On February 8, 1778, Benjamin Franklin took quill in hand at his residence in Passy. With Silas Deane at his side, he addressed a letter to the president of the Continental Congress, Henry Laurens, in York.
“Honourable Sir,” he began, “We have now the great Satisfaction of acquainting you and the Congress, that the treaties with France are at length compleated and signed. The first is a Treaty of Amity and Commerce, much on the plan of that projected in Congress; the other is a treaty of Alliance, in which it is stipulated that in Case England declares War against France, or occasions War by attempts to hinder her commerce with us, we should then make common cause of it, and join our forces and Councils.”
Franklin went on to praise King Louis XVI’s “Magnanimity and Goodness,” and clarified that the treaties required that neither France nor the United States agree to any future separate peace with Great Britain without recognition of the United States as an independent country. And with that, the world from Europe to India to Africa to the Caribbean was plunged into the war for American independence. It had not come easily. In truth, that it had ever come at all is a wonder.
Despite Franklin’s celebrity and popularity across the spectrum of French society, obstacles to a Franco-American alliance arose nearly from the moment he stepped off the Reprisal in Nantes. The memory of France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War remained molten, and since the conclusion of overt hostilities the court at Versailles had pursued an anti-British foreign policy, instituted major military reforms, and ordered the country’s naval construction expanded in preparation for what the French foresaw as the next, inevitable engagement. This was all of a piece with the lessons learned in the wake of Britain’s victory. Further, with the tacit assent of the king, the French Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of War had set to harassing the British by funding the occasional smuggling operation to deliver arms and supplies to the American revolutionaries.
The foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, had even dispatched the occasional military “volunteer” to enlist in the Continental Army and secretly report back on the rebels’ dedication and fortitude. But France was not yet prepared to take on its rival in a declared war, and when it came to provoking England closer to home, de Vergennes trod a fine line. Thus Franklin had agreed to abide by a clause in the 1763 Treaty of Paris forbidding the two European nations to harbor privateers. Any American ships putting into French ports were thus proscribed from sailing against the Royal Navy. Yet only weeks after Franklin disembarked at Nantes, the Reprisal’s captain, Lambert Wickes, went hunting.
Cruising off the coast of Spain and along the mouth of the English Channel, Wickes captured six British merchantmen within a month. After refitting at the French port of L’Orient (later Lorient), he set sail for the Irish Sea, where the Reprisal was met by two smaller Continental Navy vessels. Together they formed a squadron, which sank or took another 18 prizes, including two warships and nine brigs. Despite his assurances to de Vergennes, French spies discovered Franklin actively encouraging the raids. When in July 1777 the English ambassador to France lodged formal protests with Louis XVI against abetting American “piracy”—clearly a thinly disguised warning of military retaliation—an irritated de Vergennes wrote to Franklin and Deane reminding them of France’s treaty obligations. To drive home the point, he jailed the Irish-born American sea captain Gustavus Conyngham—the first American to be imprisoned in the Bastille. Conyngham promptly escaped, set sail, and continued to attack British shipping, capturing 24 vessels.I
Franklin, weighing the seizing or sinking of a few enemy vessels against future comity with the French, sent a letter of apology to the foreign minister and cautioned the raiding American captains—including John Paul Jones, awaiting a new ship in the Brittany port of Brest—against “giving any cause of complaint to the subjects of France, or Spain, or of any other neutral powers.” Nonetheless, the dispute had taken its toll on the fragile Franco-American relationship, and never had the court at Versailles appeared so ill disposed toward the United States. Amid this intrigue, the French were also at a loss as to what to make of the enmity that Franklin and Deane held toward the third American peace commissioner, Virginia’s Arthur Lee.
Lee, the youngest son of one of the state’s most politically connected families, had preceded Franklin’s arrival in Paris by six months. Portraits depict the 35-year-old Lee as a gruff, stone-faced man with a broad forehead accentuated by his receding hairline and a pointed, jutting chin that reached its destination long before the rest of him. What does not come through in the images is Lee’s intellectual versatility. Lee was a polymath who had attended England’s Eton College and studied medicine and law at the University of Edinburgh before passing the bar exam and opening a law practice in London. He was also a vociferous critic of slavery who, when revolution broke out, abandoned his legal career to become the United States’ first foreign secret agent. He may have been under the misguided impression that an American victory would validate the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence regarding the equality of “all men.”
Writing under a roster of pseudonyms, Lee produced endless tracts distributed throughout Europe extolling American independence while simultaneously developing a profusion of political and social connections to pry out information on the motives and movements surrounding George III and Parliament. As his older brother William had only recently been elected high sheriff of London, the only American ever to hold the position, Arthur Lee’s cover was, for a time, unassailable. Yet in the spring of 1776, with the British authorities growing increasingly suspicious of a “pestilent traitor” in their midst, both Lees fled to the European continent. There, at Congress’s behest, William argued the American cause to the Hapsburg monarchy in Vienna while Arthur unsuccessfully lobbied the courts at Madrid and Berlin before joining Deane in Paris.
Lee and Deane locked horns from the outset. Lee had little truck with Deane’s habit of conveying across the Atlantic a string of unqualified foreign parvenus to bedevil Washington and, more important, drain the congressional coffers. He was apparently particularly annoyed when Deane wrote to Congress suggesting that he might be able to persuade the soldier turned diplomat Comte Charles-François de Broglie to join the revolution, but only as commander in chief of the Continental Army, a clear insult to Washington. Lee was also leery of Deane’s blue-blooded coterie of French aristocrats. He feared that Deane’s words to his wife, Elizabeth, upon departing the United States for France—“I am about to enter the great stage of Europe”—had gone to his head. Despite Lee’s enthusiasm for breaking the chains of British colonization, there still resided in him what John Laurens described as “our ancient hereditary prejudices” against the French. France had been England’s chief international antagonist since long before Jamestown or Plymouth, and Lee’s suspicion that Deane had succumbed to the sirens of Versailles led him to publicly question not only his fellow diplomat’s ability to secure French aid, but his commitment to the enterprise now that he was in fact a player on the European stage.
Deane, who had only recently learned from a newspaper article of his wife’s death back in Connecticut, was quick to return fire. He noted Lee’s long and deep connection to England, particularly his brother’s political career, and pondered aloud where his true allegiance lay. Franklin’s arrival in France merely exacerbated the animosity, and the Continental Congress was soon bombarded with a series of letters from Lee slandering Deane and the high-living Franklin as “thieves and potential traitors.”
Lee had nurtured an intense dislike for Franklin since making his acquaintance during the latter’s frequent prewar trips to London as a colonial agent for Pennsylvania. Despite his cosmopolitan accomplishments, Lee was something of a prig, and criticized Franklin’s extravagant lifestyle as well as his apparently congenital flirting. In France, that flirting had culminated in what may or may not have been a platonic relationship with the renowned French musician and composer—and very much married—Anne Louise Brillon. Madame Brillon, 38 years Franklin’s junior, was known to refer to the rambunctious old American as “mon cher papa,” and wrote him over 100 letters. Lee was appalled when news spread of a chess match Franklin had held with the chemist, physician, and mayor of Passy, Louis-Guillaume Le Veillard, in Madame Brillon’s bathroom. It was not the venue that consternated him so much as the fact that Madame Brillon watched the competition while soaking in her tub. Lee wrote to Samuel Adams that no diplomat with Franklin’s libertine habits would ever convince Louis XVI to ally with the United States. This alone stood as proof of how little he understood the French.
Franklin did his best to ignore Lee’s “Magisterial Snubbings and Rebukes,” explaining sensibly, “I do not like angry letters. I hate Disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for Altercation.” Franklin did, however, find it prudent to warn Lee that he had best “cure your self of this Temper [or] it will end in Insanity.”
As the summer of 1777 rolled into autumn, the internecine warfare in the American legation combined with a progression of dispiriting reports reaching French shores to take an obvious emotional and physical toll on Franklin. As Burgoyne marched on Albany, Howe threatened Philadelphia, and Washington appeared to be in continual retreat, both French and English spies reported a distinct transformation in his appearance and disposition. In public Franklin still exuded a confident air, championing the revolutionaries’ values to anyone who would listen. When within earshot of those same secret agents, he was particularly vociferous in his belief that it was only a matter of time before France came to America’s assistance. Yet in private he despaired. De Vergennes was refusing to respond to his pleas for meetings, the French finance minister had turned down his request for a substantial loan to the United States, and he seemed a house prisoner at Passy.
The news from Saratoga, of course, changed everything.
♦ ♦ ♦
On Thursday morning, December 4, 1777, Benjamin Franklin watched as the 30-year-old Massachusetts revolutionary, spy, and sometime diplomat Jonathan Loring Austin, just arrived from the United States, galloped into Passy. Before Austin could dismount, Franklin called out, “Sir, is Philadelphia taken?”
When Austin said yes, the aging diplomat clasped his hands behind his back and turned away. But Austin was not finished. “But, sir,” he said, “I have greater news than that. General Burgoyne and his whole army are prisoners of war.”
Franklin clapped, and replied, “Oh, Mr. Austin, you have brought us glorious news.”
In the days following, the roads between Passy, Paris, and Versailles were crowded with a stream of coaches and carriages, more than a few carrying anxious British emissaries. They were suddenly more solicitous of finding a way to end the rift between England and its American “cousins.” The parleys culminated in the visit from the official envoy Paul Wentworth. The gathering with Wentworth set two balls in motion. Less than 24 hours after Franklin’s and Deane’s noncommittal response to his overtures, the panicked British ambassador Lord Stormont informed London that he suspected a French treaty with the United States was already en route to the American Congress. Nearly simultaneously, Louis XVI—convinced that Wentworth was close to persuading the Americans to accept the British Crown’s generous terms—instructed his foreign minister, de Vergennes, to conclude a commercial and military alliance with the American legation as soon as possible.
On January 18, 1778, drafts of the treaties were presented to Franklin, Deane, and Lee. Much to the French court’s annoyance, the Americans spent days reviewing them. They still had not returned their annotated drafts when, on January 22, Lord Stormont called on de Vergennes demanding to know if there was an alliance. Stormont’s agents had picked up rumors that the French and Spanish were about to launch an attack on Gibraltar. Vergennes was evasive; Stormont sullen.
Finally, in late January, the American representatives reached a general agreement on the terms of the pacts with the French. Louis XVI shrugged off Spain’s official reluctance to participate, and on the evening of February 6 the documents were signed in de Vergennes’s office in the Foreign Ministry. Later that night Franklin and Deane shared a carriage back to Passy carrying the two treaties. Once there, they asked an assistant named Edward Bancroft whom Deane had hired as the American legation’s secretary to write copies of the accords while they composed their letter to Congress. That Franklin omitted Arthur Lee’s name from the announcement is indicative of their mood. It would be more than a century before it came to light that Bancroft was a British spy who took the liberty of also making copies of the treaties for himself to send off to Whitehall the next day.II
The Spanish throne was far from alone in having misgivings about the efficacy of allying with the Americans. Several influential French officials were also wary of the unintended consequences of throwing their country’s lot in with a colonial rebellion. Louis XVI’s minister of finance warned the king that a successful American war of independence would only inspire France’s own colonies to follow suit—a prediction that reverberated from Port-au-Prince in 1804 through Dien Bien Phu 150 years later. And a few forward-thinking aristocrats, horrified by France’s depleted treasury, noted that diverting precious livres from the country’s own downtrodden peasant class in order to fund a foreign uprising could lead to violent repercussions.III Whether they had the Bastille and the guillotine specifically in mind is not recorded. In the end, however, the French recognition of the United States was perhaps no more of an anomaly than a revolution against the British monarchy sparked by a circle of affluent, conservative planters and businessmen.
Some argue that France’s true recognition of the United States did not occur until April 1778, when Franklin visited the Academy of Sciences in Paris and was introduced to Voltaire, the titan of Enlightenment philosophie. One witness likened the two hugging and kissing each other on the cheek to “Solon embracing Sophocles.” But in fact the Franco-American alliance became semiofficial on March 20 when, with throngs gathered outside the gates of Versailles shouting, “Vive Franklin,” the king received the American diplomats at his court as official ambassadors. It would take another six weeks for the treaties to reach the United States. Until then, the paramount question of the revolution continued to loom—would the Continental Army still exist by that time?
I. Rarely commented upon in histories of the American Revolution was the efficacy with which the much-reviled “Washington’s navy” disrupted British merchant shipping. Between May 1777 and January 1778, for instance, Continental privateers boarded 733 English merchantmen and captured close to £5 million worth of goods.
II. On Lee’s behalf, it must be noted that his early and deep mistrust of Bancroft was amply borne out.
III. France would eventually spend more than a billion in today’s dollars on behalf of the rebelling Americans.