Founding Fathers Abroad

Two celebrated Americans were at home abroad last week, just as they had been two centuries before. An exhibition commemorating Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson opened in Paris, where both men had served their young nation so well and had grown to admire their hosts. "A most amiable nation to live with" was the way Franklin described the French; and Jefferson wrote that they "love us more, I think, than they do any nation on earth."

While that love has cooled somewhat, the exhibition, sponsored by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, is appropriate. Without the help of the French, the Colonies might never have won the Revolution, and without the skillful persuasion of Franklin, who went to Paris as ambassador in 1776, the French might never have entered the war. The ties between France and the U.S. were further strengthened by Jefferson, who succeeded Franklin in 1785 and stayed until 1789.

The display covers the times and lives of the two Americans from the birth of Franklin in 1706 until Jefferson's death on July 4, 1826--precisely 50 years after he signed the Declaration of Independence. The exhibition features photographs, paintings, documents and artifacts, including a hulking 3,500-Ib. stuffed buffalo--a symbol of the vast, unmapped Western territory that Jefferson bought in the Louisiana Purchase after becoming President. Following trips to Warsaw and London, the show, which is being underwritten by IBM, will come to the U.S. in March 1976.

In the light of the Bicentennial, the eager reception that the French are giving to Franklin and Jefferson is heartwarming for Americans. Whatever an American is, however difficult to define, the national character surely has been shaped by Franklin's broad humanism and Jefferson's clear idealism.

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