Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (48 page)

In the meantime, the British sent to Paris the most trusted envoy they could muster, Paul Wentworth, their able spymaster. At the time, Wentworth was angry with his secret agent Bancroft for sending inside information to his stock speculating partner before sending it to Wentworth, who also was a speculator. King George III, upset by the bad news that his spies were giving him, denounced them all as untrustworthy stock manipulators, but he reluctantly approved Wentworth’s secret peace mission.

Wentworth arrived in Paris in mid-December, just as the Americans were meeting with Vergennes, and sent a missive to Silas Deane that was worthy of a British spy: a gentleman who wished to meet him, it said, could be found the next morning in a coach at a specified place on the road to Passy, or later at an exhibition in the Luxembourg Gallery, or at the public baths on the Seine, where Deane would find a note giving the room number to use. Deane sent a reply worthy of an American: he would be in his office, where he would be happy to see anyone who wanted to come by.
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At dinner with Deane, Wentworth proposed a plan for reconciliation between Britain and her colonies. America would have its own Congress, would be subject to Parliament only in matters of foreign policy and trade, and all the offensive acts passed since 1763 would be repealed. He also offered personal inducements—knighthoods, peer-ages, jobs, money—to Deane or any American who helped secure such a peace.

Franklin at first refused to meet with Wentworth. But then word came of Spain’s answer to France’s proposal for an alliance with America. Somewhat surprisingly, the Spanish king had rejected the plan and declared that Spain saw no reason to recognize America. It would now be up to France to act alone, if it so chose.

So, during the first week of 1778, Franklin applied pressure. He let word leak to the press that British emissaries were in town and that they might reach a pact with the Americans if the French did not do so promptly. Such a pact, the stories went, might even include American support for Britain’s efforts to capture France’s islands in the West Indies. He also agreed to meet with Wentworth on January 6, though he made him promise not to offer any personal bribes.

Wentworth’s report back to London was written in the clumsy code that might be expected from an agent who had tried to set up a secret rendezvous in a bathhouse: “I called on 72 [Franklin] yesterday, and found him very busy with his nephew [either Jonathan Williams or, more likely, Temple] who was directed to leave the room, and we remained together two hours before 51 [Deane] joined us, when the conversation ceased.” Wentworth added that he had offered to Franklin an unsigned letter that spoke of the possibility of “unqualified 107,” which was the code he used for independence. “[Franklin] said it was a very interesting, sensible letter,” Wentworth reported, “and applauded the candor, good sense and benevolent spirit of it.” Then he added the kicker: “Pity it did not come a little sooner.”

Not quite sure who was spying on whom, Franklin pursued the cleverly naïve approach he had described a year earlier. It was in his interest that the British discover (as they did through their spy Bancroft) how close the Americans were to a deal with France. And it was in his interest that the French discover (as they did through their own constant surveillance of Wentworth) that the Americans were having discussions with a British emissary. Everything he said to Wentworth he was happy to have the French overhear. As Yale historian Jonathan Dull has noted, “The ineptitude of the British government presented Franklin with a chance to play one of his best diplomatic roles: the innocent who may not be so innocent as he pretends.”
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Indeed, Franklin’s meeting with Wentworth seemed to prod the French. Two days later, Vergennes’s secretary called on the Americans. He had only one question: “What is necessary to be done to give such satisfaction to the American commissioners as to engage them not to listen to any proposition from England for a new connection with that country?” Thanks to Franklin’s maneuvers as well as the victory of Saratoga, the French now wanted an alliance as eagerly as America did.

Franklin personally wrote out the answer: “The commissioners have long since proposed a treaty of amity and commerce which is not yet concluded. The immediate conclusion of that treaty will remove the uncertainty they are under with regard to it and give them such a reliance on the friendship of France as to reject firmly all propositions made to them of peace from England which have not for their basis the entire freedom and independence of America.”

That was all the French now needed to hear. Franklin was told that the king would assent to the treaties—one on friendship and trade, the other creating a military alliance—even without the participation of Spain. France made one stipulation: America could not make peace with Britain in the future without France’s consent. And so the treaties of friendship and alliance were won.

The treaties had an important aspect: they did not violate the idealistic view, held by Franklin and others, that America, in its virgin purity, should avoid becoming entangled in foreign alliances or European spheres of influence. The commercial rights that the Americans granted were mutual, nonexclusive, and permitted a system of open and free trade with other nations. “No monopoly of our trade was granted,” Franklin pointed out in a letter to the Congress. “None are given to France but what we are at liberty to grant to any other nation.”
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The American commissioners met in Paris on February 5, 1778, for the signing of the treaty. Vergennes’s secretary had a cold, however, so the ceremony was put off for a day. At both gatherings, Franklin appeared without his usual brown coat. Instead, he wore a suit of blue Manchester velvet that was faded and a bit worn. Silas Deane, finding this puzzling, asked why. “To give it a little revenge,” Franklin answered. “I wore this coat the day Wedderburn abused me at Whitehall.” It had been four years since his humiliation in the Cockpit, and he had saved the suit for such an occasion.
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Standing near Franklin, ready to assist, was his supposedly loyal secretary, Edward Bancroft. The British spy took the document, made a copy, hired a special messenger, and got it to the ministers in London within forty-two hours. He had already, two weeks earlier, written coded letters in invisible ink that provided the outline of what the treaty would contain plus the intelligence that a French convoy of three ships and two war frigates was preparing to leave Quiberon to bring the document back to an anxious American Congress. He also sent word that “we have just received a letter from the Prussian ministry to say that the King of Prussia will immediately follow France in acknowledging the independency of America.”

Years later, when he was haggling with the British over back pay, Bancroft wrote a secret memo telling the foreign secretary that this was “information for which many individuals here would, for purposes of speculation, have given me more than all that I have received from the government.” In fact, Bancroft had indeed used this information to make money speculating on the markets. He had sent £420 to his stock partner in England, the Philadelphia-born merchant Samuel Wharton, and provided him word of the impending treaties so that it could be used to short stocks. “The bulls in the alley are likely to be left in the lurch,” he wrote in one secret missive to Wharton, using invisible ink. That letter was intercepted by the English spy service, but others made it through to Wharton and also to their other partner, the British banker Thomas Walpole. Bancroft ended up making £1,000 in the transactions.
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Louis XVI made the Franco-American treaties official by receiving the three commissioners at Versailles on March 20. Crowds gathered at the palace gates to catch a glimpse of the famous American, and they shouted “Vive Franklin” as his coach passed through the gold-crested gates.

Among those in the courtyard were, according to Susan Mary Alsop, the “officious porters” who rented out to visitors the ceremonial swords that were generally required for admission to the palace. The other American commissioners each wore one, along with the other items of official court dress. But not Franklin. Seeing no reason to abandon the simple style that had served him well, he dressed in a plain brown suit with his famous spectacles as his only adornment. He did not wear a sword and, when he discovered that the wig he had bought for the occasion did not sit well on his head, decided to forsake it as well. “I should have taken him for a big farmer,” wrote one female observer, “so great was his contrast with the other diplomats, who were all powdered, in full dress, and splashed all over with gold and ribbons.”

His one fashion concession to the occasion was that he did not wear his fur cap but instead carried a hat of pure white under his arm. “Is that white hat a symbol of liberty?” asked Madame du Deffand, the old aristocrat at whose salon Franklin had worn his fur cap. Whether or not he meant it to be, white hats for men were soon in vogue in Paris, as everything else Franklin wore was wont to become.

When Franklin was ushered into the king’s bedchamber at noon, after the official levee, Louis XVI was in a posture of prayer. “I hope that this will be for the good of both nations,” he said, giving a royal imprimatur to America’s status as an independent nation. On a personal note, he added, “I am very satisfied with your conduct since you arrived in my kingdom.”

After a midafternoon dinner hosted by Vergennes, Franklin had the honor, if not pleasure, of being allowed to stand next to the queen, the famously haughty Marie-Antoinette, as she played at the gambling tables. Alone among the throng at Versailles, she seemed to have little appreciation for the man who, she had been told, had once been “a printer’s foreman.” As she noted dismissively, a man of that background would never have been able to rise so high in Europe. Franklin would have proudly agreed.
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Franklin’s diplomatic triumph would help seal the course of the Revolution. It would also alter the world’s balances of power, not just between France and England, but also—though France certainly did not intend it to—between republicanism and monarchy.

“Franklin had won,” writes Carl Van Doren, “a diplomatic campaign equal in results to Saratoga.” The Yale historian Edmund Morgan goes even further, calling it “the greatest diplomatic victory the United States has ever achieved.” With the possible exception of the creation of the NATO alliance, that assessment may be true, though it partly points up the paucity of American successes over the years at bargaining tables, whether in Versailles after World War I or in Paris at the end of the Vietnam War. At the very least, it can be said that Franklin’s triumph permitted America the possibility of an outright victory in its war for independence while conceding no lasting entanglements that would encumber it as a new nation.

Before word of the treaty reached Philadelphia, the Congress had been debating whether to consider the new peace offers that had arrived from Britain. Now, after only two days of deliberation, it decided instead to ratify the alliance with France. “You cannot conceive what joy the treaties with France have diffused among all true Americans,” Franklin’s friend Samuel Cooper wrote from Massachusetts.
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Paris, 1778–1785

In April 1778, shortly after the American treaties with France had been signed, John Adams arrived in Paris to replace the recalled Silas Deane as one of the three American commissioners. The French were not thrilled by the switch. “Mr. Deane,” reported Edward Bancroft to his spymasters in London, “is highly esteemed here and his successor J. Adams is much distrusted.” Bancroft reported that Adams was also unhappy. “Adams is heartily disappointed to find everything done and talks of returning.”

When they served together in the Congress, Adams had initially distrusted Franklin, then gone through a blender of emotions: bemusement, resentment, admiration, and jealousy. On their trip to negotiate with Lord Howe on Staten Island (when they shared a bed and open window), he had found Franklin both amusing and annoying. So, when he arrived in Paris, it was probably inevitable that he and Franklin would, as they did, enjoy and suffer a complex mix of disdain and grudging admiration for one another.

Some have found the relationship baffling: Did Adams resent or respect Franklin? Did Franklin find Adams maddening or solid? Did they like or dislike each other? The answer, which is not all that baffling because it is often true of the relationship between two great and strong people, is that they felt all of these conflicting emotions about each other, and more.

They were both very smart, but otherwise they had quite different personalities. Adams was unbending and outspoken and argumentative, Franklin charming and taciturn and flirtatious. Adams was rigid in his personal morality and lifestyle, Franklin famously playful. Adams learned French by poring over grammar books and memorizing a collection of funeral orations; Franklin (who cared little about the grammar) learned the language by lounging on the pillows of his female friends and writing them amusing little tales. Adams felt comfortable confronting people, whereas Franklin preferred to seduce them, and the same was true of the way they dealt with nations.

Adams, who was 42 when he arrived, was thirty years younger than Franklin and about five years younger than Franklin’s son, William. More sensitive to insults, real and imagined, Adams came to feel more strongly about Franklin than vice versa. At times, he was driven almost to distraction by Franklin’s insouciance and self-indulgence. “He envied—and suspected—people with no rough edges, people who moved easily in the finer circles,” Berkeley historian Robert Middlekauff writes of Adams in his textured study
Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies.
He was “incapable of the easy gesture, and incapable too of the small hypocrisies that carry other men through life.” David McCullough, in his masterly biography of Adams, is more sympathetic and balanced about him, but he too conveys the rich complexity of his attitudes toward Franklin.
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Most of Adams’s resentments were occasioned by ill-disguised jealousy at being overshadowed. Franklin had “a monopoly of reputation here and an indecency in displaying it,” Adams complained to a friend after a few months in Paris. But in reading some of the unkind things he had to say about Franklin, it is important to note that at one time or another, Adams hurled a few nasty adjectives at just about everyone he met. (For instance, he once described George Washington as a “muttonhead.”) Despite their personal friction, Adams and Franklin were bound together by their shared patriotism and their ardor for America’s independence.

Franklin took Adams under his wing at Passy, enrolled 10-year-old John Quincy Adams at Benny Bache’s boarding school, and took his new colleague on all of his social and cultural rounds, including his grand embrace of Voltaire at the Académie. On Adams’s first day at Passy, Franklin brought him along to dine at the home of Jacques Turgot, the former finance minister, and then on subsequent days to the salons of the various women whose seductive styles entranced Franklin and appalled Adams.

Even more appalling to the puritanical Adams was Franklin’s living and work style. He was disturbed by what he assumed to be the cost of the luxurious accommodations at Passy, then even more upset when he learned that the ambitious Chaumont was charging them no rent. Soon after his arrival, Adams vented in his diary about the difficulty of getting Franklin to focus on work:

One of Franklin’s French friends put a more positive spin on his work habits: “He would eat, sleep, work whenever he saw fit, according to his needs, so that there never was a more leisurely man, though he certainly handled a tremendous amount of business.” These two descriptions of Franklin’s style reveal not just differing views about him but also differing views about work. Franklin was always industrious, and in America he famously believed in also giving the
appearance
of being industrious. But in France, where the appearance of pleasure was more valued, Franklin knew how to adopt the style. As Claude-Anne Lopez notes, “In colonial America it was sinful to look idle, in France it was vulgar to look busy.”
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One day, a Frenchman asked Adams whether he was surprised that Franklin never attended any religious services. “No,” Adams replied laughing, “because Mr. Franklin has no…” Adams did not finish the sentence for fear of seeming too blasphemous.

“Mr. Franklin adores only great nature,” said the Frenchman, “which has interested a great many people of both sexes in his favor.”

“Yes,” replied Adams, “all the atheists, deists and libertines, as well as all the philosophers and ladies, are in his train.”

“Yes,” the Frenchman continued, “he is celebrated as the great philosopher and the great legislator of America.”

Adams was unable to control his resentment. “He is a great philosopher, but as a legislator of America he has done very little,” he told the Frenchman. “It is universally believed in France, England and all Europe that his electric wand has accomplished all this revolution, but nothing is more groundless…He did not even make the constitution of Pennsylvania, bad as it is.” (Adams, who was not as much of a democrat as Franklin and believed in checks on the power of the people, strongly objected to the unicameral legislature.)
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After a few years, Franklin would tire of Adams and declare that he was “sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.” But for the time being, he found Adams tolerable, at times even admirable. And he was happy to make him part of his social set, despite Adams’s minimal enthusiasm for such frivolities.
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The
philosophes
of France were, like Franklin, eager to engage in the real world rather than lose themselves in abstruse metaphysics. Their secular version of the Bible was the
Encyclopédie
compiled by Diderot, which included articles by Turgot on economics, Montesquieu on politics, Rousseau on the arts, Condorcet on sciences, and Helvétius on man. Reigning as their king and god—or perhaps neither, as he was skeptical of both—was Voltaire, a man who contributed anonymously to the
Encyclopédie
but prominently to the intellectual life of France.

Voltaire and Franklin were, at least in the mind of the French public, soul mates. Both were aging embodiments of the wit and reason of the Enlightenment, playful yet pointed parodists, debunkers of orthodoxy and pretense, disciples of deism, tribunes of tolerance, and apostles of revolution. So it was inevitable not only that the two sages would meet but also that their meetings would, even more than the one between Franklin and the king himself, capture the public imagination.
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By early 1778, Voltaire was 84 and ailing, and there had even been stories that he had died. (His retort, even better than Mark Twain’s similar one, was that the reports were true, only premature.) In February, Franklin paid a ceremonial visit to his home and asked him to give his blessing to 7-year-old Benny Bache. As twenty awed disciples watched and shed “tears of tenderness,” Voltaire put his hands on the boy’s head and pronounced in English, “God and Liberty.” According to Condorcet, one of the witnesses, he added, “This is the only appropriate benediction for the grandson of Monsieur Franklin.”

Some derided the rather histrionic display. One of Paris’s more caustic papers accused them of “playing out a scene” of “puerile adulation,” and when former Massachusetts governor Hutchinson heard of the “God and Liberty” benediction, he remarked that it was “difficult to say which of those words had been most used to bad purposes.” Mainly, however, the encounter was reverentially publicized throughout Europe.
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Franklin and Voltaire staged an even more dramatic meeting at the Académie Royale on April 29 of that year. Franklin was dressed with trademark simplicity: plain coat, no wig, and no adornments other than his spectacles. Voltaire, who would die within a month, was gaunt and frail. The crowd demanded that they give each other a French embrace, an act that evoked, in the words of Condorcet, such “noisy acclamation one would have said it was Solon who embraced Sophocles.” The comparison to the great Greek philosophers, one famous for his laws and the other for his literature, was proclaimed throughout Europe, as eyewitness John Adams reported with his typical mix of awe and resentment:

The Académie served as one of Franklin’s bases among the intellectual elite of Paris. Another was a remarkable Masonic lodge known, in honor of the muses, as the Lodge of the Nine Sisters. Freemasonry in France was evolving from being just a set of businessmen’s social clubs, which is what it mainly was in America, and was becoming part of the movement led by the
philosophes
and other freethinkers who challenged the orthodoxies of both the church and the monarchy. Claude-Adrien Helvétius, a very freethinking
philosophe,
had first envisioned a superlodge in Paris that would be filled with the greatest writers and artists. When he died, his widow, Madame Helvétius (about whom we will soon hear a lot more), helped fund its creation in1776.

Franklin and Voltaire joined the Lodge of the Nine Sisters in April 1778, the same month as their public meeting at the Académie. The lodge provided Franklin with influential supporters and enjoyable evenings. But it was risky. Both the king and the clerics were wary of the renegade lodge—and of Franklin’s membership in it.

The controversy surrounding the lodge was heightened when, in November 1778, it held a memorial service for Voltaire, who, on his deathbed a few months earlier, had waved off priests seeking to give him last rites. Some friends, such as Condorcet and Diderot, thought it wise to avoid the ceremony. But Franklin not only attended, he took part in it.

The hall was draped in black, lit only dimly by candles. There were songs, speeches, and poems attacking the clergy and absolutism in all forms. Voltaire’s niece presented a bust by Houdon. (Houdon, a member, also did a bust of Franklin for the lodge, which is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) Then a flame of light revealed a grand painting of the apotheosis of Voltaire emerging from his tomb to be presented in heaven by the goddesses of Truth and Benevolence. Franklin took the Masonic wreath from his head and solemnly laid it at the foot of the painting. Everyone then adjourned to the banquet room, where the first toast included a tribute to Franklin—“the captive thunder dying at his feet”—and to America.

Louis XVI, though a Mason himself, was annoyed by the spectacle and worked through the other Masonic lodges to have the Nine Sisters expelled. After months of controversy, the situation was resolved when the Nine Sisters reorganized itself and Franklin took over as its Venerable, or Grand Master. During the ensuing years, Franklin would induct many Americans into the lodge, including his grandson Temple, the spy Edward Bancroft, and the naval warrior John Paul Jones. He also helped create from within the lodge a group somewhat akin to his American Philosophical Society, known as the Société Apollonienne.
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