Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  Two days later they were in Quiberon Bay, and after waiting four days for a favorable wind to carry the ship up the Loire to Nantes, Franklin landed at the fishing village of Auray. He was so exhausted he could barely stand but his indomitable spirit was unquenched. He immediately fired off a letter to Silas Deane in Paris, reporting his arrival. “I am weak, but hope that the good air which I breathe on land will soon re-establish me,” he said, “that I may travel with speed to join you in Paris.” He also asked Deane to notify Arthur Lee, in London, that he had been nominated as a third commissioner. Thomas Jefferson, Congress’s first choice (after Franklin), had regretfully refused because of his wife’s health. Fortunately, Franklin had no inkling of the enormous headache that this seemingly simple substitution would create for him.

  Auray has changed little since Franklin landed there on December 3, 1776. The same rickety bridge arches over the placid river, the same steep gables overlook the wharf. The Breton fishermen who manned the little boat that put them ashore still speak the same strange mixture of French and Gaelic. No one in the village had ever heard of the famous Dr. Franklin and they greeted him with little more than the curious stares country bumpkins give a stranger from another country. The weather was cold and raw, and Franklin continued to wear his fur hat. After a twenty-four-hour delay, a wreck of a carriage and two tired horses finally arrived from a neighboring town, and they started down the Nantes road which, the driver politely informed them, was infested with bandits. Only two weeks ago several travelers had been robbed and murdered along the route.

  They reached Nantes unscathed, to find themselves the center of a tremendous social uproar. Someone, probably the messenger whom Franklin had hired to carry his letter to Silas Deane, had notified the city that he was coming. Nantes was already a passionate convert to the American cause. Many of its merchants had been trading with America for decades. Monsieur Penet, the entrepreneur who had turned up in Philadelphia, was at the head of an entourage that greeted Franklin as if he had already won the Revolution, single-handed. The exhausted envoy had to attend an immense public dinner given by “friends of America.” Then Penet and his partner, Monsieur Pliarne, whisked him out to the country house of their associate, Monsieur Gruel. These gentlemen did their utmost to assure him of their vast enthusiasm for the American cause. But Franklin was not too exhausted to detect, almost instantly, that they were somewhat less than respectable. Perhaps he found this out in a private conversation with his friend Sieur Montaudoin, one of the city’s great merchants, long a specialist in American trade. Montaudoin hailed Franklin’s arrival by writing a poem in his honor and by purchasing a Dutch clipper which he renamed the Benjamin Franklin. Meanwhile, Captain Wickes arrived with his two prizes and sold them immediately. This news was almost enough, in itself, to restore Franklin’s strength. One of the reasons he had allowed Wickes to take the prizes was to test French willingness to permit American privateers and ships of war to use their ports.

  Meanwhile, he was coping with a stream of distinguished visitors from the city and the surrounding countryside, all eager to pay their respects to Franklin and express their enthusiasm for the American cause. Franklin was deeply touched and flattered. While he maintained a cool, noncommittal face to the world he revealed his private feelings, as he often did, to his sister Jane. “You can have no conception of the respect with which I am receiv’d and treated here by the first people, in my private character; for as yet I have assum’d no public one.”

  While Franklin recuperated at Nantes the two greatest cities in Europe were abuzz with excited rumors and speculations about his totally unexpected appearance. George III was more than ever convinced that Franklin was the evil genius behind the rebellion. His ministers and their hired writers swiftly passed the word that the philosopher had fled before the imminent collapse of the American cause. Word of Howe’s victories on Long Island and in New York had led the North ministry to half believe this propaganda. Franklin’s friends in England angrily defended him. “I never will believe,” said Edmund Burke, “that he is going to conclude a long life, which has brightened every hour it has continued, with so foul and dishonorable a flight.” Lord Rockingham told Burke that he considered the presence of Franklin at the French court “much more than a balance for the few additional acres which the English had gained by the conquest of Manhattan Island.”

  Paris was in an even wilder ferment of expectation. Horace Walpole, who loved to collect the latest gossip from both capitals, was informed by his favorite Paris correspondent, “No one can tell whether he [Franklin] is actually in Paris or not. For three or four days it has been said in the morning that he had arrived, and in the evening that he had not yet come.” Finally, at two o’clock in the afternoon of December 21, Franklin stepped from his coach and vanished into the Hotel de Hambourg on the Rue de l’Universite. He was still wearing his marten fur hat, and Paris buzzed with the news of his arrival and the uniqueness of his appearance. In style conscious France it was simply incredible for the representative of a foreign state to appear in public wearing such a costume.

  But Franklin knew precisely what he was doing. Thanks to the translation by Barbe Dubourg, he was already well known in France as Bon Homme Richard, the author of The Way to Wealth, which had won an enthusiastic reception among the tightfisted French bourgeoisie. In his introduction, Dubourg had pictured Franklin as the supreme example of France’s idealized vision of America, compounded from the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau.

  Voltaire, the guiding spirit of the French philosopher, the apostles of the Enlightenment, had written extensively about a Pennsylvania he had never visited. He pictured it as a world of idyllic social perfection, overflowing with religious toleration, prosperity and virtue. In this rhapsody the philosopher extolled the Good Quaker, who embodied all of Pennsylvania’s virtues, above all the simplicity of manner and style which France, entangled in the rituals of Catholicism and aristocracy, conspicuously lacked. Rousseau called for a return to the soil, to the supposed nobility of the savage, the purity of primitive man. Both these ideas reflected France’s almost total ignorance of America and savages. But Franklin intuitively sensed that, myths or facts, they were a superb opportunity for him to dramatize America’s cause.

  The opportunity also coincided with a most uncomfortable physical condition, which his month long ordeal aboard the Reprisal had worsened. Off and on throughout his life Franklin seems to have been bothered by periodic attacks of a skin disease similar to psoriasis. We know from a sporadic journal he kept on his health that it was extremely bad during his first weeks in Paris. It not only covered much of his body, but invaded his hair, and made wearing a wig very uncomfortable. When he heard echoes of the excitement caused by his fur cap, he decided to make it a symbol of American simplicity and wear it everywhere, instead of a wig.

  On January 15, 1777, the Abbe de Flamarens, who wrote a kind of newsletter from Paris for his friends in the provinces and abroad, described Franklin as follows: “This Quaker is in the complete costume of his sect. He has handsome features, spectacles always over his eyes, little hair, a fur cap which he wears constantly, no powder but a very clean air, extremely white linen, a brown suit completes his apparel.” Another Frenchman who noted his impressions of Franklin in these first weeks said: “Everything in him announces the simplicity and innocence of primitive morals.... Such a person was made to excite the curiosity of Paris. The people clustered around as he passed and asked, ‘Who is this old peasant who has such a noble?’” Meanwhile, in the Hotel de Hambourg, Franklin was absorbing the current political situation and meeting the men with whom he would live and work in the months to come. Inevitably he did most of his talking with Silas Deane and Edward Bancroft, who had been in Paris since July 1776 and had, at first glance, accomplished a great deal. Deane proudly reeled off to Franklin a dizzying list of distinguished European soldiers whom he had sent to America with his recommendations. He talked excitedly of no less than eight ships
loaded with guns, ammunition, clothing, which had sailed or were ready to sail. Deane had accomplished this apparent miracle without any financial support from America. Swiftly, he introduced to Franklin the two Frenchmen who had been instrumental in making it possible.

  First was Caron de Beaumarchais, a swaggering, mustachioed figure almost too flamboyant to be true. A playwright of some note, a former French foreign agent in the confidential service of both Louis XV and the present King, an expert in the art and science of blackmail, Beaumarchais poured out his enthusiasm for the American cause. He claimed, with some reason, to have played a crucial role in persuading Louis XVI to cooperate with the French foreign minister, Corant de Vergennes, by making funds available to the trading company which Beaumarchais had set up, Hortalez et Cie. The King of France and the King of Spain had advanced two million livres, about $200,000, to finance the Hortalez operation. Beaumarchais, who only a few months earlier had been bankrupt and on the run from squadrons of creditors, moved into a splendid Paris residence and began living like a duke. Everything about Beaumarchais challenged belief; it was hard to understand why a great power would entrust such a delicate task to an effervescent playwright. Franklin’s friend, Barbe Dubourg, undoubtedly filled his ear with a good deal of private information about Beaumarchais. Dubourg had been so upset when the playwright was made the chief channel of French secret aid that he had rushed to Versailles and begged Vergennes to abandon the idea. But Deane was completely hypnotized by Beaumarchais’ abundant, if superficial, charm.

  Franklin was less impressed. He preferred the second major French supporter of the American cause, who rushed to the Hotel de Hambourg to meet him. Stocky, energetic Jacques-Donatien Leray de Chaumont was one of the most successful businessmen in France. Born in a middle-class family in Nantes, he had made a fortune in the East Indian trade, bought the fifteenth-century chateau of Chaumont, and become overseer of the King’s forests and commissary of the French Army. He was the kind of man to whom Franklin instinctively responded; solid, dependable, with an established character in the world of business and politics, not a backstairs palace adventurer like Beaumarchais. Chaumont had advanced 1 million livres to Deane on credit, and was briskly involved in acting as the middle man in funneling much of the guns, uniforms, and ammunition through Hortalez et Cie.

  It was Chaumont who undertook the job of helping to sell Franklin to the French people. He did it with a vigor and talent worthy of modern-day Madison Avenue at its best. On his Chaumont estate, this jovial merchant-prince had built a ceramics factory and imported from Italy a well-known artist, Giovanni-Batista Nini. But the artist was at work down in the Loire valley and Chaumont wanted to move fast. Was there a sketch of Franklin that the artist could use? Franklin produced a drawing done by the son of Thomas Walpole, the English banker who had been one of the mainstays of the Grand Ohio venture. This was rushed to Nini at Chaumont, and there the artist, hearing about the rage for the fur cap, added one modeled not on Franklin’s Canadian chapeau but a more famous (to the French) one worn by Jean Jacques Rousseau. Chaumont had the sketch, swiftly approved, printed on terracotta medallions and produced by the thousands in the ovens at his chateau.

  Neither Chaumont, Deane, nor Beaumarchais made any secret of the fact that, along with an enthusiasm for the American cause, they hoped to make a great deal of money from the war. Beaumarchais made much of the point that he had, by October, 1776, spent a staggering 5,600,000 livres (over 1,000,000 dollars) 600,000 for equipping ships and paying seamen, 2,500,000 for munitions and guns, and an equal sum for clothing, largely supplied by Chaumont. Today American politicians would look askance at Deane, especially, and cry conflict of interest. But the idea barely existed in 1776. Just as few thought it strange to appoint relatives to jobs at their disposal, as Franklin invariably did, even fewer were in the least disturbed by the fact that a merchant-prince, such as Robert Morris, the man Deane yearned to emulate, was operating his private business with one hand and running the government’s business with the other. It was part of the eighteenth-century’s realistic attitude toward that fundamental factor in human affairs which they called “interest.” Ideally, of course, the man was supposed to strike a rational balance between his own and the public’s interest. If he rapaciously neglected the public side of the job, he would be open to censure.

  Not only did Franklin tolerate Deane’s enthusiastic participation in Beaumarchais’ and Chaumont’s dreams of financial glory, he persuaded him to appoint his Boston-born grandnephew, Jonathan Williams, who had hurried from London to meet his famous granduncle, as a special agent in Nantes to handle both private and public business. Aside from the fact that he did not trust Mr. Fenet and wanted to keep an eye on him, Franklin was trying to solve another unpleasant dilemma that confronted him. Thomas Morris, the half-brother of Robert Morris, had been appointed commercial agent for the United States in Europe and had arrived from London looking and acting like a hopeless alcoholic. Soon a British agent was describing him as “the greatest drunkard in Europe.” Franklin hoped that somehow Williams, who spoke French fluently and was an expert accountant and totally trustworthy, would prevent the chaos that was, in fact, already developing at Nantes and other ports because of the slapdash way that Beaumarchais did business.

  With this one gesture toward the business side of the operation, Franklin wisely withdrew from it. For one thing, he had no experience in operating on the grand multi-million-dollar scale which obviously suited the temperament and (Franklin hoped) the abilities of Deane. Besides, it was simply too exhausting. Haggling over contracts and contractors, worrying over delivery dates and shipping schedules, and roistering with hard drinking ship captains had Deane and his volunteer American assistant, young William Carmichael, on the run from 5 A.M. in the morning until midnight. It was no job for a man of seventy. Early in March, Franklin moved out of the Hotel de Hambourg and retreated to the village of Passy. Now a residential district of Paris, distinguished largely by its high-rent apartment houses, Passy then was a charming suburb, surrounded by forests, with a beautiful view of the Seine. There, Franklin accepted the invitation of the Chaumont’s to live rent-free in one of the pavilions of their spacious villa, the Hotel de Valentinois. Franklin described his situation in a letter to his sister Jane Mecom. “I live in a fine airy house upon a hill, which has a large garden with fine walks in it, about a half an hour’s drive from the city of Paris.”

  Significantly, Passy was on the road to Versailles. This was perhaps its main attraction to Franklin, aside from his desire to escape the pandemonium of the Hotel de Hambourg. From what Deane had told him it was evident that the diplomatic side of the American mission had been badly neglected. France was, if anything, moving away from an alliance with America as the grim news of the American Army’s defeats in Canada and on Long Island filtered across the Atlantic. Permission to export the remaining war materiel purchased by Deane and Beaumarchais was abruptly revoked. This made Silas Deane profoundly angry and disillusioned with France.

  Like too many other Americans, Deane had wildly idealistic notions about the motivation of men and nations. He was outraged to discover that France was helping America largely with a view to helping herself and with an absolute minimum of risks. He would have been even more outraged if he could have read the secret memoranda which Count de Vergennes had been depositing in the Foreign Office files since 1774, carefully analyzing the risks and advantages of France’s intervening in the quarrel between England and her colonies. Franklin, on the other hand, was totally unsurprised by France’s cold-blooded approach. He had had more than a hint of their attitude in his dinners with the French ambassador in London. Twenty years of hobnobbing with the men who ran the British Empire had long since extinguished any fanciful hope that statesmen were motivated by anything but national self-interest. While Deane and Carmichael went into frenzies because the French, with a jumpy eye on England, revoked permission for Beaumarchais’ supply ships to sail, Franklin coolly went
about the business of playing the bittersweet game of great power diplomacy on France’s terms.

  On December 28, 1776, Franklin, Deane, and the third American commissioner, Arthur Lee, who had rushed from London to join them, had their first interview with the French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, the Count de Vergennes. In his fifty-seventh year, this suave, reserved diplomat was the veteran of a lifetime in European capitals, ranging from Constantinople to Stockholm. Cold and aloof in manner, he was a solidly built, rather plump faced man with a commanding, even a patronizing air. His basic tactic in diplomatic confrontations was one which Franklin had long since mastered; to say as little as possible. In this first meeting, he let Franklin do most of the talking. It was a superb study of one professional coolly taking the measure of another.

  What America needed, more than anything else, was a French military alliance. But Franklin never even mentioned it throughout the interview. Instead, he talked only about America’s willingness to sign a commercial treaty with France which would give the French the benefit of the thirteen colonies’ substantial trade. Vergennes, who knew what America wanted and needed as well as Franklin, found himself forced to admire the American commissioner’s skill. “I don’t know whether Mr. Franklin told me everything,” he wrote somewhat ruefully to the Count Montmorin, the French ambassador in Madrid, “but what he did say is not very interesting.” The foreign minister found the petition for a commercial treaty so “modest” that he could not help wondering if there were “political considerations” behind it. With a shrewdness that matched Franklin’s guile, Vergennes went to the heart of the war. Franklin wanted France as an ally. But he wanted to deal with her as an equal, not a supplicating beggar. The commercial treaty was Franklin’s way of saying that America had something very important to offer in exchange for French aid. Even more important, by playing the commercial treaty as his opening card, Franklin was also informing Vergennes that he was not prepared to pay the high price France might exact for a military treaty, a formal alliance which would involve America in all of France’s future wars.