The words Franklin in France are pretty much guaranteed to elicit a smile or a raised eyebrow, maybe even a mischievous wink -perhaps character flaws or good trade craft?
Franklin sailed to Paris in l776 on a crucial mission.
When he crossed the ocean that November ,he did so for the first time as a traitor – only a couple months earlier Franklin put his signature to the Declaration of Independence; had he been captured at sea he would have been hanged in London.
The British Ambassador to France made that clear, at first mention of Franklin’s unexpected arrival.
The British Ambassador also loudly regretted that some English frigate had not met and disposed of him on the high seas.
To the Englishman’s mind, the 70-year-old American—widely referred to as
“the chief of the rebels” or as
“General Franklin” was dangerous.
The ambassador was not alone in his surprise at hearing the famous American washed up on French shores.
The Derby Mercury, 03 Jan 1777,
However, Franklin met with an electrifying welcome.
Mainly due to his scientific work, he was the best-known American in the world -although, no one could say with any authority exactly what he was doing in France.
The theories were endless.
- Franklin came for his health, the climate of France being gentler than that of America.
- Maybe, he had come to supply his grandsons with a European education
- to see his works published.
- It was equally asserted that Franklin had sailed as a fugitive, having quarreled with Congress; in order to protest his countrymen’s decision to reconcile with England.
- Just as sinister, to discuss a commercial treaty with France; to sue for peace with the British.
- Perhaps the most mundane, to secure his bank account
- the almost unthinkable, to ensure that future American generations would be “Frenchified” !
- The Portuguese ambassador reported on Franklin’s plans to retire to a Swiss chateau with his immense fortune.
- The Saxon ambassador stubbornly refused to believe that “the chief of the rebels” could conceivably even be in France at all.
- According to the Sardinian envoy, Franklin had fled America with his family and fortune, having deluded his countrymen with the false promise of a foreign mission.
Print shows Benjamin Franklin receiving a laurel wreath upon his head. left to right, French court include: Duchesse Jules de Polignac, Princesse Lamballe (holding flowers), Diane de Polignac (holding wreath), Comte de Vergennes, Mme Campan, Contesse de Neuilly, Marie-Antoinette (seated), Louis XVI, Princess Elizabeth. Hand-coloured lithograph.
Everyone waited breathlessly for the great man to divulge his plans.
The plans not being divulged, were perfectly simple: Congress had declared independence in large part so as to attract a foreign partner in the American rebellion.
For a long time that assembly discussed which should come first, requests for foreign assistance or the formal break with Great Britain.
The best orator in Congress argued that a declaration of independence was the necessary step for securing aid; in that light the document was drafted as an SOS.
In l776, the colonies were without munitions, money, credit, common cause.
They knew, however, who their friends were, or at least who England’s enemies were.
France was steadily at the top of that list.
And in fact—unbeknownst to Franklin, or any American—the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been studying an American revolt far longer than the colonies had even considered one.
Striking at an established power through the Achilles heel of her far-off colonies was standard operating procedure at the time.
After all, France felt that Britain had done so when Corsica had rebelled in the 1760s, during the Seven Years War.
It is also the same war, which ignited the American Revoloution and even brought a young Napoleon Bonaparte to France, in the first place.
It is vital to remember that in the 18th-century hallways of power—which is to say in the European Courts—the American colonies were about as large, about as real, and about as important, as the French Island of Corsica.
Most Frenchmen had trouble locating the Americas on the globe.
It was equally possible that one thought the America’s bordered Turkey or were part of India.
The average Frenchman was even uncertain as to which language was spoken there and it was not unusual for a French volunteer to expect to be greeted on arrival in the New World by panthers.
It was Franklin, from France, who more than anyone helped to put those colonies on the map.
Fortunately, he waltzed into a Paris already on many levels ripe with Enlightenment ideals, and he had on his side immense fame and prestige.
He appeared, as well – something that the French had themselves invented, in sense and sensibility a joint production of Voltaire and Rousseau.
Nothing could have been more appealing.
Nor could anything have worked more potently in Franklin’s favor, as he was up against almost insuperable odds.
The British Ambassador was a charismatic and indefatigable man, the favorite of most French society women; he could not speak more loudly, or more eloquently, of the deceits Dr. Franklin was spreading about the colonies, and about how the gullible French were eating them up.
Advertising revolution in a monarchy is a sticky business, to say the least.
However, Franklin could not be openly welcomed by the ministers at Versailles, who were as eager to preserve a cordial public relationship with England as they were covertly to undermine that nation.
It was risky, Franklin was encircled by spies, French spies followed by English spies, all of them marvelously deft reporters; there was no keyhole in France too small for them to slip through.
Routinely they pilfered locked drawers and dove into closets.
They sometimes even stumbled over each other.
Early on, one agent purloined Franklin’s mail while it was in transit with a fellow agent’s wife.
As much as Franklin was a man of universal ideas, he was also a man of a very different universe; he could have had no idea of how to enter a French drawing room or hold his glass or arrange his sword.
And his French was, to say the least, rudimentary.
He acknowledged that a man plunging into a language, not his own automatically sacrifices half his intelligence.
He simultaneously established an enduring truism of French life – the brand of freestyle French permitted only to those of exceptional talent who, attempting to perfect that language, are understood—regardless of the results and by virtue of their audible disregard for their inhibitions—to be acknowledge with every mutilated syllable the superiority of France.
What Franklin did within the limitations, was dazzling-essentially he ignored them.
He forged ahead, in fractured French, indifferent to the informers, oblivious to the social gaffes, seemingly oblivious, too, to the impossible odds his countrymen faced across the ocean.
His arrival in Paris coincided with news of General Washington’s late August defeat at Long Island.
Franklin shrugged that report off as insignificant.
Everywhere he went he carried the same message.
Long Island afforded the British no strategic advantage.
They would need an army of 200,000 men to subjugate a people so attached to their freedom.
Short of that, the war would stretch on for a decade.
The American army was in fine shape and lacked for nothing.
It was re-positioning itself and would fight on indefinitely; by spring it would number 80,000 expertly trained men.
The farther the British troops penetrated the continent, Franklin warned, the more resistance they would encounter.
None of this was true, of course; there was no gunpowder to speak of in the American colonies, and Washington commanded something closer to 14,000 men.
“I have helped them here to recover their spirits a little,” Franklin assumed Congress the morning after—unknown to anyone in Europe—Washington scrambled to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, and days after Congress had fled to Baltimore, to hold sessions in a deserted tavern.
In other words, Franklin fought a war of disinformation with very little help from the New World.
Congressional dispatches were intercepted more often than not (a complete set of them can be read today either in the British Library or in the French State Department archives), which meant that Franklin was generally starved for news.
For the first year he heard almost nothing from Congress; what he did hear was by no means uplifting.
He engaged in a war of propaganda, in which his very person qualified as a weapon. The French press was tightly controlled by the state.
Fortunately that state—in the form of the French foreign minister, the Count de Vergennes—had every interest in helping Franklin, more so than even Franklin suspected.
For his own political reasons Vergennes was intent on an American war, but he had plenty of enemies, and needed to justify the project to his king.
It was one thing to insult the British in America.
It was another thing to back a losing side.
For his first, nerve-racking 18 months abroad, Franklin therefore played a waiting game.
Fortunately, he was an old man, who had come finally to embrace patience.
He felt he had already proved himself, unlike his colleagues, burning with ambition.
By nature too he was a good bluffer.
Alone among the Americans in Paris he felt that time was on the colonies’ side.
In the fall of 1777 ,Franklin’s nerves began to fray.
On the afternoon of September 7, he received a visit from a French officer who spoke fluent English and who qualified as one of the more prominent eccentrics in Europe.
Franklin had been warned against the very charming Count de Lauraguais; he had a loose tongue and an idiosyncratic mind, enough so to have seen the inside of nearly every prison in France.
Lauraguais also had reasons to ingratiate himself with Vergennes, and so reported to the French Minister every syllable of his conversation with the American envoy.
After several glasses of wine, Franklin unburdened himself, with much emotion: “There is nothing better to do here than drink,” he lamented.
“How can we fool ourselves that France might understand America better than Britain?
How can we fool ourselves that a monarchy will help republicans, revolt against their monarch? How can your ministers believe what they cannot understand?”
France wanted to crush her old rival, but would not help America to do so. He was heartsick.
He sorely regretted his failure to interest Versailles in an alliance, which would have been so much to the good of both countries.
And while he understood that France feared for her colonies if America succeeded too well, he believed France could delay but by no means prevent that success.
He did not sound like the serene, unflappable Franklin of legend.
At the same time, he made no public concession to despair.
It was as essential that he appear buoyant in Paris as it was essential that he convince Vergennes that the Americans were perilously close to sinking.
The papers constantly reported him in good spirits, despite the news that the British occupied Philadelphia.
He was colorful in his pronouncements. Philadelphia, he insisted, would prove a grave for the British troops.
Washington would blockade the roads; the Delaware would freeze; the British army would be cut off from its own ships.
As authentic as it may have been, his bad mood made for good strategy.
It could be dilated upon, or dismissed, at will. Which is precisely what Franklin did with it, throughout a long, bleak season that came to a dramatic end on December 4th.
That Thursday morning an American messenger galloped into Franklin’s courtyard. He had left the colonies only a month earlier.
He had not alighted from his horse when Franklin called out to him, “Sir, is Philadelphia taken?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the young officer, at which Franklin turned in defeat, his hands clasped behind his back.
“But, sir, I have greater news than that,” the messenger called to Franklin’s back, “General Burgoyne and his whole army are prisoners of war!”
From that point the race was on for a treaty.
The French and British fell all over themselves trying to secure Franklin’s favor.
The British were intent on a reconciliation and peace, the French on an alliance and war. Franklin made child’s play of everyone’s best efforts.
The French won out; a Treaty of Alliance was signed promptly, so promptly that France went ahead without the consent of her ally.
Spain would enter the contest only later, but without making any commitment to American independence.
It was agreed among the ministers at Versailles that they had done something extraordinary.
They had thrown over their closest ally for a new and unproved one, on which none of them had set eyes.
They had entered into a treaty, in defiance of a power with whom they were not at war, for the sake of creating a republic that might one day devour Europe.
They could well be creating a monster.
The decision was an arduous one, but, sighed the French Prime Minister, Franklin had skillfully led them all by the nose.
All of that history can be read today, by the way, in the French State Department archives, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the Quai d’Orsay.
There are four pertinent series of documents, which break down roughly as follows:
- the American series includes the materials intercepted on their way to and from Franklin
- the English series reveals what the French wanted the British to think
- the Spanish series what the French really thought
- the Mémoirs et Documents series what the French ministers discussed among themselves.
There are also spy reports everything including each dinner invitation and report on Franklin’s groceries.
What came across Franklin’s desk is also preserved.
The Treaty of Paris Desk inside John Quincy Adams State Drawing Room of the US State Department — the treaty ended the Revolutionary War and was signed on the desk in 1783
From the middle of 1778 on, Franklin’s job consisted not in soliciting secret aid for America but in sustaining an alliance that was ill-advised and, in the end, ruinously expensive for France.
It also consisted of fending off a most extraordinary number of callers and correspondents: the mail arrived in torrents; the visitors were unceasing, as were the solicitations of those who wanted to fight in America.
If in the Philadelphia of his youth Franklin had recognized the value of seeming to work hard, in Paris, at age 70, he quickly mastered the essential French art : accomplishing much while appearing to accomplish little.
Industry and efficiency were still foreign concepts in the Old World, calibrated in glory and style.
(The French foreign minister was so irritated by his own reputation as a hard worker that when one of his aides calculated that he put in 11-hour days, he insisted that the aide scale back the figure).
Rarely has a man so capably adapted to the rules of a foreign world, while at the same time playing that world to the benefit of his own.
Franklin was a man of protean imagination and of multiple disguises, but in France the role he played was that of himself.
That strategy worked very well on the French, who were charmed by Franklin’s ease of manner.
His friends admired his most French of abilities: “At whatever moment you called,” remembered a young neighbor who did so regularly, “he always made himself available.”
His door was open. Dr. Franklin, the eminent scientist, who would spend much of the year apologizing for the dilatoriness of his correspondence, always had an hour for you.
Franklin had the confident man’s ease about affecting subservience; he made it his business to acknowledge publicly the gratitude he genuinely felt.
Without French aid the revolution would quite simply have collapsed.
The majority of the guns fired on the British at Saratoga were French; the surrender at Yorktown had been given to troops that were equal parts French and American, all of them protected by a French fleet.
It was essential to Franklin to advertise the fact that America was a country that did not forget its benefactors. It took its friendships seriously.
As early as 1783 Franklin begged to be recalled to America.
He did so repeatedly, and as the years dragged by without a response from Congress, he began to despair.
The request was finally granted in 1785; he sailed from France in July.
He was nearly 80 when he set eyes for the first time on the country that had not existed on his departure, and which he had done so much to create.
The disorientation was profound. He was able to recognize friends only by their voices. The American language had evolved since his departure. Philadelphia was a teeming metropolis.
Even before he had made that trip, Franklin had become painfully aware that he had been forgotten in his native country.
He had asked for Congress to recognize his grandson, who had served as his secretary since his arrival. Over and over they had failed to do so.
Franklin was cut to the quick, as he told anyone who would listen, many times over and many more times than was wise.
“I flattered myself vainly that the Congress would be pleased with the opportunity, I gave them of showing their approbation for my services,” he lamented.
“But I suppose the present members hardly know me or that I have performed any.”
For the first time that fall, just before his return, he had referred to himself as being “in exile.”
And the most famous American in the world had changed, too, in his Parisian years.
There would be no reward, no settling of accounts, nor even a syllable of gratitude for what he had done for his country.
He was understandably hurt: Franklin considered the French posting the most taxing assignment of his life.
He had never worked so hard in any capacity.
He knew Congress had generously compensated several of his colleagues for their European tours, in one case for a tour that had consisted of little more than obstructing each one of Franklin’s efforts.
The nature of Franklin’s errand had something to do with Congressional ingratitude; he was associated in many minds with the dependent chapter of American independence.
Some assumed the worst of any envoy to an overdressed, highly mannered European court; old enemies whispered that Franklin had profited handsomely from his French stay and had helped himself to government funds.
It was true as well that Franklin belonged to a different generation; most of the members of Congress knew him by reputation, but not personally.
For having extracted the equivalent of $13 billion dollars today and the bulk of the gunpowder used in the Revolution, Franklin went to his grave without any thanks whatever from Congress. In the end his greatest mission proved very costly to him.
Information not quoted from A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America
Where were you when I was growing up and studying history? Someone like you makes history so interesting and writes about it so thoroughly that I actually would have understood all the implications. Great job and thank you for these lively stories from history. I can’t imagine better accounts of these things. Thank you kindly.