Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies)

by Thomas A. Foster

  In contrast to such reticence, other contemporary writers celebrate Franklin's sexuality as a signature aspect of his modernity. One early-twentieth-century biography of Franklin not only remarks favorably on Franklin's friendship with D'Eon but even goes so far as to include a portrait of D'Eon with the caption "in the woman's clothes he chose to wear during the latter part of his life." The author of this biography also includes a copy of a letter from D'Eon "with signature in the feminine." "D'Eon was living in exile in London while Franklin was there," he explains, "and there is evidence that they became friends."49 Published at a time described as "sex o'clock" in America by a contemporary magazine, the association of Franklin with a figure like D'Eon put him at the vanguard of a new sexual culture.51

  Many early-twentieth-century Americans viewed his writings as humorous and progressive, in direct contrast to the perceived repression and censorship of previous generations. One early-twentieth-century biographer includes an odd selection of suggestive Poor Richard's aphorisms largely without comment: "A ship under sail and a big-bellied woman, are the handsomest two things that can be seen common." "After three days men grow weary of a wench, a guest, and weather rainy." "You cannot pluck roses without danger of thorns, nor enjoy a fair wife without danger of horns." "Neither a fortress nor a m----d will hold out long after they begin to parley."51 Such earthy sayings underscore Franklin's roots and serve to make him appealing to early-twentieth-century Americans self-consciously breaking free of Victorian propriety.

  In addition to giving rise to a consistent memorial voice that extols Franklin's sexuality, the twentieth century's public memory of Franklin differs from the Victorian era's because of an important change in how historians have approached him. The advent of women's history and the significant work done on his papers from his time in France open up an examination of the portion of Franklin's life that his Autobiography does not cover. The autobiography so dominates the depictions of him in nineteenth-century America that these later accounts seem revelatory. Thus, a remarkable transformation occurred in the mid-twentieth century with regard to how Franklin's personal life would be discussed.

  According to Tise, until the early twentieth century, "public discussion of his views on women and involvements with them was pretty much put aside." For fifty years before this, "historians almost uniformly considered it improper and ungentlemanly to talk about Franklin's dealings with women."52 Women's history has aided the development of Franklin's new legacy, especially given the depth of scholarship on Franklin's time in the salon culture of Paris. Historian Lopez's work, for example, reveals the significance of the relationships that Franklin had with women and the important context for appreciating the role of women and the nature of heterosocial interaction in salon culture.

  Even depictions of Franklin's marriage take on a new gloss in this new context that celebrated his flirtatious and amorous persona. Attempting to make the marriage seem more sexual and romantic, Charles Tansill writes about Franklin's choice of wife: "She had a good figure, however, and in Ben's visual arithmetic this added up to a nice sum. But his response to her physical charms had to be restrained," for at first he did not have enough money to secure her hand in marriage. Very shortly thereafter, he explains, Franklin "began seriously to court Deborah, who now was looking boldly at Ben over the high rampart of her ample bosom."53 Franklin was the perfect subject for Tansill's project. His self-professed reason for focusing on the "secret loves" of the Founders, as we have seen in previous chapters, is to use sex and romance to "humanize" them. Franklin's personal reputation, never a stuffy one, needed little of this help but does blossom from Tansill's depictions of his disposition.

  In some accounts, women are fashioned as a diversion from the real work at hand. For example, one argues that the tensions between his neighbor Madame Brillon and Franklin were a kind of ritual: "His quarrels with her were never serious; they were part of the game they were playing, a mannered, eighteenth-century-style love minuet. He enjoyed and valued her friendship, which helped him relieve the pressures of his nerve-straining negotiations with Vergennes."54 But most often the view of Franklin as enlightened in his view of women, even a near feminist, only deepens through the twentieth century and fits well with the idea of him as a modern American, ahead of his eighteenth-century counterparts. According to one early-twentieth-century biographer, at the age of sixteen, Franklin was already showing himself to be a "free thinker," "foe of religious intolerance," "potential rebel against powers arbitrarily exercised, and a defender of women's rights."55 Historian Lopez states, "Women, young and old, loved him because he took a keen interest in them, not merely as objects of desire, but as people with a different outlook, with their own contribution to make."56 Franklin, writes one twentieth-century chronicler, "loved the ladies, flirted outrageously, [and] talked and wrote at length about love affairs." Yet, "he genuinely liked women, well beyond sexual attraction."57 Another late-twentieth-century account similarly notes, "Almost inevitably French ladies took an important part in making this circle work. They probably realized that Franklin liked them as people-and appreciated them because they were women .1151

  Part of the misplaced emphasis on Franklin's relationships with women, especially while he was in France, stems from a sexist perception that devalues the role of women in early modern society. As Lopez argues, this view is typical of "our modern culture, which pays so much attention to sex and so little to women."" And she continues, "The myth that Franklin in Paris behaved like an old lecher having a jolly time is still with us. The truth is far less titillating. He was, simply, the greatest ambassador that America ever sent to France."60

  Some academic scholars are right to point out that his relationships with women in Paris went well beyond social calls. Reducing women to romantic objects, and refusing to view them as correspondents, has warped our view. His letters to Madame Brillon, for example, are partly "grammar lessons," written to practice his French and returned to him with corrections in red ink. They would "play an important role in his mission, for women were skillful courtiers and their salons were excellent lobbies for foreign and secret agents."" His landlord, Chaumont, for another example, viewing Franklin's salon comportment in a favorable light, was able to secure valuable items for the cause of the American Revolution, including fifteen thousand uniforms. Famously, King Louis XVI told Franklin as they finalized France's support for American Independence, "I am very satisfied with your conduct since you arrived in my kingdom."62

  By the 1960s, Franklin's reputation as a ladies' man was fully embraced. As Tansill puts it in 1964, "Ben obviously warmed more beds... than most people realized."" Part of the contemporary curiosity feeds off willful confusion-was he sexually "modern" or all talk and no action? The ambiguity of the nature of his relationships with women allows him to favorably straddle the Culture Wars. For those who wish to see him as sexually liberated, there's a Franklin, a man who is at ease with human sexuality, especially in contrast to the commonly held view of the stuffy Founding Father. In this public memory, Franklin emerges as compatible with the post-Sexual Revolution values of modern America. It has been said, for example, that Franklin "wrote his own code of morals." Many Americans today view Franklin as a trailblazer and self-made man, even in the areas of sex and romance. "The Puritan way of life," that same mid-century writer explains, "had little attraction for him. He had few inhibitions to check his warm impulses, and seldom did the fearsome shadow of sin put fear into his heart."64

  Franklin's ribald writings on the surface present an ease with sexuality that frightened nineteenth-century Americans yet pleased those of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Indeed, Franklin's reputation as a romantic man has usefully kept him relevant. As Fleming notes, Franklin had flirtatious relationships on this side of the Atlantic long before Paris, and such stories show that "romantic love" "was (and is) ancient and forever modern.""

  Today, Americans consider the controversial essay "Choice of a Mistre
ss" to be virtually "modern" and one that reveals Franklin to be a man of our period and not his own. On the "Choice of a Mistress," professor of political science Jerry Weinberger remarks that "the last reason is the one most remembered by posterity. Ask any ten people... [and] most will say: `Oh yes, the one where old ladies are said to be so grateful."' He goes on to say that he has conducted this "questioning experiment (in the locker room of my athletic club). It's no wonder it remains the most familiar line: It is funny and charming in its appeal to common decency-gratitude, after all, is a virtue associated with love and beneficence and akin to justice but without the compulsion or harshness of justice. The line is tender and it picks up other sweet things said about old women earlier on." Thus, today we can see that Franklin's lines resonate with male heterosexuality (note the "locker room" and "athletic club" locations). But Weinberger also frames it as short of typical locker-room objectification. "When, for a further experiment, I asked a professional woman in her early sixties," the author explains, "she said it was racy, to be sure, but really sweet and kindhearted."66 Here again, we see the view of him as a friend to and not user of women-an idealized modern heterosexual male.

  And controversial aspects of Franklin's Autobiography have similarly been offered in a positive and more sexually explicit light. Consider, for example, the translation of a contemporary edition that seeks to remove any ambiguity from the meaning of one passage where Franklin describes "intrigues with low women." The full passage from Franklin's Autobiography reads, "In the mean time, that hard-to-be-govern'd Passion of Youth, hurried me frequently into Intrigues with such low Women as fell in my Way, which were attended with some Expence & Inconvenience, besides a continual Risque to my Health by a Distemper which of all Things I dreaded, tho' by great good Luck I escaped it."67 A 2005 edition of his Autobiography, subtitled Franklin's Autobiography Adapted for Modern Times, includes an updated translation of the famous passage: "In the mean time, my passions drove me to frequent relations with prostitutes and other low women. Admittedly, such behavior was both expensive and a risk to health and reputation. I'm grateful that I never caught any diseases."68 In contrast to previous generations who tended to whitewash such topics, the editor of this translation ensures that the eighteenth-century prose would not obstruct readers from understanding Franklin. With a more contemporary wording, Americans today are able to see Franklin as someone they can relate to-in this regard, if not in others.

  Today, the depiction of Franklin's marriage is highlighted more than ever before. One biographer today wanting to portray Franklin as ever-pragmatic (and yet oh-so-appealingly sexual) notes that "Franklin had a sexual appetite that he knew required discipline. So he set out to find himself a mate, preferably one with a dowry attached.""

  Historian Wood explains their common-law marriage not as a product of immorality (as some Victorians saw it) but in terms of the legal setting: "Since Pennsylvania law did not allow divorce for desertion, Franklin and Deborah in 1730 decided to avoid legal difficulties by simply setting up housekeeping as husband and wife." And Wood also rightly explains that common-law marriage was "much more prevalent" in the eighteenth century "than today": "Known already was his child from an unknown woman who he brought to live with him and Deborah shortly after their marriage. They would raise him as their son. As you might imagine, Victorian biographers struggled with all of these revelations."70

  Given the importance of marriage, perhaps most importantly for Franklin's portrayal as nonthreatening, is his biographer's consistent depiction of him as loyal to his wife. For all his failings, public memory contends, he was no adulterer like Hamilton. Academic and popular depictions of his marriage as stable have continued to the present day, where he is described as an "averagely good family man. 1171 One recent account points out that "there is no hint anywhere in his correspondence that he was unfaithful to her. 1171 Decades earlier, another similarly explains, "There are no letters, diaries, or memoirs that ever mention a specific liaison after Franklin's marriage to Deborah Read."73 With similar certainty, a college newspaper interview with Franklin scholar Leo Lemay covering "myths and facts" explains, "Franklin was a notorious womanizer. False. Although Franklin was an inveterate flirt, and he sired an illegitimate child before his 1730 wedding to Deborah Reed [sic] Rogers, there is no evidence that he had any affairs during his marriage."74

  Franklin and French Beauties

  As for Franklin's reputation while a widower in France, today Franklin appears to be the harmless older man and not the threatening sexual deviant. The "French beauties," one mid-twentieth-century biographer explains (gleefully), whom "he visited most" while living in and outside Paris were Madame Brillon and Madame Helvetius. Given the letters that were exchanged and the surrounding company who observed Franklin in the salon culture of Paris, the relationships are well-documented and commented on by virtually all his biographers. As with his writings, through the twentieth century, the relationships have become increasingly embraced and enjoyed as evidence of Franklin's joie de vivre, his ease with women and sexuality, in sharp contrast to the oppressive Puritans of stereotypical early America.

  Thirty-three-year-old Madame Brillon was his neighbor in Passy. In the hands of many biographers, romantic mist encircles the depiction of Franklin and Madame Brillon. Consider the following passage from an article in a special 2003 issue of Time magazine, entitled "Why He Was a Babe Magnet":

  Music is her Cupid's arrow. The lovely and talented Anne-Louise d'Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy plays the harpsichord and piano like an angel. Eager to meet her new neighbor in the fashionable Paris suburb of Passy, the celebrated envoy from America, she inquires about his musical tastes and woos him with a recital of Scottish songs. She follows with invitations to tea, chess games and tete-atetes in which she pours out her troubled soul to him. The delighted Franklin, now in his 70s, soon presses her for more tangible evidence of her affection. She plays coy, however, and steers the relationship with "Cher Papa" (her endearing term for him that soon catches on widely) into a safer daughter-father pattern, over his useless protests.75

  Lopez explains the relationship with Brillon as including 103 letters from her and 29 letters from him, 11 at least as many letters as for all the other French ladies taken together."76 According to another author, "her attitude toward Franklin was purely maternal." "Despite his age," however, "he grew naughty and made advances." His letters to her are flirtatious and even carry a "definite hint of sex," but she always turned him down-and also would not stop her well-known habit of sitting on his lap.77 One of his letters to Madam Brillon, which is often quoted, reads, "When I was a young man and enjoyed more favours from the sex than at present, I never had the gout. If the ladies at Passy had more of that Christian charity which I have so often recommended to you, in vain, I would not have the gout now. '17' As far as the relationship with Brillon went, historian Robert Middlekauff remarks, "How an aging man, now seventy-one, played the part of gallant without appearing and feeling foolish is not clear, but Franklin evidently managed. Madame Brillon played, not the temptress, but the faithful wife and mother. ... It was her talent and charm that held Franklin's attention after Madame Brillon made him realize that she would not fulfill his sexual demands."79 Brillon's husband did "not mind the attention Franklin paid to his wife."" In one letter, he writes playfully, "I am certain you have been kissing my wife"-yet he also adds, "My dear Doctor, let me kiss you back in return."81

  An exchange between Madame Brillon and Franklin often commented on includes Franklin's referring to the Commandments that he has broken by coveting her. She replies by referring to the seven deadly sins-lust going unnamed but clearly being emphasized-and he responds with creative additions to the Commandments, bringing them up to twelve. The two he added? "Increase, multiply and fill the earth; the twelfth (a commandment I enjoin you to obey): love one another." "She... openly professed her love for Franklin, leaving out the physical aspect he kept seeking from her.""

  If Frank
lin's role as "Cher Papa" with Madame Brillon provided ample evidence of his playful nature, most biographers agree that his relationship with Madame Helvetius was much more serious. Madame Helvetius, a wealthy sixty-year-old widow, also lived near Franklin. In the words of Isaacson, "by September 1779, he was ardently proposing marriage."83 Here, too, Time's special issue wraps a romantic gauze around the subjects and is also worth quoting at length:

  The Franklin libido really stirs when he encounters the brilliant and beautiful Anne-Catherine de Ligniville d'Autricourt, a descendant of Austrian nobility known by her married name, Madame Helvetius. Outgoing, exuberant and earthy, she uses her late husband's fortune to operate a bohemian, animal-filled estate on the fringes of the Bois de Boulogne, where she reigns over a salon of Enlighten ment philosophes. To Franklin, this is an intellectual heaven. Franklin proposes marriage to Madame Helvetius but frames the offer so coyly that it can be seen either as serious or as a joke, a canny way of saving face for both parties. He tells her that her late husband and his late Deborah have tied the knot in heaven, so it would be fitting revenge if she accepted him on earth. Ah, mon cher ami, she tells him in effect, it cannot be. When he finally decides to return home to America, her friends chide her for not accepting his proposal and keeping the adored Franklin in France.84

  As for Helvetius, "she was the queen of them all, the only one to whom he wrote more often than she answered, who did not call him papa, but, as an equal, mon cher ami, the one woman with whom he did not want to have merely a flirtation, a passing adventure: he wanted her for a wife."85 Another account remarks that she "won his heart" and that he proposed "seriously" and that after being turned down was "disappointed; he had wanted her badly and would have remained in France for the rest of his days had she married him."86