In May of 1786 -- a decade after the start of the American Revolution, 3 years before the French Revolution began, and a year before
Don Giovanni premiered in Prague --
The Marriage of Figaro first played on a Vienna stage. The music was Mozart's; the libretto was Lorenzo da Ponte's.
And the material was from a play by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Like da Ponte, Beaumarchais led an eventful life. Born the seventh of 10 children to a watchmaker in Paris, he became an inventor, gun runner to American Revolutionaries, newspaper editor, and spy -- with orders to buy off expatriate journalists who threatened to make revelations about Louis XV, or Louis XVI, and their mistresses. In his spare time, Beaumarchais wrote plays. His La marriage de Figaro was first acted, in Paris, in April of 1784 -- after having been banned for 6 years by Louis XVI, who found it a "detestable" piece of work.
It's about the right of the first night. Figaro, the count's valet, is set to marry the countess' maid. But the count wants to tussle in the garden with the bride before her husband does. As Figaro says, "I splash through mud and give my all for the honor of your family, while you're kindly doing your bit to increase the size of mine!" He follows that up with a notorious speech. "You won't have her, you shall not! You think that because you're a great lord you're a great genius: nobility, wealth, rank, a good job-they make a man proud. But what did you ever do to earn them? You chose your parents well, that's all."
Members of the ancien régime were not pleased. When Louis XVI -- who was sent to the guillotine in January of 1793 -- censored Beaumarchais' play, he wrote that "the Bastille would have to be pulled down" before it could be staged. "Figaro killed the nobility," the French Revolutionary, Georges Danton, would say; and Napoleon would see Figaro as "the Revolution in action."
But long before Beaumarchais, and long before da Ponte, Figaros of various sorts were upset with promiscuous bosses. Julius Caesar, for instance, is supposed to have had a habit of seducing his senators' women. There were rumors about Marcus Cato's sister; there were rumors about Marcus Brutus' sister; there were rumors about Marcus Crassus' wife, Tertulla, and about Pompey's wife, Mucia -- who was put away "because of" Caesar, his biographer wrote. And there was the other, fatal rumor, about the bill drawn up for the Commons to pass while Caesar was out of town, "legitimizing his union with any woman, or women, he pleased, for the procreation of children." Days later, Caesar was stabbed by his senators 23 times -- Marcus Brutus may have wounded him in the groin -- and the drafter of the bill (or somebody else with the same name) was torn, limb from limb, by a mob of angry men.
Even before Caesar, there was Abraham. One day, in the middle of a famine in Canaan, he and Sarah went down for a sojourn in Egypt. But Abraham knew what pharaoh would be up to, so he warned his wife. "The Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. And when the princes of pharaoh saw her, they praised her to pharaoh. And the woman was taken into pharaoh's house" (Genesis 12:10-16).
Even before Abraham, there was Gilgamesh, an epic written into one of the clay tablets in Ashurbanipal's 7th-century BC Assyrian library, but based on a story about a 25th-century king of Uruk. "For Gilgamesh, the King of Broad-Marted Uruk, open is the veil of the people for choosing. He will have intercourse with the 'destined wife,' he first, the husband afterward," is how the story goes.
Many years after Gilgamesh, Francois-Marie Arouet -- better known as Voltaire -- put a note in his Philosophical Dictionary about The Right of the First Night. He didn't go back to the pharaohs, but he mentioned Caesar. "I call a public law which deprives me of my property, which takes away my wife and gives her to another, a law against morals," he said. His contemporaries -- Beaumarchais and da Ponte -- agreed.
Thousands of young, unmarried young men have sailed from North Africa to Europe over the past few months. 5000 Tunisians landed at Lampedusa, a small Italian island, just this week; others have come from Libya, Egypt and across the Mediterranean rim. Thousands of other young, unmarried North African men lost their lives over the past few months, when their governments cracked down on pro-democracy revolts.
Just a few hundred years ago, thousands of storm tossed migrants crossed the Atlantic to America, and threw off their European overlords' yoke. With inspiration from Voltaire and da Ponte, and with guns from Beaumarchais, they fought for fundamental human rights. And they won the opportunity to work hard, to get married, and to support their own families.
The young men of North Africa are risking their lives for no more, or less.
I hope they get what they want.
(Another) Figaro Soundtrack:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgeEWUMI7n0
References:
Betzig, Laura. 2010. The end of the republic. In P. Kappeler and J. Silk, eds. Mind the Gap: Primate Behavior and Human Universals, pp. 153-68. Berlin: Springer Verlag. PDF file
Betzig, Laura. 2002. British polygyny. In Malcolm Smith, ed. Human Biology and History, pp. 30-97. London: Taylor and Francis.
Photo Credit:
http://www.npr.org/2011/02/16/133812383/eu-faces-challenge-of-a-widening-wave-of-migrants
