The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (30 page)

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

reproduced at one time in so many different forms.
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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.
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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!

Oh! it was enchanting to see Solon and Sophocles embracing!”
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Franklin’s genius was to understand how the French saw him and to exploit that image on behalf of the American cause. Since Franklin was from Pennsylvania, people assumed he was a simple Quaker, and he played the part to perfection. He dressed plainly in white and brown linen, declared one observer, “glasses on his head, a fur cap, which he always wears on his head, no powder, but a neat appearance.” Instead of the short sword worn by most aristocrats, “he carries as his only defense a cane in his hand.”
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Franklin knew very well the political significance of what he was doing. After describing to an English friend his simple dress with his “thin grey strait Hair, that peeps out under my only Coiffure, a fine Fur Cap which comes down my Forehead almost to my Spectacles,” he remarked, “Think how this must appear among the Powder’d Heads of Paris.”
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In French eyes Franklin came to symbolize America as no single person in history ever has. He realized that he was “much respected, complimented and caress’d by the [French] People in general,” and that “some in Power” paid him a particular “Deference,” which, he said, was probably why his colleagues “cordially hated and detested” him so much.
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Indeed, it seemed he could do no wrong in France.

When Franklin was received by Louis XVI at Versailles, he violated almost every rule of this, the most ornate and ritual-bound court in all of Europe. While his American colleagues wore the elaborate court dress prescribed by the royal chamberlain, Franklin appeared in his simple rustic dress; and the French courtiers loved it. He could have been taken “for a big farmer,” said one 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.”
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The French turned everything about Franklin into a sign of Quaker or republican simplicity. They fell over themselves in enthusiasm for this village philosopher. To his French admirers even Franklin’s deficiencies became great virtues. Was he quiet in large gatherings? This only demonstrated his republican reticence. Did he speak and write rather poor ungrammatical French? This only showed that he spoke and wrote from the heart.

Even when he fooled the best of the French intellectuals with one of his literary tricks, he was celebrated. No less a personage than the
philosophe
Abbe Raynal, for example, fell for Franklin’s famous Polly Baker hoax, which was first published in a London paper in 1747. In his account Franklin had Polly, a prostitute, defend herself in a speech before a court in Connecticut for giving birth to five successive illegitimate children. She was doing nothing more, she said, than her duty— “the Duty of the first and great Command of Nature, and of Nature’s God,
Encrease and Multiply.
A Duty, from the steady Performance of which, nothing has ever been able to deter me; but for its Sake, I have hazarded the Loss of the Publick Esteem, and frequently incurr’d Publick Disgrace and Punishment; and therefore ought, in my humble Opinion, instead of a Whipping, to have a Statue erected in my Memory.” According to Franklin, Polly’s speech so moved her judges that they dispensed with her punishment; it even “induced one of her Judges to marry her the next Day.”

Although Franklin may have been merely poking fun at the double standard for women, the story seems to have been widely taken as an authentic account of an event. It was kept alive by many subsequent reprintings in both America and Britain. No one was more bamboozled by “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker” than Abbé Raynal. Raynal picked it up from an English publication and, believing it to be a true story, inserted it in his immensely popular
Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes
(1770). The ever earnest abbé thought the story was meant to show the puritanical severity of New England’s laws, which made it enormously appealing to all those enlightened French intellectuals eager to show their sympathy for the oppressed of the world. Only during Franklin’s mission in France did Raynal discover that the story was made up. Franklin told Raynal that as a young printer he had had the habit of creating “anecdotes and fables and fancies,” and that Polly Baker’s speech was one of those. Surprised, the abbé quickly recovered. “Oh, very well, Doctor, I had rather relate your stories than other men’s truths.”
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To the infatuated French all Franklin’s writings seemed praiseworthy. In 1777 his
The Way to Wealth
was translated as
La Science du Bonhomme Richard, ou moyen facile de payer les impôts.
It became the most widely read American work in France, going through four editions in two years and five others over the next two decades.
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Although Franklin viewed his work as a hodgepodge of borrowed proverbial wisdom, and sometimes satirized his own prudential advice, the French in their passion for Franklin described his Bonhomme Richard maxims as sublime philosophy worthy of Voltaire and Montaigne. Timeworn adages such as “One Today is worth two Tomorrows” and “Laziness travels so slowly, that Poverty soon overtakes him” were extolled as serious moral philosophy.
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Indeed, French excitement over the proverbs of Bonhomme Richard reveals some of what we might call the early beginnings of modern French structuralism and deconstruction. In his eulogy on Franklin’s death, the Marquis de Condorcet, the French
philosophe
and Masonic friend of Franklin, expressed a peculiar form of Gallic logic. Bonhomme Richard, said Condorcet, was a “unique work in which one cannot help recognizing the superior man without it being possible to cite a single passage where he allows his superiority to be perceived.” Condorcet, who died in prison during the French Revolution while writing about the perfectibility of mankind, declared that there was nothing in the thought or style of Franklin’s work that showed anything above “the least developed intelligence.” But, said Condorcet, in an argument worthy of Jacques Derrida, “a philosophic mind” could discover the “noble aims and profound intentions” behind the maxims and proverbs.
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Although
The Way to Wealth
may have been his best-selling work in France, Franklin was anything but a bourgeois businessman to the French. He understood the French aristocrats’ love of honor and liberality and, despite being a former artisan from the lowest rungs of the social ladder, he knew how to deal with them. He tried to tell the American foreign secretary Robert R. Livingston the way to approach the French. “This is really a generous Nation, fond of Glory and particularly that of protecting the Oppress’d.” The French nobility, “who always govern here,” was not really concerned with trade. To tell these French aristocrats that “their
Commerce
will be advantag’d by our Success, and that it is their
Interest
to help us, seems as much to say, Help us and we shall not be obliged to you.”
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Franklin knew better. The French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, noted that all the Americans had “a terrible mania for commerce.” But not Franklin: “I believe,” said Vergennes, “his hands and heart are equally pure.”
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Although Franklin never liked snobbery, was always eager to defend obscure but honest men, and often ridiculed the idea of aristocracy and claims of blood, he was eager to share the French aristocracy’s contempt for commerce, which he generally equated with “
Cheating."
Of course, by commerce he meant the kind of international trade that great wholesale merchants and nations engaged in; he did not generally mean the kind of buying and selling that he had done as a tradesman in Philadelphia. But he was no defender of rapacious moneymaking. His severest criticism of a nation was to say, as he did of Holland in 1781, that it had “no other Principles or Sentiments but those of a Shopkeeper.”
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Precisely because he had begun his career as a tradesman, he seems to have had a much greater need than the other Founders to show the world that he was truly genteel and “free from Avarice.” All these condemnations of commerce and shopkeepers suggest something of the emotional price Franklin paid for his remarkable rise. But they also reveal the peculiar way this former tradesman who had become the representative American endeared himself to the French.
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THE PROBLEMS OF THE MISSION

Symbol or no symbol, Franklin faced extraordinary difficulties and very unpromising circumstances in Paris, difficulties and circumstances that make the achievements of his mission all the more remarkable. In 1776 he seemingly had everything against him. The British immediately expressed dismay at his presence in France, and Louis XVI was not at all happy to have his monarchy encouraging republican rebels against another king. Queen Marie-Antoinette was especially opposed to aiding the Americans, and some members of the ministry agreed with her. Franklin and his fellow commissioners knew that their task was to bring France into the war on America’s side. But the French government did not believe itself ready yet for open war with England. As the commissioners reported in the spring of 1777, France wanted to avoid offering “an open Reception and Acknowledgement of us, or entering into any formal Negotiation with us, as Ministers from the Congress.”
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Indeed, out of fear of precipitating a premature war with Britain, France initially put all sorts of restrictions on American behavior, including preventing Americans from enlisting French officers and forbidding American privateers to sell captured prizes in French ports. The French were willing to open their ports to American commerce and to supply arms and money, however, as long as no one talked about it.

France’s hesitation was quite understandable. Ever since independence the Continental army had been in pell-mell retreat from the British forces, and the prospect of sustaining the Revolution seemed doubtful. Even in these difficult circumstances the United States was prepared to offer the French very little. The most the new republic would promise was that if French aid to the United States led France into war with Great Britain, America would not assist Britain in such a war.

Congress offered little guidance; indeed, Franklin and his colleagues essentially had to teach themselves diplomacy. With no word from Congress for months, the commissioners had no knowledge of what was going on in America. “Our total Ignorance of the truth or Falsehood of Facts, when Questions are asked of us concerning them,” they complained, “makes us appear small in the Eyes of the People here, and is prejudicial to our Negotiations.”
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Added to this confusion was the extraordinary number of solicitors the commissioners, especially Franklin, had to deal with. The esteemed doctor was overwhelmed with correspondents and visitors at the very time he was trying to win over the French while struggling with a foreign language and different social customs. His grasp of French was never strong. Once, at a public gathering where there were many speeches, Franklin had a hard time understanding what was being said; but he followed the lead of one of his lady friends and applauded when she did. Later his grandson told him that he had been applauding praises of himself, and more vigorously than anyone.
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Everybody interested in America, it seemed, wanted him for something or other—merchants and traders looking to make money from an American deal, inventors and savants seeking his blessing, and especially French and other European officers eager to be recommended for commissions in the American army. “These Applications,” he wrote to one of his French friends, “are my perpetual Torment. People will believe, notwithstanding my continually repeated Declarations to the Contrary, that I am sent hither to engage Officers. In Truth, I never had such Orders.... You can have no Conception how I am harass’d. All my Friends are sought out and teiz’d to teaze me; Great Officers of all Ranks in all Departments, Ladies great and small, besides profess’d Sollicitors, worry me from Morning to Night.”
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