The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Read online

  THE MISSION TO FRANCE

  That independence, however, still had to be won, and most Americans thought they would need help from abroad to achieve it. In several letters to English friends, Franklin suggested the possibility of America’s appealing to a foreign power for assistance. In November 1775 the Continental Congress had appointed Franklin to a Committee of Secret Correspondence, which was to seek foreign support for the war. In December, Franklin asked a European philosophe in the Netherlands to find out whether some European state might be willing to aid the Americans. At the same time France, the greatest of the continental powers, had sent an agent to America to see whether the rebels were worth supporting. On behalf of the Committee of Secret Correspondence, Franklin wrote Connecticut merchant Silas Deane in March 1776 to engage him in secretly approaching the French government in order to secure money and arms.

  After the Declaration of Independence that July, America’s situation was clarified and its search for foreign aid could be more open. Congress now realized that a formal commission of delegates was needed in Paris if the United States was to persuade France to join the war as America’s ally. Unlike Adams and Jefferson, who declined to become one of the commissioners to be sent to France, Franklin had no hesitation in accepting and, in fact, may have pushed to get the appointment. In October, Congress appointed Franklin to join Deane and Arthur Lee of Virginia, who was still in London, as a three-man commission to obtain arms and an alliance. The choice of Franklin was obvious. He was an international celebrity who knew the world better than any other American.

  Franklin seems to have yearned to get back to the other side of the Atlantic. Perhaps he felt he was the stranger in his own country that he predicted he might be. In a sketch written shortly after the meeting with Howe he outlined various conditions for peace that might be negotiated with Great Britain—including, of course, unconditional independence, but also Britain’s ceding to the United States for some sum of money all of Canada, the Floridas, Bermuda, and the Bahamas. One reason why such negotiations for peace with Britain were timely now, wrote Franklin, was that they might pressure the French into signing an alliance. But he added that such negotiations would also “furnish a pretence for BF’s going to England where he has many friends and acquaintance, particularly among the best writers and ablest speakers in both Houses of Parliament.” If the British balked at the terms of settlement, he wrote, then he was influential enough “to work up such a division of sentiments in the nation as greatly to weaken its exertions against the United States and lessen its credit in foreign countries.”34 Any excuse, it seemed, to get back across the Atlantic.

  When people learned of Franklin’s planned mission to France, some were deeply suspicious of his motives. He was blamed once again for bringing about the Revolution, making people of the same empire “strangers and enemies of each other.” The British ambassador to France and many American loyalists thought that he was escaping America in order to avoid the inevitable collapse of the rebellion. Even his old friend Edmund Burke could not accept the news that Franklin was going on a mission to France. “I refuse to believe,” Burke wrote, “that he is going to conclude a long life which he brightened every hour it continued, with so foul and dishonorable [a] flight.”35 But Franklin was not fleeing America out of any fears for the success of the Revolution; he merely wanted to return to the Old World, where he felt more at home.

  On October 26, 1776, Franklin sailed with his two grandsons, sixteen-year-old Temple, William’s illegitimate son, and seven-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache, Sally’s boy. They arrived in France in December—after a bold and risky voyage, for, as Lord Rockingham noted, Franklin might have been captured at sea and “once more brought before an implacable tribunal.”36 That he took the voyage says a great deal about Franklin’s anger and his determination to defeat the British. It also says a great deal about his desire to experience once again the larger European world, where he had spent so much of his adult life. It would be nearly nine years before he returned to the United States.

  Even before he reached France, Franklin was emotionally prepared for his new role as America’s representative to the world. Back in 1757, Thomas Penn had predicted that the highest levels of English politics would eventually be closed to Franklin. Whatever Franklin’s scientific reputation meant to the intellectual members of the Royal Society or the Club of Honest Whigs, Penn said, it would count for very little in the eyes of the ruling aristocracy, the “great People” who actually exercised political power.37 As Franklin himself came to this realization by the early 1770s, he began to see the English stage on which he had been operating as more and more limited. Suddenly his reputation “in foreign courts” as a kind of ambassador of America seemed to compensate for his loss of influence in England.

  During his last years in London he proudly told his son that “learned and ingenious foreigners that come to England, almost all make a point of visiting me, for my reputation is still higher abroad than here.” He pointed out that “several of the foreign ambassadors have assiduously cultivated my acquaintance, treating me as one of their corps." Some of them wanted to learn something about America, mainly out of the hope that troubles with the American colonies might diminish some of Britain’s “alarming power.” Others merely desired to introduce Franklin to their fellow countrymen. Whatever the reasons for his extraordinary international reputation as the representative American, Franklin was well aware of it and was prepared to use it to help America.38

  THE SYMBOLIC AMERICAN

  In 1776 Franklin was the most potent weapon the United States possessed in its struggle with the greatest power on earth. Lord Rockingham observed at the time that the British ministers would publicly play down Franklin’s mission to France, but “inwardly they will tremble at it.”39 The British government had good reason to tremble. Franklin was eventually able not only to bring the French monarchy into the war against Britain on behalf of the new republic of the United States but also to sustain the alliance for almost a half-dozen years. Without his presence in Paris throughout that tumultuous time, the French would never have been as supportive of the American Revolution as they were. And without that French support, the War for Independence might never have been won.

  The French knew about Franklin well before he arrived in 1776. The great French naturalist Comte de Buffon read his Experiments and Observations on Electricity in 1751 and urged a translation. The next year King Louis XV endorsed the publication of a translated edition of Franklin’s work and personally congratulated the author. In the years that followed, Franklin received letter after letter from French admirers of his electrical experiments. One of these admirers, Dr. Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, began exchanging writings with Franklin. He translated many of Franklin’s essays and works, including his testimony before the House of Commons in 1766, and had them reprinted in the French monthly Ephémérides du citoyen. Readers of the journal were told that from Franklin’s statements “they will see what constitutes the superiority of intelligence, the presence of mind and the nobility of character of this illustrious philosopher, appearing before an assembly of legislators.”40 His testimony in the House of Commons was eventually published in five separate French editions.

  In 1767 and again in 1769 Franklin visited France, was presented to the king, and dined with the royal family. He was especially impressed with the politeness and urbanity of the French and, as he wrote in a playful letter to Polly Stevenson, he had started to become French himself. “I had not been here Six Days before my Taylor and Peruquier had transform’d me into a Frenchman. Only think what a Figure I make in a little Bag Wig and naked Ears! They told me I was become 20 Years younger, and look’d very galante; so being in Paris where the Mode is to be sacredly follow’d, I was once very near making Love to my Friend’s Wife.”41

  During his visits to France, Franklin made many friends among French intellectuals. Dubourg described him in print as “one of the greatest and the most enlightened
and the noblest men the new world had seen born and the old world has ever admired.”42 In 1772 Franklin was elected a foreign associate to the French Royal Academy of Science, one of only eight foreigners so honored. The next year Dubourg published two volumes of the Oeuvres de M. Franklin, prefixed with a print of Franklin that made him look like a Frenchman, together with the line “He stole the fire of the Heavens and caused the arts to flourish in savage climes.”43 In the preface Dubourg further sharpened the image of the backwoods philosopher emerging from the land of the peaceful Quakers.

  The French, of course, already had an image of America as the land of plain Quakers. Voltaire in his Lettres philosophiques (1754) had identified Pennsylvania with the Society of Friends, who were celebrated for their equality, pacifism, religious freedom, and, naturally, their absence of priests. It was as if nobody but Quakers lived in Pennsylvania. With three

  Franklin as a Frenchman, engraving by François Martinet, 1773

  articles on Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and the Quakers, Diderot’s Ency-clopédie further contributed to this picture of Pennsylvania as the land of freedom, simplicity, and benevolence—an image that gradually was expanded to the New World in general.44

  Many of the French philosophes like Voltaire were struggling to reform the ancien régime, and they turned the New World into a weapon in their struggle. America in their eyes came to stand for all that eighteenth-century France lacked—natural simplicity, social equality, religious freedom, and rustic enlightenment. Not that the reformers expected France to become like America. But they wanted to contrast this romantic image of the New World with the aristocratic corruption, priestly tyranny, and luxurious materialism they saw in the ancien régime. A popular debate that arose in France—over the issue of whether the climate of the New World was harmful to all living creatures and caused them to degenerate—was fed by these political concerns.45 With this issue in mind, many of the liberal reformers were eager to emphasize the positive qualities of America. Idealizing all that was different from the luxury and corruption they saw around them, many of the liberal French philosophes created “a Mirage in the West,” a countercultural image of America with which to criticize their own society.

  In addition to the philosophes, many French aristocrats were themselves critics of their society, involved in what today we might call “radical chic.” They were eager to celebrate the new enlightened values of the eighteenth century, many of which were drawn from the classical republican writings of the ancient world. French nobles invoked classical antiquity and especially republican Rome to create imagined alternatives to the decadence of the ancien régime. Of course, they did not appreciate the explosive nature of the materials they were playing with. They sang songs in praise of liberty and republicanism, praised the spartan simplicity of the ancients, and extolled the republican equality of antiquity—all without any intention of actually destroying the monarchy on which their status as aristocrats depended. The French nobles applauded Beaumarchais’s Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro, and later Mozart’s operatic version, Le Nozze di Figaro, with their celebration of egalitarian and anti-aristocratic values, without any sense they were contributing to their own demise. They flocked to Paris salons to ooh and aah over republican paintings such as Jacques-Louis David’s severe classical work The Oath of the Horatii, without foreseeing that they were eroding the values that made monarchy and their dominance possible. Many of these French aristocrats, such as the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, a friend and admirer of Franklin, were passionate advocates of abolishing the very privileges to which they owed their positions and fortunes. They had no idea where all their radical chic would lead. In 1792 La Rochefoucauld was stoned to death by a frenzied revolutionary mob.46

  Franklin was part of this radical chic from the beginning. The French aristocrats were prepared for Franklin, and they contributed greatly to the process of his Americanization. They helped to create Franklin the symbolic American. In this sense Franklin as the representative American belonged to France before he belonged to America itself. Because

  The Oath of the Horatii, by Jacques-Louis David, 1785

  the French had a need of the symbol before the Americans did, they first began to create the images of Franklin that we today are familiar with— the Poor Richard moralist, the symbol of rustic democracy, and the simple backwoods philosopher.

  He was the celebrated Dr. Franklin from the moment of his arrival in France in 1776. He was invited by a wealthy merchant, Jacques Donatien Le Ray, the Comte de Chaumont, to live in the garden pavilion of his elegant Hôtel de Valentinois located on his spacious estate in Passy, a small village outside of Paris on the route to Versailles. Unlike Franklin’s London home, which had been in the midst of the crowds and bustle of the city, this house was a half mile from Paris, sitting on a bluff with terraces leading down to the Seine, with views overlooking the city. Franklin enjoyed this suburban existence; when pressed by his colleagues to move into Paris in order to save money, he refused. Chaumont was a government

  LEFT: Franklin, engraving by Augustin de Saint-Aubin, 1777 after a drawing by Charles-Nicholas Cochin

  RIGHT: To the Genius of Franklin, etching by Marguerite Gerard, after a design by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1778

  LEFT: Franklin, porcelain medallion, Sèvres ware, 1778

  RIGHT: Franklin, French school, c. 1783

  contractor. As an enthusiastic partisan of the United States, he refused any rent from Franklin, at least at first, and saw to it that the great man lived in relative luxury, serviced by a liveried staff of a half-dozen or more servants. In addition to the large formal gardens in which Franklin enjoyed walking, Franklin’s house had a lightning rod on the roof and a printing press in the basement. He spent his entire time in France quite comfortably ensconced in these plush surroundings. His food was ample and his wine cellar was well stocked with over a thousand bottles. He needed all these supplies, for he had a steady stream of guests.

  The great man is “much sought after and entertained,” noted an observer, “not only by his learned colleagues, but by everyone who can gain access to him.” The nobility lionized him. They addressed him simply as “Doctor Franklin, as one would have addressed Plato or Socrates.”47 The French placed crowns upon his head at ceremonial occasions, wrote poems in his honor, and did their hair a la Franklin. Wherever he traveled in his carriage, crowds gathered and, amid acclamations, gave way to him in the most respectful manner, “an honour,” noted Silas Deane, “seldom paid to the first princes of the blood.” Only three weeks after his arrival, it was already the mode of the day, said another commentator, “for everyone to have an engraving of M. Franklin over the mantelpiece.”48 Indeed, the number of Franklin images that were produced is astonishing. His face appeared everywhere—on statues and prints and on medallions, snuffboxes, candy boxes, rings, clocks, vases, dishes, handkerchiefs, and pocketknives. Franklin told his daughter that the “incredible” numbers of images spread everywhere “have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon.”49

  Not only did Jean-Antoine Houdon and Jean-Jacques Caffiéri mold busts of Franklin, in marble, bronze, and plaster, but every artist, it seemed, wanted to do his portrait. Jean-Baptiste Greuze and J. F. de L’Hospital painted him, and Joseph-Siffred Duplessis did at least a dozen portraits of him (see pages 178-79). The Duplessis portrait of 1778 portrayed Franklin in a fur collar and was repeatedly engraved and copied by numerous other artists; it became the most widely recognizable image of Franklin.50 “I have at the request of friends,” Franklin complained, “sat so much and so often to painters and Statuaries, that I am perfectly sick of it.”51 No man before Franklin, it has been suggested, ever had his likeness

  LEFT: Franklin, bust by Jean-Jacques Caffiéri, 1777

  RIGHT: Franklin, bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon, 1778

  LEFT: Franklin, by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, 1778

  RIGHT: Franklin, by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1777

  Franklin
, by J. F. de L’Hospital, 1778

  reproduced at one time in so many different forms.52 Apparently King Louis XVI became so irritated with Franklin’s image everywhere that he presented one of Franklin’s admirers in his court with a porcelain chamber pot with the American hero’s face adorning the bottom.53

  To the French, Franklin personified not only republican America but the Enlightenment as well. As a Freemason, he was a member of that eighteenth-century international fraternity that transcended national boundaries. In 1777 he was made a member, and later grand master, of the Masonic Lodge of the Nine Sisters, the most eminent lodge in France. Although many monarchists were suspicious of Freemasonry and discouraged their friends from joining the order, the lodge nevertheless contained many distinguished artists and intellectuals. Franklin used his association with them to further the American cause. He suggested to a fellow lodge member, La Rochefoucauld, for example, that he translate the American state constitutions into French. When this was done, Franklin presented copies to every ambassador in Paris and spread copies throughout Europe.

  Since he was the American Enlightenment personified, it was necessary that he meet his European counterpart—Voltaire. When Voltaire returned to France in 1778 after twenty-eight years in exile, he met with Franklin several times. The most public of these meetings took place at the Academy of Science in April 1778. Since both the old philosophes were at the meeting, the rest of those in attendance called for them to be introduced. But, according to John Adams, who witnessed the occasion, bowing to one another was not enough. Even after Franklin and Voltaire took each other’s hands, the crowd cried for more. They must embrace “à la francoise.” “The two Aged Actors upon this great Theater of Philosophy and frivolity,” recalled Adams sardonically, “then embraced each other by hugging one another in their Arms and kissing each other’s cheeks, and then the tumult subsided. And the Cry immediately spread through the whole Kingdom and I suppose over all Europe.... How charming it was!