‘Franklin, France, and the Birth of America’: Revolutionary ideas, charm

'A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America'

by Stacy Schiff

Henry Holt, 489 pp., $30

In December 1776, a decidedly seasick 70-year-old Benjamin Franklin arrived in France, seeking financial and military support for his embattled new country. During the seven years he served as the American representative in Paris, Franklin proved a masterful diplomat, manipulating the tangled European political scene to achieve what, from a distance, appears an improbable outcome: the massive support for a republic founded on democratic principles from one of the strongest monarchies in Europe.

In “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America,” Stacy Schiff recounts the story of Franklin’s time in Paris. A Pulitzer Prize winner (for “Véra,” a biography of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), Schiff poured through diplomatic archives, family papers and even spy reports to reveal insights into this little-known chapter in Franklin’s life.

At the time of Franklin’s arrival in Paris, the newly declared American republic was recognized by no other countries, had few financial resources and no military allies, and was attempting to win its independence from one of the most formidable, well-armed and well-financed military powers in existence. Its citizen army was poorly equipped, on the run and suffering one defeat after another, retreating even from major metropolitan centers. To say that the colonial revolutionaries faced an uphill battle is an understatement.

Franklin’s purpose was to secure French military and economic support for the revolution. France sought to undermine England’s hegemony over North America and to support its own designs on that continent. England sought to crush the revolution and keep the French from meddling in what it considered “internal” disputes within the British empire.

Franklin deftly played one side off the other — holding out the possibility of a negotiated settlement to the British on the one hand, while cajoling a series of enormous loans, grants and military support from the French on the other. And he was spectacularly successful: During the first year of the revolution, 90 percent of the gunpowder came from France. Millions of dollars in economic aid, military uniforms and French volunteers poured across the Atlantic to support the cause. The battle of Yorktown was not only fought by brave American patriots, but also by the combined American and French armies, where the victory cry was equally “God and Liberty!” and “Vive le Roi!” The French population became passionately pro-American in what, in retrospect, plainly presaged the French Revolution itself.

When he arrived, Franklin was already well known and widely respected by the French. His unannounced arrival caused an uproar of well-wishers trodding the path to his door, and he quickly won over the Parisian population with his charm.

But even from the outset, the French-American relationship was strained in ways that continue to this day. First, cultural differences between the two countries were stark. As Schiff notes, in American society, a young lady could properly flirt until marriage, but never thereafter. The roles were almost precisely reversed in pre-Revolutionary France, where flirtation among married women was elevated to a near art form. Franklin excelled at the art and had numerous relationships (in his 70s) with a variety of French women. Moreover, class standing played a central role in defining one’s role in pre-Revolutionary France, and many French were puzzled by Franklin, a mere printer by trade, who rose to prominence on the strength of his scientific and diplomatic accomplishments.

But for all the power of the story, the biography suffers from stilted, awkward writing, almost as if written in French, or perhaps German, and then poorly translated to English. More than once, a reader is forced to reread a sentence two or three times before comprehending what Schiff was attempting to communicate. The editor here was plainly missing in action and the book suffers as a result.

Still, the story rises above even this flaw, and has special relevance today, in an era of “Freedom Fries” and blatant anti-French sentiment. Franklin, who embraced — and was embraced by — the French, recognized that, without French support, the American Republic would have quickly vanished without a trace under the bootheels of the British regular troops. Perhaps it is a timely reminder that, despite passing political trends, the bonds between America and France were forged from the outset of the Republic and can withstand even today’s unfortunate political posturing and sloganeering. For, indeed, without France, there would have been no America at all.

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