Beaumarchais and the War of American Independence, Vol. 1

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was born the son of a watchmaker. By the time he finished, he had revolutionized French theater, outwitted the king's ministers, and helped arm a revolution across the Atlantic. This first volume traces his extraordinary ascent from Parisian workshop to the gilded corridors of Versailles, showing how a restless, ingenious outsider learned to navigate the treacherous currents of eighteenth-century French society. We see the young Beaumarchais as he was: brilliant, vain, musically gifted, and perpetually in trouble with authority. Kite reveals the forces that shaped a man who would later become indispensable to the American cause, smuggling arms and money to the colonists while waging his own shadow war against the Spanish crown. This is biography as it should be: not a monument to a dead reputation, but a vivid portrait of a living, scheming, endlessly fascinating human being whose Private manipulations Public history.