Improbable Patriot

by Harlow Giles Unger

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  Its author was, of all people, a French music master and playwright — Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a man so gifted in plotting and scheming on the stage that the French government had enlisted his skills offstage as a master spy. Vergennes had no reason — and yet every reason — to doubt Beaumarchais’s words.

  To most at the palace at Versailles, Beaumarchais was pure rogue — the most impudent, unscrupulous, outrageous intriguer; a double-dealing commoner and adventurer who stopped at nothing to advance his fame and fortune, singing defiantly in the face of those he exploited. But to thousands of others outside the confines of the French palace — across France, England, and Europe — he was a dashing hero: a towering intellect who thumbed his nose at arrogant aristocrats and stood ready to risk his all for the downtrodden, the needy, and the helpless.

  In fact, he was all of the above … and more. He was also a brilliant inventor, musician, composer, lyricist, singer, actor, poet, publisher, man of fashion, courtier, swordsman, spy, diplomat, adviser to kings, arms dealer, canny investor, financier, shipping magnate, philanthropist, irresistible lover, devoted husband, doting father, loyal friend, champion of the poor and persecuted, advocate of individual liberty and equal rights, and staunch friend of the American Revolution …

  … and he was unquestionably the most brilliant French playwright of his and perhaps any era, all but universally recognized from London to St. Petersburg for his revolutionary stage productions.

  At once charming and infuriating, Beaumarchais had earned the love and devotion of the powerless and the scorn and rancor of the powerful, with the king banning his greatest artistic achievements from public view. The public prosecutor had stripped him of his civil rights and citizenship for not being a lawyer and trying to defend himself without hiring one — an act that powerful French judges deemed insolent and worthy of indefinite imprisonment, loss of citizenship, and public silence. Condemnation to public silence left him forbidden to appeal his punishments, either in court or before the public or in any publication. He simply was not allowed to speak in public. If he did, police would jail him — condemn him to indefinite solitary confinement. In the eyes of the state, Beaumarchais was a nonperson — a condition that left the comte de Vergennes shaking his head in disbelief as he read Beaumarchais’s insolent letter to the king of France. A commoner, writing to the king of France, who ruled by divine right! It was unheard of — until Beaumarchais …

  “The preservation of our possessions in America and the peace which your majesty seems to want so much,” Beaumarchais warned the king, “depend entirely on this one proposition: we must help the Americans.”8

  Despite Beaumarchais’s past — or more likely because of it — Vergennes reread the letter several times. Beaumarchais was offering the king nothing less than a scheme to restore French power over her ancient English enemy. A strident nationalist, Vergennes could not, by his very nature, dismiss Beaumarchais’s suggestion. After all, France and England had been warring for centuries — since the glorious conquest of England in 1066 by Normandy’s Guillaume le Conquérant, William the Conqueror. England eventually retaliated during the Hundred Years’ War of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, overrunning Normandy, Brittany, and most of northern France, but Louis XIV — the Sun King — restored the French Empire to its former glory in the seventeenth century, all but enveloping the globe in the Bourbon flag. Louis the Great, as he was also called, extended French hegemony across Europe and beyond — over the Mediterranean Sea and into Africa, eastward to India and the South Pacific and westward across North America. La Nouvelle France encompassed most of Canada, from the Arctic and Atlantic shores, across the Great Lakes, westward to the Rocky Mountains and southward along the western slopes of the Appalachian Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico and into the Caribbean. Louis outlived both his son and grandson, and when he died, his five-year-old great-grandson ascended the throne as Louis XV.

  “The French king is master and arbiter of Europe,” the boy-king’s mentor Cardinal Fleury explained. “Our neighbors have everything to fear from us — we nothing from them. … The diplomatic object of this Crown has been and will always be to enjoy in Europe that role of leadership which accords with antiquity, its worth and its greatness — to abase every power which shall attempt to become superior to it.”9 A regent governed the empire until Louis reached the age of majority, at which time he found that royal responsibilities were a royal bore compared to the raptures that awaited in his royal bedroom.

  In the interests of sovereign succession and French territorial expansion, the regent arranged a territorially advantageous marriage of the French boy-king to Marie Leszczynska, the ugly twenty-one-year-old daughter of the Polish king. Only fifteen at the time, Louis couldn’t stomach the sight of his wife and limited his contacts with her to brief, infrequent encounters that kept her pregnant most of the time and confined to her bedchamber. While the queen labored in her apartment to produce a procession of ugly little princesses, Louis labored in his apartment to possess a procession of pretty little mistresses, who collectively earned him the often misinterpreted sobriquet of “Louis le Bien-Aimé” — Louis the well-loved.

  The motives for women’s love of Louis varied. Some offered themselves to win noble titles for their families; others went to the king’s bed by order of their husbands or sons seeking profitable land grants, government contracts, or other favors; still others — believing themselves inheritors of Jeanne d’Arc’s mantle — swore they heard the voice of God command them into the arms of the king who had been “crowned by God.” But their motives were secondary. When a woman or girl caught the king’s eye, neither she, her parents, nor her husband dared reject the blessing of a royal command, and off she went to the king’s bedchamber, where her pleas, tears, or shrieks of pain only excited the king’s lust.

  He was “a mindless man without a soul, without feeling,” said Étienne-François, duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s prime minister for twelve years. “He loved hurting people the way children love to make animals suffer. … He enjoyed making them suffer whenever he could; I don’t think anyone who ever knew him ever saw him show any benevolence since the day he was born.”10

  “If she’s pretty and I like her looks,” the king salivated, “I say that I want her, and that ends it.”11

  During his first years on the throne, Louis XV left administrative duties to his mentor and surrogate father, Cardinal Fleury. Fleury died in 1743, just as the beautiful twenty-two-year-old Madame Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson Lenormant d’Étioles, daughter of a minor bourgeois financier, captured the king’s heart, mind, and body. A star of influential Paris social salons, she had married Charles Lenormant d’Étioles, a wealthy merchant who made the mistake of presenting her at Versailles. Louis snatched her from her husband, led her to the royal bedchamber, and, two years later, emerged long enough to ennoble her as marquise de Pompadour — the name of a manor he bought for her. Her distraught husband had no choice but to skulk out of the palace and retire by himself to his own Château d’Étioles — too humiliated to set foot in the palace at Versailles except when protocol required. His wife, meanwhile, so enthralled the king that he created a new title for her, appointing her maitresse en titre (official royal mistress) at a formal court presentation, and giving her a standing and power never before accorded to royal mistresses. Choiseul called it “a scandalous presentation … that violated every rule of dignity and morality. Sovereign princes by nature almost always represent a lower form of life than the rest of mankind, but of all European princes, the French Bourbons rank as the lowest and most despicable.”12

  Louis XV, the French monarch from 1715 to 1774, was first to use Beaumarchais as a secret agent. More interested in pursuing palace pleasures than governing, Louis lost most of the great French empire of his forebear Louis XIV to the British.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  Madame de Pompadour, daughter of a bou
rgeois financier and wife of a wealthy merchant, so enraptured King Louis XV that he snatched her from her husband, entitled her a marquise, and placed her in his bedchamber as official Royal Mistress. Her title refers to the estate the king gave her, not her hairdo.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  Apart from sex, Louis enjoyed nothing more than riding to hunt at Marly, a palatial hunting lodge between Versailles and Paris. His weeks-long hunting excursions left Pompadour the de facto prime minister to manage palace politics in the king’s absence. She set about reshaping life at Versailles, ruthlessly disgracing anyone — especially any woman — she suspected of coveting the king’s social, political, financial, or sexual favors and elevating to power men who submitted to her own social, political, financial, and sexual demands. Neither she nor the king noticed the fissures forming in the structure of the great empire that stretched beyond the palace gates. Louis and Madame de Pompadour assumed that the same God who had placed him and his forebears on the French throne would preserve his empire forever. The French military machine at the time held most of continental Europe in thrall; powerful French armies secured the wealth of India and West Africa’s lucrative slave and ivory trades. And in North America, French troops — and their savage Indian allies — had confined British settlers to a pathetically small strip of land — about 1,000 miles long and 100 miles wide — that hugged the Atlantic coast.

  Although some of Britain’s thirteen colonies claimed lands as far west as the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes, they did not come into conflict with the French until the British population expanded and spilled over the western reaches of the Appalachians. Indian warriors were there to greet them. Armed and spurred by their French allies, they massacred hundreds of men, women, and children who settled on what the Indians claimed as their ancient hunting grounds in western Pennsylvania and Ohio.

  North America before the outbreak of the French and Indian War in North America and the Seven Years’ War in Europe.

  After French troops and Indians leveled a British trading post in western Pennsylvania in 1752, British governor Robert Dinwiddie, of Virginia, dispatched twenty-year-old militia major George Washington to warn the French to leave or face military retaliation. Met with a brusque rejection by the French military commander, Washington reported back to Dinwiddie, who promoted the young man to lieutenant colonel and ordered him to lead a company of volunteers “to the Fork of the Ohio … to make prisoners of or kill and destroy … any persons who … obstruct our settlements. … Pray God preserve you and grant success to our just designs.”13

  Washington rounded up seventy-five volunteers and hiked to the banks of the Youghiogheny River, sixty miles south of Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), the primary French outpost at the fork of the Ohio. On May 27, one of Washington’s scouts reported fifty French troops camped only six miles away, and Washington set out to attack the enemy. “We were advanced pretty near to them when they discovered us,” he reported, “whereupon I ordered my company to fire. … We received the whole fire of the French, during the greatest part of the action, which only lasted a quarter of an hour, before the enemy was routed. We killed … the commander of the party, as also nine others. … The Indians scalped the dead and took away part of their arms.”14

  With his order to fire, the naive young Washington ignited the planet’s first true “world war,” a seven-year struggle between England, France, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and a kaleidoscope of allies and enemies for control of colonies in North America, Africa, and Asia and the sea lanes in between. Often called the “Great War for Empire,” the Seven Years’ War changed the map of the world, shifting national borders beyond recognition, leveling thousands of towns and villages, killing or maiming more than a million soldiers and civilians, and bankrupting a dozen nations, including England and France. The war not only bankrupted France, however, it humiliated her — stripped her of all her territories around the world, save a few malaria-infested islands in the Caribbean. The French lost all of Canada and Louisiana in North America and all her most vital colonies in Africa, India, and the South Pacific. Her once-powerful navy and merchant fleet lay either in British ports or at the bottom of the seas, and the British destroyed the fortifications at the strategically critical French channel port of Dunkerque and put the port and city under the command of a British commissioner.

  As the ink was drying on the treaty that ended the war in 1763, Pompadour died and Louis XV forwent the pleasures of his bedchamber long enough to order Prime Minister Choiseul to avenge the French defeat and recapture at least some of the lost empire. As Louis returned to his bed to feast on newer, younger playthings, Choiseul set out to rebuild the nation’s army and navy. To keep abreast of intrigues at home and abroad, he assumed authority over the post office and the mail flowing in and out of the palace. To cull secrets from foreign courts, he expanded a small espionage group into what he called the “Bureau of Interpreters,” which sent a flock of agents in the guise of interpreters to every French embassy and consulate overseas. He ordered interpreters to accompany every French diplomat and important figure who went abroad, and he often assigned them dual roles as both diplomats and spies. It was easy to recruit agents among former army and navy officers eager to avenge their disgrace in the Seven Years’ War — and among the unjustly condemned, whose only option for overturning their convictions was to serve the king in whatever way he wished.

  In 1765, two years after the war, Choiseul sent a naval-officer-turned-spy — sieur Pontleroy — to evaluate colonist dissatisfaction in America and determine whether French arms and money might help incite rebellion and weaken the British enough to permit France to reclaim Canada without a costly war with England. The Seven Years’ War had also left Britain bankrupt — victorious, but nonetheless as bankrupt as France. With King George III unwilling to reduce his lavish way of life and Parliament spending £300,000 a year to maintain its military garrisons in America, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Grenville raised duties on American imports and extended England’s Stamp Act to the colonies to force Americans to pay for their own military protection. It was the first time Parliament had taxed the colonies directly, having previously relied exclusively on hidden, indirect taxes such as import duties, thus allowing colonial legislatures to raise their own local taxes. After Boston’s James Otis responded to the Stamp Act by threatening to “set the province in flames,” Choiseul sent Pontleroy in the guise of a French tobacco merchant to determine the true extent and depth of the revolutionary fervor expressed by Otis. Traveling the length and breadth of the thirteen American colonies, Pontleroy stood at the door of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, Virginia, when Patrick Henry raged that Virginians were not bound “to any law other than the laws or ordinances of the general assembly of Virginia.”15

  Duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s foreign minister, envisioned French recapture of Canada by aiding the American rebellion against the British.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  As anti-tax rioting spread across America, representatives of eight colonies approved a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances of the Colonists in America” — the first such joint action in colonial history. To Pontleroy’s astonishment, however, those same representatives expressed “glory in being subjects of the best of kings” and called their connection with Great Britain “secure” and, indeed, “one of their great blessings.” Although vigorously opposed to the Stamp Act, they rejected outright rebellion — and Pontleroy advised Choiseul to abandon thoughts of encouraging colonist disaffection with the mother country. It was sound advice. Less than five months later, in February 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act and temporarily quelled revolutionary fervor in America.16

  The following year, however, the bankrupt English government tried to replenish its treasury with a wave of tax increases that swept 40,000 Englishmen into debtors’ prisons and provoked anti-tax riots across England. Fearing the riots might swell into full-scale rebellion, Parl
iament reduced the tax increases at home, but compensated by imposing new taxes on the American colonies, where the cost of military garrisons had soared to £700,000 a year. The ensuing protests convinced Choiseul that colonial America might at last be ready to break from the mother country and weaken Britain enough to permit France to recapture French Canada without another costly war with England.

  “Before six months have elapsed,” he exulted to the king, “America will be on fire at every point. The question then is whether the colonists have the means of feeding it without the aid of a foreign [power].”17

  Step by step, arrogant leaders in the English parliament seemed determined to turn Choiseul’s prediction into a reality. In a series of legislative and military blunders aimed at crushing colonist willfulness, Parliament imposed trading regulations that prevented the colonies from trading with any nation other than the mother country. It imposed unbearably heavy import duties on essentials ranging from paper to tea — all of it necessarily imported from England under the new trading regulations. As costs of living soared, colonist protests resumed in Massachusetts and, at the end of 1767, Choiseul sent a second agent to America — the “Baron” Johann de Kalb, a gallant Prussian officer and mercenary in the French army during the Seven Years’ War.

  Born a peasant in Bavaria, Kalb was a bear of a man — brilliant, exceptionally learned but, like most commoners, self-educated. He invented his baronetcy to bypass French army rules that limited officers’ ranks to noblemen. As a “baron,” he rose to the highest ranks of the French army and Office of Foreign Affairs, acquiring diplomatic skills and fluency in several foreign languages, including English. His success in negotiating the return of French properties to their former owners after the Seven Years’ War earned him fees that made him independently wealthy, and he married the daughter of a minor French nobleman, who added a big dowry to Kalb’s fortune along with some legitimate luster — and land — to authenticate his fictional baronetcy.