Making France Our Best Friend

By Stacy Schiff

Ben Franklin arrived in Paris in December 1776 to a public frenzy that would not be matched by another American landing until Charles Lindbergh set down there more than 150 years later. Instantly Franklin was surrounded, celebrated, applauded in the streets and theaters. He spoke, and Paris purred. His likeness blossomed everywhere, on clocks and rings and walking sticks. Terra-cotta Franklin medallions were served up by the thousand but could not satisfy the demand. The portraitists wore him out. He could be held responsible for a riotous explosion of bad poetry.

He did not travel to France for the reasons that have impelled Americans since 1776: for a sentimental education, a cultural polish, for sexual or artistic or racial freedom, to perfect the language of Moliere, Flaubert and Proust. He went because there was as yet no independent America and because it was painfully clear to the Continental Congress that without the assistance of a European power, there would not be. The colonies had no munitions, no money and no credit but had resolved all the same to battle the mother country. There was something of a difference between declaring independence and achieving it.

France was the logical accomplice, given its historic rivalry with England, to which America owed its birth. Rarely has it been so baldly true that the enemy of one's enemy is one's friend. In the name of expediency, the colonies were willing to put aside their traditional aversion to Papist France. And in the name of expediency, the French monarchy--which saw in America some delicious trade advantages and an equally appealing chance to humble England--was willing to underwrite a republic. Its doing so was in large part Franklin's work. Ninety percent of the gunpowder used in the first years of the Revolution came from France, as did tens of millions of dollars in aid. In 1781 British commanding General Charles Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown to a greater number of French than American troops. For the better part of his years in France, Franklin heard little from Congress aside from variations on a single refrain: the war hung by French assistance alone. As Robert Morris wrote, "In a word, Sir, we must have it, or we are undone."

That 13 rebel colonies were willing to throw themselves on the mercy of one foreign power in order to dissolve their political bonds with another stood as the first of many ironies. That the nascent republic sent Franklin--stout, balding and 70--to play the role of seductive ingenue was another. Here was the man who believed that necessity never makes a good bargain, that God helps those who help themselves, sent off to perform a spectacular tin-cup routine. It was all the more spectacular in that Franklin had grave doubts about the proposition. He was firmly of the opinion that America should not flounce about "suitoring for alliances." As it turned out, the maxim-defying years he spent begging in France saw the greatest political feat of his life and one of the greatest political triumphs of American history, yielding the only alliance America forged for 170 years. And Franklin held on to his post as American representative for eight years, despite regular attempts on the part of his enemies to recall him and of his government to undermine him. What a French volunteer in the Continental Army said of George Washington was no less true of Franklin: "Congress expects him to do great things and at the same time refuses him the means of doing them."

The crucial embrace of the two nations--it is telling that neither side could agree on when, precisely, it was over--is all the more astonishing for having been based on mutual illusion. What was for France a revenge and a romance was for America a solemn matter of principles and practicalities. Effecting and sustaining that marriage of convenience required Franklin to leave many of those famed Franklinian virtues--the aversion to tyranny, the commitment to tolerance--at home. It was his job to court an absolute monarchy on behalf of a country to which civil liberties, freedom of the press and the right to dissent were to be sacred. Nowhere is the majestic suppleness of his character on better display. It was his task as well to offer a gentle crash course on America, correcting French misconceptions.

Franklin could have begun with those about himself. America's original back-room operator was welcomed in France as a "noble savage," in sense and sensibility a joint production of Voltaire and Rousseau. The French embraced him as a frontier philosopher, which Franklin was not on either count. When consulted for information on farming, he confessed to thorough ignorance, having lived in cities all his life. His pages of political philosophy make for a skimpy offering. He was dismissive when his sister inquired after these: "I could as easily make a collection for you of all the past parings of my nails." The French had spent decades producing theories on liberty and equality, for which they regularly enjoyed stays in the Bastille. Franklin had produced no such theses but put those combustible ideas into practice. He was dimly understood to be an American general; he was so much an anomaly in socially inert France that he was repeatedly addressed as Monsieur de Franklin. This frontier philosopher was dripping in honorary degrees. He wrung a great deal of mileage out of being thought a Quaker, which he was not. Every religion claimed Franklin, groused John Adams, who knew that his colleague had little use for the stuff, at least in any churchgoing sense. This by no means prevented Franklin's becoming a cult figure. He made America his religion, adapting the rituals to suit the Parisian faithful.

Here Franklin's improvisational genius came into play, as did his restraint. Adams would snarl that Franklin would receive undue credit for having set out "to abolish monarchy, aristocracy, and hierarchy, throughout the world." If he could, he might well have; he had long been allergic to titles and idle elites and dynastic privilege. Fifty-three years before he sailed to France, he noted that Americans do not speak of "Master Adam" or "the Right Honourable Abraham" or "Noah, Esquire." Those observations had not endeared him to the ruling elites of America or Britain any more than his humble origins did. He did not fit into the new American aristocracy and he had never fit into the old British aristocracy, but somehow he was entirely at home with the French aristocracy, which--it paid to be original, noted one of his successors--was entirely at home with him. In France he was cultivated, cosseted, lionized by dukes, counts and princes, for which John Adams could no more forgive him than he could accept Franklin's rampant popularity with footmen and chambermaids. In Philadelphia Franklin trailed behind him the self-made man's dubious scent of social climbing. In France he did not have to climb. He was hoisted up.

What Franklin did have to do was extend to prerevolutionary France a tolerance that did not come easily to a devout republican and a man who seldom met with anything--from bifocals to popcorn to spelling to the Lord's Prayer--that he did not feel he could improve on. While he might well write off European peerages as "a sort of tar-and-feather honour, a mixture of foulness and folly," he kept this view to himself while consorting with the aristocrats who eased the U.S. into being. A year before his return, Franklin did concede, "There are two opinions prevalent in Europe which have mischievous effects in diminishing national felicity; the one, that useful labour is dishonourable; the other that families may be perpetuated with estates. In America we have neither of these prejudices, which is a great advantage to us"--but he did so in a letter to a Spaniard. The reports that Washington and his officers were forming a hereditary honorary society made him livid. He raged that his countrymen had been seduced by the ribbons and crosses of the Old World; he did not believe honors either could or should be inherited. Were the project to survive (it did, as the Society of the Cincinnati), he proposed the officers follow the Chinese example and hand their decorations up to their parents rather than down to their children. This rant he confined to a letter to his daughter.

In his discretion Franklin differed from his countrymen, who almost universally found the Paris posting a Calvary and who were vocal on the subject. One swore he would prefer a farm in America to a dukedom in France. Adams wailed that he would rather be a doorman in Congress. Among his torments was Franklin himself, who understood that some American qualities--piety, earnestness, efficiency--did not go far in 18th century France. Franklin remained at all times a pragmatist and an astonishingly flexible thinker. He was realistic about the prospects of conducting business in a land of radically different habits. "It is vexing for men of spirit and honour accustomed to a different mode of conducting business to be trifled with, and as I may say, to be jockied by such a finesse. But we must for a time submit," he advised at one aggravating juncture. In fact, ego massaging and wheel greasing and string pulling--the courtier's repertoire--came easily to him. He was no innocent abroad; he was no more bawdy Poor Richard than he was the self-correcting killjoy of his autobiography. What he was instead was himself, gravitas and raffishness combined, always a winning combination in Paris. The censors approved Poor Richard's Almanack for publication in 1777 but noted that it could have been in better taste. It proved a best seller.

Franklin paid the price for his French posture, which he made appear comfortable when it was at times excruciating. By the end of the mission he had reason to complain of Congress, and it of him. After eight years in France, he seemed more the courtier than the father of self-reliance. His flaws had been on full display in Paris, where his detractors--burning with impatience while the wheels of European diplomacy ground at their stately pace--had had plenty of time to dilate upon them. In an uncharacteristically self-indulgent mood, he grumbled that Congress had shown little appreciation for his services: "But I suppose the present members hardly know me or that I have performed any." His greatest task for his country was a thankless one, though he had been instrumental in negotiating treaties of commerce and alliance with France, had adroitly bled the French treasury dry and had represented his country at the negotiating table when the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, concluding the Revolution and ushering the U.S. into its existence as a sovereign power.

In the end there were two Franklins: the stately philosopher revered by the French and the eccentric, shambling, adage-spouting guy with the kite, about whom America has had mixed feelings. In France the ugly American wears as many faces as he does baseball caps, but the model American wears the placid, loose-jawed countenance of Ben Franklin, Ur-republican. He stands in stark contrast to his sanctimonious and chauvinistic and mercantile countrymen, a model of what the French like most in their Americans: a skeptical, subtle faux naif with a sense of humor and a taste for culture and a deep appreciation for the supremacy of France.

STACY SCHIFF, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her biography Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), is writing a book about Franklin's years in Paris