How the French Saved America Read online

  Deferential, knowledgeable, hardworking, a man who had proved his devotion to the country, yet was untainted by court intrigues, Vergennes quickly became close to Louis XVI. Contributing to that closeness was that both were extremely devout and agreed on a few basic policy principles. Aiming to restore France’s power after its humiliation by Great Britain in the Peace of Paris, in which it was forced to cede many of its colonies and to accept British control of Dunkerque and of the fisheries off Newfoundland, Louis and Vergennes decided on three linked initiatives. First, that France would seek no additional colonies; this was congruent with Louis’s view of himself as pacific rather than martial. Second, that France would work to diminish Great Britain’s influence in order to build up its own. Third, that France would rearm, as there could be no better guarantor of increased influence than adequately prepared and equipped armed forces.

  Louis when younger had been deeply moved by the works of the seventeenth-century writer François Fénélon, in particular his Maximes morales et politiques tirées de Télémaque (Moral and political maxims drawn from Telemachus). He had written an introduction for a new edition; Louis XV had read it and ordered the plates destroyed and banned publication of all of Fénélon. One of Louis XVI’s first acts, upon becoming king, was to lift that ban and republish the volume, with his own pacific commentary intact:

  The true science of a sovereign … consists in earning the confidence of his neighbors and becoming their arbiter. Good faith and moderation are the only paths by which he may reach that end.… Not to have the air of peace by fear and baseness, but never to dream of war except to defend liberty.… War is the greatest of evils with which God afflicts men … even those who undertake it justly … and end it with advantage.

  His foreign minister agreed with these sentiments. In Vergennes’s first tour d’horizon for the young king, in the early summer of 1774, his principal concerns were tinderbox situations on the European continent and France’s complicated relations with Spain, its Bourbon family ally. As for the growing possibility of a conflict in Britain’s North American colonies, Vergennes mentioned the matter only in passing. In late June 1775, receiving the news of the events at Lexington and Concord, he wrote to one of his ambassadors, “The spirit of revolt … is always a dangerous example.… That is why we must prevent the spirit of independence from making an explosion so terrible in the British American colonies that its strength is communicated to our own points of interest in that hemisphere.”

  Six weeks later, on August 7, he authorized Bonvouloir’s mission, which sent a message that the colonists could not fail to understand as encouraging them to reject Great Britain and accept the overtures of a possible suitor. On the same day King Louis XVI, using words likely written by Vergennes, wrote to his uncle, King Carlos III of Spain: “Perhaps there has never been an occasion when the likelihood of a war with England seemed less probable.” There was no contradiction in those two messages, for Vergennes believed that the many prior wars between France and Great Britain made inevitable a next one, and that France should take the current interlude of peace to prepare for it, in part by opening a courtship to interest the Americans in joining forces against the common enemy.

  2

  “Arrogance and insults against which my heart revolted.” —Comte de Vergennes

  France’s ability to potentially ally with Britain’s rebelling American colonies, as well as to boost its military readiness and flexibility to engage with the rest of the world, was deeply affected by its burgeoning debt. That troubled Louis XVI.

  Contrary to public opinion, the young king was more involved than his predecessor had been in the granular details of governance, and had diligent work habits. Eight hours a day he took notes from books and advice from tutors on how to govern—organizing the notes under such topic headings as “the persona of the prince” and “the character and execution of the monarchy”—read state papers, and took part in council sessions. Of principal concern to the council of ministers was the ruinous debt run up during the Seven Years’ War. More than a decade after the war’s conclusion, interest on the debt continued to hurt France, as did the absence of income from colonies taken away during the war. To discount some obligations in 1770 Louis XV had declared a bankruptcy, but in 1774, when Louis XVI began his reign, debt service still accounted for 30 percent of the annual budget. That was why, after only five weeks on the throne, Louis fired the holdover finance minister, who had suspended payouts on government bonds and had regularly obtained high-interest loans to cover current expenses, and elevated Turgot, whose zeal, competence, and ingenuity had already impressed everyone.

  Turgot made his acceptance of the post of finance minister conditional on the king’s allowing him to enact the program laid out in his letter of August 24, 1774. What he proposed to do was summed up in a slogan of what he would not countenance: “No Bankruptcy. No Increase of Taxes. No Loans.” His program was also to vigorously attack some costly long-standing arrangements. When appointed he eliminated the pots-de-vin, the bribes that tax collectors and major trading houses paid government functionaries to obtain monopolies to sell to the army at inflated prices such essentials as ammunition, and he slashed the number of sinecures at court and the subsidies for nobles in attendance.

  In the spring of 1775, when at Lexington and Concord there was fired the “shot heard round the world,” Turgot and the king were too busy to hear it. They were focused on an internal problem in France, the so-called Flour War in which prices rose overly high during barren harvests. Turgot persuaded Louis to use both tough and magnanimous tactics to resolve the crisis, and these not only ended the crisis but boosted the public’s opinion of Louis XVI’s abilities. But while the king seemingly backed Turgot’s other efforts to stabilize France’s finances and thereby make it easier to restore the nation’s position of power, he proved unable to fend off the importuning of his family and his courtiers as much as would have been necessary to adequately reform the government’s lax and luxe policies. He permitted Marie Antoinette to obtain money from the treasury to pay the Gobelin silks manufactory to create a new silk for her dresses that exactly matched the color of her hair, and for Maurepas to spend 176,000 livres on artworks for the palaces.

  As Turgot’s replacement as minister of the marine, a key post in rearming the country, the king chose the long-serving police chief of Paris, Antoine-Raymond-Gualbert-Gabriel de Sartine, forty-six. Sartine’s senses of organization, of the importance of ports, and of the need to maintain the flow of supplies and repair the dockyards quickly produced results. And in October, upon the death in office of the elderly minister for war, Louis appointed Claude-Louis, Comte de Saint-Germain, sixty-eight, to that position. A former field marshal, Saint-Germain in his salad days had repeatedly clashed with de Broglie, “the most mortal enemy I have ever had.” Resigning rather than serve under him, Saint-Germain then rose steadily in the Austrian, Bavarian, and Danish militaries, becoming defense minister of Denmark before retiring. Entering Louis XVI’s cabinet, Saint-Germain attacked his bureaucratic brief with a youngster’s energy and the savvy of a veteran of the efficient military of Frederick the Great. The Prussian king opined to Voltaire that hiring Saint-Germain was the smartest move Louis XVI could make.

  Saint-Germain had a large target for reform, France’s army, top-heavy with officers—some sixty thousand for 217,000 troops—and hampered by a blue-vs.-red divide. The distance in French society between the wealthy nobility and the vast majority of the population, which was lowborn and poor, was reflected in the gulf between the blue-uniformed nobility of the sword and the middle-rank officers, who were not from that nobility and whose uniforms were edged with red. As Saint-Germain understood, the two-tier system calcified the upper ranks with excess officers, some of them quite incompetent, while preventing plebeian-born officers from rising to levels of command commensurate with their talents:

  The first class instantly obtains the highest grades [in the army] as if by right,
while the second class, by the sole misfortune of its birth or poverty, is condemned to waste its life in the subaltern grades. The custom is doubly pernicious. The first class does not need to work to succeed; it obtains as if by right. And the second does not work because its efforts would be useless. Thus, all striving is destroyed.

  Discovering that more than 2,500 men were guarding the king at court, he cut that figure to 1,500, abolishing the storied Musketeers and other elite units that had not seen battle in decades. He also retired 865 superfluous colonels, halted the practice of purchasing commissions, and began to eliminate the right of officers to raise and pay their own units and then seek reimbursement. Far better in terms of the troops’ loyalty to France, Saint-Germain argued, was to have the government pay them directly.

  A host of new regulations that Saint-Germain issued in December 1775 cast many officers out of work and augured badly for the futures of others, particularly those in the aristocratic units, from which there came howls of outrage. “The choice of horses, the magnificence of the uniforms, and everything about the [military units at court] announced to all who could see that they were guarding the premier European potentate,” one writer argued, charging that the diminution of such pomp debased Louis in the eyes of his fellow monarchs. The king dismissed such concerns and encouraged Sartine and Saint-Germain’s efforts to reform the army and navy. In doing so these ministers became Vergennes’s allies in reforming foreign policy, for all of their changes had a common objective, countering the pervasive power of Great Britain.

  Vergennes had discovered that no matter where he tried to advance his goal of raising France’s power in world affairs, “perfidious Albion” blocked the way. When he tried to keep Spain from invading Portugal and pulling France into their war, Britain attempted to goad Spain into that war with the aim of breaking the Bourbon family alliance. When he wanted to make repairs to the port at Dunkerque, Britain refused that as a violation of the 1763 peace treaty, and did the same when France tried to extend its fishing rights off Newfoundland. Such British “arrogance and insults against which my heart revolted made me desire and search for the means to change a situation so little compatible with the elevation of your [majesty’s] soul and the grandeur of your power,” Vergennes later wrote.

  Also pushing Vergennes toward actions against Great Britain was public pressure, as reflected in a French street song:

  Vergennes, gobe-mouches,

  Ministre sans talents,

  Laissez l’Anglais farouche

  Battre les insurgents.

  Valet bas et soumis,

  De toute l’Angleterre.

  A Georges III a promis,

  Qu-on serait toujours de ses amis

  Pendant une ministère.

  (Vergennes, who believes all he hears,

  Minister without talents,

  Who allows the savage English

  To batter the [American] insurgents.

  Valet base and docile

  To all of England,

  To George III he’s promised

  That we will always be friends

  During his ministry.)

  In December 1775, as Washington’s forces faced the British at Boston, as Franklin’s committee in Philadelphia dealt with Bonvouloir, and as Saint-Germain’s newly issued regulations roiled the French military, in London Arthur Lee learned that he had been appointed by the Committee of Secret Correspondence as its agent to seek aid from France. He had expected the appointment but was of two minds about it: On the one he refused to correspond with the committee while it included Franklin and Jay and did not include any of his friends and relatives, but on the other he was delighted with the appointment because during the previous year he had been privately agitating for a Franco-American alliance and could now do so officially.

  Lee had been born in Virginia as the youngest of eight children. Educated at Eton, he then took a medical degree at Edinburgh. He briefly practiced medicine in Williamsburg, Virginia, but soon returned to London to study law at the Middle Temple and set up shop as a businessman, with a sideline as an essayist under a pen name. At thirty-five he was an habitual outsider with a weakness for intrigue and conspiracy theories that edged into paranoia. His patriotic zeal mirrored that of his congressional-delegate brothers, Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot Lee, who were among the more radical members of that body. Purists often disdain those who doubt even when the doubters are the more realistic: The Lees and their congressional allies, Samuel and John Adams, all early advocates of independence, distrusted Franklin and Jay for what they misperceived as a lingering affinity for Britain. In the spring the Massachusetts-Virginia alliance had put Arthur in line to succeed Franklin as agent for the Massachusetts Bay colony, thus making him, in the fall, the logical choice as the Committee of Secret Correspondence’s man in London, a decision that Franklin ratified despite being aware of Lee’s deep antipathy to him.

  Lee knew just where to find help for America: from the Opposition circle around London’s mayor, John Wilkes, who had often spoken out against the current British government’s American colonial policies. At a Wilkes dinner Lee met Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Author of the current hit comedy The Barber of Seville, the forty-three-year-old Beaumarchais was also an agent of the French court, which now and then called upon him to foil royal blackmailers and scurrilous pamphleteers, something Beaumarchais knew a lot about since he had written similar pamphlets himself.

  Known for his romantic dramas, he had had a romantic rise from modest beginnings, initially following his father’s watchmaking trade, then eclipsing it by adding Beaumarchais to his name through an early marriage to an older woman who died within two years. He also benefited from business training by a mentor who made a fortune selling armaments to France during the Seven Years’ War. Charming, daring, and endlessly articulate, Beaumarchais was well regarded at Versailles, having been music master to the king’s aunts. He was on a quest to induce the French crown to restore his rights as a citizen, which he had lost as a result of a court case and imprisonment. His interlocutor at Versailles was Sartine, whom he had come to know when the minister had been chief of police.

  Beaumarchais was in London on Sartine’s behalf to conclude a deal with the blackmailer known as the Chevalier d’Éon. The chevalier threatened to expose two dark matters, the existence of the previous king’s back-channel communications and espionage network, the Secret du Roi, and of a scandalous and as yet unpublished biography of Madame du Barry. In a letter to Beaumarchais, d’Éon said he had been, in turn, “girl, man, woman, soldier, politician, secretary, minister, author.” Now he wanted to be properly pensioned off, to have his debts forgiven, and to be permitted to return to France as a woman. Their negotiations were taking a while, which kept Beaumarchais returning to London, where he met Lee.

  Lee wanted Beaumarchais to help him buy French arms for the rebels. Beaumarchais took this request to the king but asked Louis for more than Lee had sought—a serious French embrace of the American cause. Beaumarchais argued to the king that France must succor the American “army of infuriates whose vengeance and rage animate every effort” and whose numbers were large enough to trouble the British. He put himself forth as just the man to take charge of supplying the rebels, and promised to turn a profit on that enterprise, assuring Louis that if France put up one million livres, by astute trading in a few years he would return nine million. Beaumarchais sent this letter to the king unsealed, so that Vergennes could first read it; the minister did, and forwarded it to Louis with the caveat that he was unable to verify Beaumarchais’s high numerical estimate of American forces. But Vergennes simultaneously adopted that estimate in his dealings with the Spanish ambassador to Versailles, the Comte d’Aranda, volunteering that the American colonists’ surprisingly great strength of numbers, and the inability of the British to break the American siege of Boston, had convinced him that Great Britain’s war with its colonies would not end soon, and would exhaust that nation.


  Those who most desire to have others fight have the least stake in which side wins or in ending the fight quickly. Vergennes, a royalist in favor of neither democratic aspirations nor rebellions against an autocrat, was a believer in the balance of power. He did not seek the utter destruction of Great Britain’s might; rather, he desired to have a diminished Great Britain and an enhanced France someday jointly keep the peace in Europe. Toward that end he was quite willing to help the Americans prolong the Revolutionary War, since every month that passed while Great Britain was distracted gave space and time to France to rearm.

  Beaumarchais helped. He wrote more unsealed letters to Louis XVI. Playing on the not-so-secret fear of the king and council that if the American colonies and Great Britain, rather than continuing to kill each other, patched up their differences they could then make a joint assault on the French Caribbean colonies, Beaumarchais pointed out that the “sugar islands” brought into the French treasury some three hundred million livres per annum—and that helping the Americans, a move that would protect those islands, would cost only three million a year.

  Just then, Ambassador Guines also helped along the cause of aid to America by demonstrating anew the perfidy of the British—and his own. The vice that most frequently topples ambassadors is a tilting toward the positions of the country in which they are serving. The Portuguese ambassador in London sent home a message that Guines had sought to guarantee to the British that if they ceased backing Portugal in its dispute with Spain over Brazil, France would withdraw support from Spain. France intercepted this message, and Vergennes read it aloud to the king’s council, producing the desired effect—outrage from Maurepas and Turgot, who convinced Louis that by this false promise Guines had not only compromised the Bourbon family compact between France and Spain but had also usurped the king’s authority, and therefore must be recalled. Marie Antoinette tried to save Guines and have Vergennes fired. Vergennes threatened to resign. That, Louis would not permit. Guines was retired and awarded a dukedom. Thereafter Marie Antoinette’s influence on foreign policy receded, but in retaliation she withdrew support at court for Mme. Vergennes, distressing the minister.