First Dibs

The premise of the central conflict in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro is frequently alluded to but never explained outright. Shrouded by intentional vagueness, euphemism, and innuendo, the motivation for the Count’s attempted seduction of Susanna is largely left to the audience to decipher. His prerogative is the so-called “droit de seigneur,” French for “right of the lord.” In common parlance, this phrase refers to the feudal lord’s right or privilege to have sexual relations with any of his women vassals, especially on the night of her wedding. The practice has thus also been called “jus primae noctis,” Latin for “right of the first night.”     

The opera’s dramatic and narrative action is sparked when the Count, who has recently abolished or relinquished the privilege on his lands, intends to reclaim it. Susanna reveals as much in the first scene of the opera, when she tells Figaro that the Count has been pursuing her, aided by the music teacher Don Basilio:     

Here, “the feudal right” is the droit de seigneur. All ensuing hijinks result from this initial reversal, the Count’s intention to “redeem” the feudal right he has previously abolished. The relinquishment of his privilege does not, however, merely concern Susanna. The entire manor, and all its women, have essentially been liberated from the threat of the Count’s sexual advances. (And the men of the manor are no longer in danger of having their marriages violated by their lord.) Toward the end of Act I, a chorus of peasants arrives and sings the Count’s praises:   

The feminine perspective on this question is further explored first in a duet sung by two peasant women and then by the entire chorus at the end of Act III, when Figaro and Susanna finally have their marriage blessed by the Count. From the audience’s perspective, these choruses are shot through with irony, as the Count has no intention to honor his “gracious” decision to restore virtue to his subjects. 

Although the droit de seigneur forms the basis of the opera’s plot, there is little evidence that any such formal law existed. The first appearance of the French phrase dates to 1762—about two decades before Beaumarchais would write the play ultimately adapted into Le Nozze di Figaro—when Voltaire used it in his five-act comedy Le Droit du Seigneur ou l’Écueil du Sage. The writer and philosopher had previously referred to the practice in his Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), and it is also mentioned in Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of Law) (1748). 

In feudal Europe, it seems that the custom was more likely exercised as a tax or fee to be paid by the vassal in exchange for the right to be waived. In medieval England, this payment was called the “merchet.” In late medieval Spain, the practice was outlawed by Ferdinand II of Aragon in the Sentencia Arbitral de Guadelupe in 1486, which set limits on the obligations of serfs to their lords. 

Though the droit de seigneur seems not to have been codified in law, it is easy enough to understand how nobles were able to wield power over those who not only worked for them but were also dependent upon—and often indebted to—them. In that sense, the privilege the Count hopes to reclaim is all the more pernicious for its customary continuation outside the formal realm of the law. What Beaumarchais, and Da Ponte and Mozart after him, hoped to unveil was not a legal problem but a moral one: the unchecked power of the lord of the manor to do whatever, with whomever, he pleases.