Pierre Augustin Caron Beaumarchais

Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron (1732–99), French dramatist and variously an artist, litigant, and political agent. His best-known plays, The Barber of Seville (1775) and The Marriage of Figaro (1784), the basis of operas by Rossini and Mozart, ridiculed the established order and the nobility. He was instrumental in furnishing the Americans with arms and money at the outbreak of their Revolution.