The foreign aid provided by France during the American Revolution was crucial to the outcome of the uprising. French funds kept the Revolution alive. As Stacy Schiff points out in A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, The majority of the guns fired on the British at Saratoga were French. Four years later, when the British set down their muskets at Yorktown, they surrendered to forces that were equal parts French and American, all of them fed and clothed and paid for by France, and protected by (a French) fleet. Critical to getting this aid from the French monarchy was Benjamin Franklin, revered throughout the world as a scientist and philosopher. But the aid did not come easily. The story of how it was obtained is fascinating and messy, as diplomacy often is. As part of his eight-year mission in France, Franklin also assisted in negotiating the 1783 peace settlement, the terms of which are arguably America’s greatest diplomatic triumph.
Schiff, who received the Pulitzer Prize for biography for Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) in 2000, tells this story in engaging detail in the most insightful A Great Improvisation. As she writes, He was inventing foreign policy out of whole cloth, teaching himself diplomacy on the job, while serving as America’s unofficial banker. In addition, Franklin was in charge of his budding nation’s naval affairs and dealing in other areas that were not part of his official instructions. Such matters would have been difficult enough if those who shared his objectives were compatible personally and strategically, but this was not the case. One example was that John Adams, among others, understood that Franklin’s reputation was merited and benefited the American cause. What irked his American colleagues was the difference between the man and the myth. In their eyes, Schiff observes, He ruled by fiat; the Enlightenment-embodying democrat was a bully at home. . . . As his dissenting colleagues saw it, there were no checks on Franklin’s behavior. As (he) saw it, he was operating in a vacuum, forced to make sweeping decisions in areas far outside his expertise, with no hope of guidance in Europe and little in America. To further complicate matters, there were British and French spies everywhere Franklin turned.
The many-sided Franklin and his cause are always at the center of events in A Great Improvisation. But Schiff’s extraordinary scholarship and gift for vivid re-creation of the period also help us to better understand the other major personalities and complex issues involved. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.
