“A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America”, by Stacy Schiff

512 pages, Henry Holt and Co., ISBN-13: 978-0805066333

Stacy Schiff has established herself as one of my go-to historians; I am more than willing to pull a book with her name on it and buy it before I even know what the subject matter is, she’s that good. Don’t believe me? Alright, then, here’s Ron Chernow’s take on the Divine Madame S: “Even if forced at gunpoint, Stacy Schiff would be incapable of writing a dull page or a lame sentence”. And it’s true, for Schiff has the unique ability to bring the past to life, whether in Ptolemaic Egypt (Cleopatra: A Life, reviewed by me on March 18, 2013) or Puritan New England (The Witches: Salem, 1692, reviewed by me on November 17, 2018); thus, capturing the pulse of diplomatic life in late 18^th Century France is a cinch for her, and she does so in A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. There are many reasons to recommend this book, the first being Schiff’s wonderful irreverent wit; for instance, when discussing the parade of dubious French officers seeking a commission to fight in America she quips, “The French nobility included a fair number of eight-year-old majors and fourteen-year-old colonels, every one of them burning to be nineteen-year-old generals”. Or when Temple Franklin, Benjamin’s grandson and unofficial secretary in France, got his mistress pregnant, Schiff notes that the unfortunate young woman had born “Franklin’s illegitimate son’s illegitimate son an illegitimate son”. Good stuff, right?

But perhaps the best reason to recommend A Great Improvisation is that it offers a clear window into the machinations of the American delegation in Paris during the War of Independence. Schiff’s core thesis is simple: “France was crucial to American independence, and Franklin was critical to France”. She constructs her delightful narrative around this argument. Schiff calls the American delegation a “great improvisation” for good reason, as the inchoate nation in rebellion against the British had no experience at statecraft, little understanding of the recondite procedures required to conduct diplomatic affairs at the courts of European nobility, and no financial credit upon which to draw to equip an army of farmers and mechanics. Congress sent the best tool they had at their disposal, Benjamin Franklin, and it was an inspired choice, according to Schiff: “Franklin was a natural diplomat, genial and ruthless…[h]is stature [in France] was the most the dangerous weapon in the American arsenal”. The French adored Franklin from the moment he landed on their shores in November 1776, embodying everything the French wished America represented: modesty, industry and virility. Nevertheless, Franklin was embarking into uncharted waters. “He was inventing American foreign policy from whole cloth”, Schiff says, “teaching himself diplomacy on the job, while serving as his country’s unofficial banker”. Franklin was particularly poorly suited for the latter responsibility, according to Schiff. “By nature Franklin was a streamliner and a simplifier, while everything about the procurement business was baroque and protracted”.

France may have loved their new American ambassador, but the same cannot be said for Franklin’s fellow American representatives to Europe; almost every other American sent across the Atlantic on a diplomatic mission came to despise him. “The higher Franklin rose in the [French] public pantheon,” Schiff writes, “the lower he sank in the estimation of his colleagues”. Arthur Lee, a Virginian appointed envoy to Prussia and Spain, called Franklin “the most corrupt of all men”; Ralph Izard, a South Carolinian who served as the commissioner to the Court of Tuscany, noted in his diary: “Dr. Franklin was one of the most unprincipled men upon earth: that he was a man of no veracity, no honor, no integrity, as great a villain as ever breathed”; John Adams, the future president and fellow delegate to France, had for Franklin “no other sentiments than contempt or abhorrence…[he was] the demon of discord among our ministers, and curse and scourge of our foreign affairs”. His only ally, besides his grandson, was Silas Deane, the Connecticut lawyer originally sent to France as a secret envoy in 1776, who was recalled by Congress in light of allegations of financial impropriety. Indeed, the rancor, backstabbing, and competing personal alliances that Schiff describes makes the American delegation at Valentois outside Versailles sound like a contemporary reality TV show: part Downton Abbey, part Real Housewives of New Jersey. Schiff is far more forgiving of Franklin’s behavior during his nearly decade-long mission to Paris. She believes that the trouble between the commissioners could be chalked up to “miscommunication, misapprehension and misrepresentation”. Yes, Franklin had a tendency to sleep late, not answer his mail, spend too much time with female admirers, keep poor records, and not share information freely with his co-commissioners; but he was, nevertheless, indispensable to the American mission at the court of Louis XVI. Schiff maintains that the American cause could not have survived without the French – it was “her bedrock, her polestar, her salvation” – and the French alliance may very well never have come off without Franklin. Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, conceded: “[Franklin’s] age and his love of tranquility leave him with an apathy incompatible with his responsibilities”, but defended his position as essential to maintaining strong Franco-American relations.

Franklin was never given his proper due for his service abroad, according to Schiff. He returned home under a cloud of suspicion, stoked in Congress by his erstwhile co-delegates, and harbored resentment about his treatment for the rest of his life. It didn’t help that “Massive obscurity reigned in Congress as to how much aid France had extended America, and on what terms”, primarily because Franklin had failed to accurately record many of the transactions. But he was successful in getting the French to back the American cause with loans, weapons, military sundries, and – perhaps most important of all – naval support, without which the revolution would have been doomed (the one thing the French sent that the Americans had no use for was those 19-year-old French generals). Another great book by one of America’s preeminent living historians, A Great Improvisation belongs on every American’s bookshelf.