The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution

by Alex Storozynski

Kosciuszko did not find what he was looking for in Saxony, and by December he returned to Paris to look up friends from his university days. The French capital was abuzz over the rebellion against Britain in the thirteen colonies, and Kosciuszko spent time in the cafés and salons of Paris searching for the right opportunity to which to devote his skills. The story of the Boston Tea Party in 1774 was already known in Europe, and the latest news was of the “shot heard round the world” fired by the Massachusetts minutemen on the British at the battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. The French were openly giddy over the misfortunes of their greatest enemy, England. Banging the drum for the French to support the Americans was the multitalented Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a writer, musician, inventor, watchmaker, publisher, revolutionary, and would-be spy. His plays The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, would be turned into operas, and his revolutionary polemics were shaking up Paris. Beaumarchais wrote daring letters to the French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes goading King Louis XVI into taking a moral stand in world affairs. Beaumarchais boldly criticized Louis XVI for not opposing slavery in the new world, or the land grab by Poland’s neighbors: “How can you allow your vessels [sic] to take by force and bind suffering black men whom nature made free and who are only miserable because you are powerful? How can you suffer ...

Kosciuszko was inspired to join the American rebellion after marinating in the salons of Paris as news of Lexington and Concord rolled in.