[War and Finance Series] Benjamin Franklin: a Man in Paris or How he wooed the French to win the Revolutionary War

At the beginning of the Revolutionary war, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Arthur Lee were sent to France as a commission representing the American colonies. The purpose of the commission was to raise money for the American war effort, to negotiate for arms and other military equipment and to promote the conclusion of an alliance.

It can be argued that if Benjamin Franklin had not gone to Paris in 1776, Americans might still speak with a British accent. By winning the hearts of the French people and the heads of the French court, Franklin parlayed a domestic squabble between Great Britain and one of its wayward colonies into a transatlantic melee among the European powers of the day. The American patriots needed shiploads, literally, of money, military help, and supplies from France to win their independence, and Franklin delivered.

Franklin sailed to France in 1776 on the young nation’s rather desperate business. He was already considered an elder statesman in the colonies, having recently signed the Declaration of Independence and presided at the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention. During his seven and a half years in Paris, Franklin argued the patriot cause, using his considerable diplomatic talents to secure loans, buy war materiel, and orchestrate shipments. Sometimes he was part of a negotiating team, but more often he worked alone as Minister Plenipotentiary, a title Congress bestowed in 1779.

“French support was due entirely to Franklin,” says Ellen Cohn, editor of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, a mammoth project sponsored by the American Philosophical Society and Yale University. “In terms of world fame, there is no question that during this time Franklin was the most famous American in the world. The French adored him. There were many images of Franklin circulating at this time; there was hardly a house in France that didn’t have one. Franklin himself had a part in popularizing his image when he arrived. I believe this was part of his plan to win the French over, a bit like an early spin campaign.” Part of that campaign involved exchanging the early image of Franklin in a fur hat with a much more dignified portrait to reflect the gravitas of his mission.

Jonathan Dull, senior associate editor at the project, agrees that Franklin was the major proponent for America in France during this period. “Franklin basically trusted the French, which made him very effective,” Dull explains. “He was treated as a professional diplomat; the other American representatives were considered amateurs.”

“Primarily he was there to get supplies sent to the American army and that consumed an immense amount of time,” Cohn says. “During this period we see him struggling to find merchants to assemble these items--guns, uniforms, shoes--and then finding the ships and convoys to send them to America.” All this required money, of which Congress didn’t have enough, so it looked to the French government for loans. Franklin was frequently pestered to find more funding. “It was complicated and terribly frustrating for Franklin,” adds Cohn. “He kept writing back to Congress telling it not to ask for more money.”

In an exchange with Robert Morris, superintendent of finance for the Continental Congress, Franklin wrote on November 5, 1781:

As . . . it will be useful to you to know what Aids you may expect from Europe, I think it right to give you my Opinion that you cannot rely on such as may be called very considerable. If Europe was in peace, and its Governments therefore under no Necessity of Borrowing, much of the spare Money of private Persons might then be collectible in a Loan to our States. But four of the Principal Nations being already at War [Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands] and a fifth suppos’d to be preparing for it [possibly Russia], all borrowing what they can . . . it is to be suppos’d, that money’d Men will rather risque lending their Cash to their own Governments or to those of their Neighbours, than hazard it over the Atlantick with a new State, which to them hardly appears to be yet firmly established.

Though Franklin was often busy with diplomatic work, he found time to engage in his lifelong loves of science, philosophy, and printing. He even learned French. “He had a really wonderful group of close friends in Passy, the suburb of Paris where he lived,” Cohn explains. “Learning French with them was like a big parlor game--he would write things and they would correct them.” This included love letters and essays, perhaps giving rise to Franklin’s reputation among his detractors that he was quite a ladies’ man.

Franklin’s approach was a calculated one. “Though he could be frivolous, Franklin was not a frivolous person,” Dull says. “He was a patriot. He was consumed with rage at George III about the way he was conducting the war. Underneath, Franklin was a very serious person and a very angry person. His friendship with France was a means to an end, though he enjoyed his time there.”

Franklin’s accessibility, affability, and clear affinity with the French were not popular in all quarters. John Adams, a fellow negotiator, criticized Franklin’s approach and implied that what he viewed as Franklin’s excessive civility was not necessary on either personal or political levels.

“It was Adams’s opinion that the French needed us more than we needed them,” explains Dull. The future president found the French court insufferable. He believed that the French would reap considerable benefits from an American victory, which they should be eager to assure. France could expect to pick up an important new trading partner in an independent America no longer confined to trading with Britain. And a defeat for Britain would also reduce its power among the premier European nations. The American victory over British forces at Saratoga, New York, in October 1777 was often cited as proof that the patriots could manage without the French.

But the renegade colonies were not quite as self-sufficient as some liked to think, says Dull. “Most of the muskets used at Saratoga by the Americans were French, as were the cannon.” There was little manufacturing capacity in the colonies, and America could not produce the military equipment and supplies it needed. Economic capacity was severely limited as well. By October 1781, American currency was being used as wallpaper, and the Continental Congress was so broke it could not pay for General Washington and his troops to get to Yorktown, Virginia.Once again, the French fronted money and military strength to win the battle, and this time, the war.

France, however, fared not so well from the peace treaty at the end of the war. Despite Adams’s insistence that an alliance with America was heavily weighted in France’s favor, the expected economic and political benefits never materialized, according to Dull. “France didn’t pick up that much trade from the United States,” he says, “and Britain was not significantly weakened by American independence. These were major disappointments in France. A few years later, France went bankrupt, which precipitated the French Revolution. That bankruptcy happened, in part, because of the earlier French support of America.”

The Franklin charm never wore off in France, though. On news of Franklin’s death in 1790, the National Assembly went into mourning for three days, says Lopez, making it “the first political body in the world to pay homage to a simple citizen from another land.”