ABSTRACT
Beaumarchais, in creating the SAD in mid-1777, effectively situated himself between these two trajectories. On the one hand, he had clearly wanted to create an alternative venue to the Comédie Française, in which he and other writers would have greater control over their status as men of letters. On the other, he did not want to break with the established institution and norms of elite sociability by claiming to speak directly to the “public,” since such a transgression would diminish his standing as a man of letters. Though Beaumarchais had previously employed this latter strategy to circumvent the institutionalized power of the Company of Watchmakers as a youth and more recently, the parlement of Aix, he knew that printed attacks on the royal theater would be more easily suppressed. Moreover, in this case, Beaumarchais had no pre-existing conflict onto which he could graft his own claims, as he had done against Le Paute (already facing accusations from other master watchmakers) and Goezmann (already under attack for participating in a “Maupeou parlement” replacing the regular magistrates). Furthermore, a successful attack would diminish the status of the Comédie, with which his public persona as a writer had become closely associated. While a printed attack on the royal theater might enhance his notoriety before a broad public of pamphlet readers, such a violation of civil conduct would cost him standing within the elite Parisian social networks. Finally, a printed attack against the Comédie would open the way to other aspirants, whose ascendance would devalue Beaumarchais’s own advance. For all these reasons, Beaumarchais did not want, in this case, to create another cause célèbre through printed polemics.
