valet, these thinly veiled accusations of sexual abuse might not be accepted at the court of Vienna, where the representation of the Marriage of Figaro had also been banned.
comic verve
The wily Lorenzo da Ponte (author of the libretto) and the idealist Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, enthusiastic regarding the comic verve of Beaumarchais, naturally expurgated them from the text set to music in their opera (a project initially refused by the Austrian emperor but finally created in 1786). Netia Jones projected them at the Palais Garnier on the big screen at a key moment in the fourth act which brings the young Barberine (raped by the Count?) closer to her elder Marceline (the only one capable of understanding her distress for having probably suffered the same fate ). The text of Beaumarchais is then inscribed as a highlight of the replies of the Marriage of Figaro (on one side in Italian, on the other in French translation) that the British wished, from time to time, to expose on a backdrop.
Who would dare to blame him for this (dramatic) misconduct in a work that takes (conjugal) infidelity as a plot? Certainly not the viewers agree with Marceline’s ultimate apostrophe towards men. “In the even higher ranks, women obtain only a derisory consideration from you: lured with apparent respect, in real servitude; treated as minors for our goods, punished as majors for our faults! » Proof that Beaumarchais was a feminist long before the term emerged?