"Revolution as Enterprise: On Beaumarchais the Entrepreneur"

This paper compares Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ involvement in the American Revolutionary War, through his merchant company Roderigue, Hortalez and Company, with other business enterprises of the time, starting with his own ones. Known primarily for his literary and diplomatic talents, Beaumarchais was also what we would today call a ‘serial entrepreneur,’ who took part, over his diverse and busy career, in ventures ranging from slave-trading with his mentor Pâris-Duverney (1760s) to selling off his late wife’s diamonds (1770s); from supplying Paris with water to running the largest print shop in Europe (1780s); and from buying guns in Holland for the French revolutionaries to investing in the Dupont de Nemours company on the eve of his death (1790s). The diversity of these interests reveals the insatiable curiosity and appetite for profit of Beaumarchais, of course, but also some regularities in the ways of doing business, including a constant emphasis on the production of benefits to the community and the solicitation of political officials. These regularities were also literary ones, embodied as they were in the countless memoires, projects, and prospectuses circulated by Beaumarchais and which appear as a genre in itself. The paper however demonstrates that this genre and the related business practices, far from being specific to Beaumarchais, were shaped by the contemporary institutional forms of business venturing, which could only be carried out with official authorization. Beaumarchais’ involvement in the American Revolutionary War can, as such, be understood as a normal business enterprise of the time.