Call For Papers – From America to France Beaumarchais and the experience of Revolution

October 1–4, 2026
Grenoble & Vizille (France)
International symposium

Organizing committee : Université Grenoble Alpes (Gilles Montègre)
Musée de la Révolution française – Domaine de Vizille (Sophie Mouton)

Université de Montpellier (Linda Gil)

In 2026, as the United States celebrates 250 years of independence and takes an increasing aggressive
stance toward Europe, the Museum of the French Revolution – Domaine de Vizille and the LUHCIE laboratory at Grenoble Alpes University are organizing an international symposium aimed at rethinking the revolutionary origins of Franco-American relations through the figure and writings of Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799). This reinterpretation has been made possible by the recent acquisition by the Bibliothèque nationale de France of Beaumarchais’ voluminous personal archives, as well as by the unprecedented digital publication of his entire surviving correspondence and manuscripts, undertaken as part of the collective and interdisciplinary program @rchibeau (2024-2029).

Danton, Napoleon, and many others believed they detected a prophetic foreshadowing of the French
Revolution in Beaumarchais’s theatrical work. But the author of The Marriage of Figaro did not become famous solely for the diatribes against privilege uttered by his Seville barber. It is now often forgotten, but Beaumarchais was also an observer and actor in the Atlantic revolutions, whose success he constantly predicted even as he sought to determine their course. As soon as the American insurgents entered into open rebellion against Great Britain, Beaumarchais set out to convince France’s King Louis XVI to seek an alliance with Americans, whom he described as “full of enthusiasm for liberty”. He argued that “such a nation must be invincible” (letter to the king, September 21, 1775). After living through the French Revolution, in a context in which Franco-American relations had become dangerously strained, Beaumarchais wrote to one of the leaders of Franbce’s ruling Directory that he dreamed only of “rapprochement between the two greatest republics in the world, the French and the American” (letter to Jean-François Reubell, June 7, 1798). This steady confidence in the necessary union of the two sides of the North Atlantic will be examined during the conference in light of the new approaches that characterize revolutionary historiography today.

The first of these new approaches centers on the transnational connections and reciprocal influences that
characterized the revolutionary experience in the second half of the 18th century. Although Beaumarchais
himself never set foot in America, the extent of his transatlantic networks, now well documented by the dense and continuous series of letters he wrote, provides a particularly stimulating framework for rethinking the links between the American and French revolutions. These links can be measured first and foremost by Beaumarchais’ role in supplying both young republics with weapons and military equipment. The company known as Roderigue & Hortalez, secretly run by Beaumarchais, did not merely connect the French monarchy with the American insurgents; well before the Franco-American alliance of 1778, it paved the way for the first military victories won by George Washington’s Continental Army and reinforced connections between ports cities on both sides of the North Atlantic, as well as several in the Caribbean and Spanish America. As for the later “affaire des fusils de Hollande” in which Beaumarchais became involved during the French Revolution, it deserves to be revisited from the perspective of the internationalization of revolutions across continental Europe. Beaumarchais attempted to supply revolutionary France with rifles from the Brabant Revolution, not long before France itself attempted to establish a Batavian republic in the United Provinces. Through transnational practices such as these that were typical of the age of revolutions, Beaumarchais’ networks provides a basis on which we can question models both of hegemony and balance of power among major world powers. Whether colonial or emancipatory, slave-owning or liberating, these models must be examined from an economic as well as a political perspective, and from a financial as well as a cultural perspective, using archives that shed light on them from a practical rather than simply a theoretical point of view.

The second approach that will guide the symposium’s discussions draws on new ways of understanding
the history of emotions, which historians no longer regard as mere reactions to revolutionary events but as active performative factors in them. The emotional experience of freedom that breathes through Beaumarchais’s writings will be reconsidered in light of his personal experience of the American and French revolutions, which was both enthusiastic and painful. A sumptuous residence he built in 1787 in the shadow of the Bastille was searched and requisitioned on numerous occasions during significant moments of the Revolution. His Compte rendu des neuf mois les plus pénibles de ma vie (Account of the Nine Most Painful Months of My Life) published in 1793 at the time of the establishment of the Comité de Salut Public, also deserves to be revisited with a fresh eye, and to be compared with the Mémoires contre Goëzman (Memoirs Against Goëzman), which first established Beaumarchais’s fame during the Enlightenment. Many others of his published writings still need to be read in light of the newly available manuscripts and archival documents. In plays such as La Mère coupable, operas such as Tarare, but also in printed legal briefs, public letters, and articles published in the periodical Courrier de l’Europe, Beaumarchais multiplied the forms of communication that inked politics to the emotional sphere: in this way, he helped to respond to the crisis of representation that can be considered one of the main drivers of the revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic.

Proposals for papers of approximately one page (in English or French) should be sent to Gilles Montègre (gilles.montegre@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr) and Linda Gil (linda.gil@univ-montp3.fr) before April 30, 2026.
Presentations based on original documentation from the BnF collections (https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc1256467/cb3485) as well as other American, European or
French collections will be given priority. Speakers’ expenses may be covered, and particular attention will be
paid to the multidisciplinary nature of the papers, as well as to the balance between researchers from Europe and the United States.

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