by H. W. Brands
Well they might have. Franklin offered something to almost everyone in France. He was a philosopher to the liberal philosophes, an ardent foe of Britain (by now it was clear he was not selling America out) to the conservatives who hungered for revenge against perfidious Albion, a wit to the habitués of the salons, a prophet of profits to the makers of weapons and outfitters of privateers.
He was also a bit of a puzzle to King Louis’s foreign minister. Vergennes had a grand design for French policy, namely the restoration of French grandeur, so badly tarnished in the last war. Upon appointment in 1774 he had begun a buildup of French armed strength, of which the centerpiece would be a navy the fighting equal to Britain’s. On current, necessarily secret, estimates, the buildup would reach fruition sometime in 1778.
The outbreak of the American war presented an opportunity and a problem. The opportunity was the obvious one: to capitalize on Britain’s current discomfiture and distraction. The problem was less obvious (to those unaware of the foreign minister’s timetable) but no less real: whether to accelerate war plans in order to exploit England’s troubles, or to stick with the plan. How much help would the Americans be in a war? How real was the prospect of their reconciliation with Britain, or their defeat? Vergennes needed to know.
He did not get much out of Franklin—but then neither did Franklin get much out of him. Upon Franklin’s arrival in Paris, where he was joined by Deane and Lee, the three applied for an interview with Vergennes. The foreign minister declined a formal meeting at Versailles in favor of a secret session in Paris, intended to take the measure of the Americans, Franklin especially, rather than to determine policy. “Intelligent, but very circumspect,” was how the foreign minister characterized Franklin, adding, “This did not surprise me.”
Franklin spoke for the group, and for the American Congress. He indicated his country’s interest in a treaty with France (and, for good measure, with Spain). When Vergennes nodded noncommittally, Franklin promised a memorandum on the current state of American affairs. The foreign minister indicated he would read such a memorandum with great interest.
Franklin spent the last days of 1776 drafting the memo, which he delivered to Vergennes at Versailles early in January. Franklin’s message mixed promises with threats.
As other princes of Europe are lending or hiring their troops to Britain against America, it is apprehended that France may, if she thinks fit, afford our Independent States the same kind of aid, without giving England just cause of complaint. But if England should on that account declare war, we conceive that by the united force of France, Spain and America, she will lose all her possessions in the West Indies, much the greatest part of that commerce that has rendered her so opulent, and be reduced to that state of weakness and humiliation she has by her perfidy, her insolence, and her cruelty both in the East and West so justly merited.
On the other hand, without French assistance, especially at sea, America might be forced to terminate the war.
While the English are masters of the American seas and can, without fear of interruption, transport with such ease their army from one part of our extensive coast to another, and we can only meet them by land marches, we may possibly, unless some powerful aid is given us, or some strong diversion made in our favour, be so harassed and put to such immense expense as that finally our people will find themselves reduced to the necessity of ending the war by an accommodation.
France and Spain must seize the moment to link arms with America. Franklin summarized and concluded:
North America now offers to France and Spain her amity and commerce. She is also ready to guarantee in the firmest manner to those nations all their present possessions in the West Indies, as well as those they shall acquire from the enemy in a war that may be consequential of such assistance as she requests. The interest of the three nations is the same. The opportunity of cementing them, and of securing all the advantages of that commerce, which in time will be immense, now presents itself. If neglected, it may never again return. We cannot help suggesting that a considerable delay may be attended with fatal consequences.
Vergennes was not to be moved by mere rhetoric. During the next few months he kept Franklin and the other Americans at arm’s length. Their requests for interviews were diverted to his assistants, their very existence hardly acknowledged by the French court. Their request for a treaty was rebuffed, as was their application for such formal and undeniable assistance as a loan of ships of the French line. Clearly the government was not ready to embrace the American cause openly—for fear “of giving umbrage to England,” Franklin explained to the Committee of Secret Correspondence.
Yet privately Vergennes facilitated the American war effort. The ports of France were opened to American vessels for the selling of American goods and the buying of French. Arrangements were made for the purchase of five thousand hogsheads of American tobacco by the Farmers General, a consortium of bankers and merchants closely connected to the government, which besides collecting taxes for the king ran the state’s tobacco monopoly. The Farmers General would advance 1 million livres in payment; further sums would follow commencement of delivery of the tobacco. The government itself provided a grant of 2 million livres, to be paid in four quarterly installments.
On the whole Franklin found cause for optimism, as he usually did. The delay in winning an alliance with France simply meant France would be stronger when the alliance did come, as Franklin was certain it ultimately would—by either a positive act on France’s part or a British declaration of war against France for assisting the Americans. And the French would bring Spain—“with which they mean to act in perfect unanimity,” Franklin remarked. “Their fleet is nearly ready,” he said of the French, “and will be much superior to the English, when joined with that of Spain, which is preparing with all diligence. The tone of the Court accordingly rises; and it is said that a few days since, when the British ambassador intimated to the minister, that if the Americans were permitted to continue drawing supplies of arms &c. from this kingdom, the peace could not last much longer, he was firmly answered, Nous ne desirons pas la guerre, et nous ne le craignons pas. We neither desire war, nor fear it.” Franklin was not willing to predict a date for the onset of hostilities; this might be a matter of chance. But it could not be far off. “When all are ready for it, a small matter may suddenly bring it on; and it is the universal opinion that the peace cannot continue another year. Every nation in Europe wishes to see Britain humbled, having all in their turns been offended by her insolence.”
America’s star was on the rise. “All Europe is for us. Our Articles of Confederation, being by our means translated and published here, have given an appearance of consistence and firmness to the American states and Government, that begins to make them considerable. The separate constitutions of the several states are also translating and publishing here, which afford abundance of speculation to the politicians of Europe.”
On this point Franklin was speaking more of popular opinion than of the views of the courts of the Continent—which on principle looked askance at republicanism. His meaning became clear as he described what victory would yield. “It is a very general opinion that if we succeed in establishing our liberties, we shall as soon as peace is restored receive an immense addition of numbers and wealth from Europe, by the families who will come over to participate our privileges and bring their estates with them.” This made the American cause all the more worthy.
Tyranny is so generally established in the rest of the world that the prospect of an asylum in America for those who love liberty gives general joy, and our cause is esteemed the cause of all mankind. Slaves naturally become base as well as wretched. We are fighting for the dignity and happiness of human nature. Glorious it is for the Americans to be called by Providence to this post of honour. Cursed and detested will everyone be that deserts or betrays it.
The great goal of Franklin’s French mission was an alliance with Louis’s regime, but achieving that g
oal required keeping the United States afloat till the Bourbon monarch came round. Money was a constant problem, despite the grants and advances Vergennes arranged. Franklin knew something about financing a war from the last conflict with France, but the war against Britain ate through money faster than he or anyone else in America had imagined. For internal consumption the Congress could levy taxes and print money, both of which it did. Yet neither addressed the need for foreign exchange—the coin of the realms where Americans hoped to buy the muskets, cannons, ships, and other items they could not produce themselves in the quantities they needed. For these they had to pay in promises, which went at a severe discount after disasters like Long Island, or in trade goods the French, Spanish, and other foreigners wanted to buy. The tobacco deal marked a start, but it soon suffered from the same ailment that afflicted the rest of the trade from America: British men-of-war, which stopped up American ports and scoured the shipping lanes to Europe. Vessels got through now and again, compensating their captains for their audacity, but not frequently enough to keep the new republic in the livres it required.
An alternative was resort to privateers, the licensed pirates on whom the English had relied since the days of Francis Drake. The privateers preyed on the maritime trade of Britain, thereby depriving London of revenues; more positively (from the American perspective), the privateers’ prizes might be sold on the open foreign market for the hard currency America desperately required.
The problem was that the market for prizes was not as open as Franklin and the other Americans wished. France was the obvious place to sell the captured cargoes and vessels, and France was where they were first disposed of. Lambert Wickes, the captain of the Reprisal, the bucking brig that brought Franklin over from Philadelphia, sold his two prizes to French purchasers willing to wink at the falsified papers that were to the privateers’ practice what Continental dollars were to the fiscal practice of the American Congress. But the British were not so tolerant. They warned Vergennes that conspiracy in piracy might lead to belligerency. Vergennes initially told Franklin that American privateers in French ports must leave with their prizes at once, but upon being informed that the vessels in question required repairs, and that to turn them out would simply turn them over to the British, the foreign minister relented. They might stay—indeed they must stay—pending further notice.
Although Franklin was willing to abide by Vergennes’s cease-and-desist order, the privateers themselves—for whom privateering was often as much a moneymaking venture as an exercise in patriotism—were not. Gustavus Conyngham was released from French custody at Dunkirk on the assurances of the American commissioners that he and his cutter Revenge would sail directly to America and engage in no activities hostile to Britain save self-defense. The captain blithely ignored written orders and set about picking off British merchantmen. To make matters worse, he allowed one of his prizes to be recaptured by the British, and the prize crew (the sailors from Conyngham’s ship detailed to sail the captured vessel in place of the now-confined original crew) turned out to be mostly Frenchmen.
The fault was not all Conyngham’s. Evidently the captain had received an oral message from one William Carmichael, a courier from Franklin and the commission, that countermanded his written orders. Carmichael evidently considered Franklin too timid and desired to force the French into the war. Whether or not Conyngham suspected Carmichael of freelancing, the captain was happy to resume his predation.
Vergennes had no interest in which Americans were to blame; the fact that French sailors had been captured in what the British interpreted as piracy provoked a diplomatic crisis. A special envoy from King George arrived at Versailles threatening war against France. Vergennes and Louis took the matter most seriously, with the former warning the French ambassador in London that hostilities could begin at any time and the latter holding French ships in port. Louis also ordered American privateers and prizes out of French harbors, repaired or not. Vergennes refused to deal further with Franklin or the other American commissioners.
Franklin understood that Vergennes’s displeasure was as much for Britain’s benefit as America’s, and he assumed that once the war scare passed, the displeasure would dissipate.
Other problems were less tractable. The American commissioners had charge of purchasing weapons and other war matériel for Washington’s army, and though funding these purchases was a constant challenge, there was no lack of interest on the part of French and other European merchants and manufacturers in America’s business. Yet precisely because of the uncertainty of getting paid, those expressing the interest were often of the enterprising—not to say shady—sort.
One of the more curious characters Franklin encountered was Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a Frenchman with background and interests almost as varied as Franklin’s. The son of a watchmaker, Beaumarchais had developed a modest reputation as an inventor; his creativity found other outlets in music and drama. His popular play Le Barbier de Séville was still on the boards when Franklin arrived in Paris; he would proceed to write Le Mariage de Figaro. Meanwhile the playwright moved on to drama of another sort, namely the revolution unfolding in America. He became entranced with the American version of liberté and determined that France must midwife its birth. He urged Vergennes to back the American rebels and offered to act as secret agent supplying the support. When Louis approved the project, Beaumarchais created a front firm, Roderigue Hortalez & Co., to disguise the government’s role. A substantial amount of French (and Spanish) money flowed through Beaumarchais’s hands, winding up as weapons and other matériel in America.
Precisely what Beaumarchais was going to get out of the arrangement was unclear. The Americans resisted repaying him, on the reasoning that the money was intended for them, not for him. Whatever his emotional attachment to the American cause, he apparently expected some profit for his pains. It was his bad luck to attach himself to Silas Deane, who himself came under suspicion for profiteering (and eventually came under more than suspicion when he abandoned the American cause). Beaumarchais also antagonized Franklin’s old friend Dubourg, who hoped to corner the French market for American supplies himself, and Jacques Donatien Leray de Chaumont, an intimate of Vergennes who became Franklin’s host. Franklin, recognizing the cloud over Beaumarchais, kept his distance from this ingenious fellow with whom, under different circumstances, he must have found much in common.
Others were less easily put off. A small army of young men—and some not so young—besieged Franklin, seeking commissions in the American army. After nearly a decade and a half of boring peace, the warrior class of the Continent wanted work. A Swiss officer who had served with the Dutch wished to become a lieutenant colonel under General Washington, despite never having risen higher than lieutenant for the Dutch. A veteran of ten years in the French army, writing from Spain, where nothing was brewing, thought he should be a regimental quartermaster. A student from Lyons declared that the time had come for him to accomplish something grand; he would start by killing redcoats in America. An aristocrat from Orléans explained that his forty-two years in the French army had taught him how an army of 25,000 could defeat a host ten times as large; he would be honored to share this secret with General Washington. A German student wrote from Jena declaring candidly that his family could no longer fund his education; he would fight for his daily bread. A Dutch surgeon sought to expand his knowledge of physical trauma in the only place where bodies were being blown apart on a regular basis. A British subject who had been outlawed from England after fighting with the French in Corsica declared his desire to fight with the Americans against those who had treated him so shabbily. The abbess of St.-Michel de Doullens offered the nephew of one of the nuns, a lad of eighteen who, bless his heart, wanted to support his eleven brothers and sisters as a soldier with the Americans. A mother from Châtellerault with sons to spare forwarded three for the front. A Paris matron explained that a young male relation had been serving with the royal guard of Spain b
ut found King Carlos’s incessant hunting exhausting; he wished to rest up against the British.
There were a few diamonds amid the dross. “Count Pulaski of Poland, an officer famous throughout Europe for his bravery and conduct in defence of the liberties of his country against the three invading powers of Russia, Austria and Prussia will have the honour of delivering this into your Excellency’s hands,” Franklin wrote Washington in May 1777, sending along the man who would organize the Continental cavalry. A few months later he recommended “the Baron de Steuben, lately a Lieutenant General in the King of Prussia’s service”—and shortly to impress Prussian discipline on Washington’s troops (at which point the fact that he had been only a captain, rather than a lieutenant general as represented to Franklin, was forgiven). In another letter Franklin endorsed “the Marquis de la Fayette, a young nobleman of great expectations and exceedingly beloved here.” Fulfilling those expectations, Lafayette became just as beloved in America.
Such as these Franklin could recommend forthrightly. In other cases he either ignored the entreaties or wrote something innocuous. “The bearer, Monsr. Dorcet, is extremely desirous of entering in the American service, and goes over at his own expense, contrary to my advice,” Franklin wrote Washington regarding one worthy whose sponsors had to be appeased. Franklin assured Washington he had not given the gentleman in question “the smallest expectation” of a commission. Yet the man insisted on a recommendation, and Franklin obliged, after a fashion. Reiterating that the gentleman refused to be dissuaded, Franklin wrote, “This at least shows a zeal for our cause that merits some regard.”
Even such backhanded compliments became too much for Washington. “Our corps being already formed and fully officered,” the general wrote Franklin from Continental Army headquarters, “the number of foreign gentlemen already commissioned and continually arriving with fresh applications throw such obstacles in the way of any future appointments that every new arrival is only a source of embarrassment to Congress and myself and of disappointment and chagrin to the gentlemen who come over.” Speaking candidly, Washington admitted mistakes in the past that had continuing consequences. “The error we at first fell into of prodigally bestowing rank upon foreigners without examining properly their pretensions, having led us to confer high ranks upon those who had none or of a very inferior degree in their own country, it now happens that those who have really good pretensions, who are men of character, abilities and rank will not be contented unless they are introduced into some of the highest stations of the army.” This was impossible, as Franklin surely appreciated. Washington acknowledged the need to maintain the goodwill of influential Frenchmen, but, please, no more officer candidates.