Franklin remembered the bitter crisis of the summer when Louis XVI had agreed to armed intervention and then had capitulated to his uncle. It led the French to seek an alliance with the Americans to dethrone Louis XVI. At the first hint of this the Doctor tendered his resignation, which to his relief was not accepted. This was the same thing as asking France and Spain to declare immediate war against Great Britain. Shipping was at a premium; in the last year the price of vessels had tripled. This released a great stock of surplus arms for Hortalez to buy up cheaply. A few days later Louis XVI made the United States a loan of 2,000,000 livres. Much paper would be required for their letter campaign, and a spate of words would cover their omission of proofs. The King was tireless, and only the quirks and massive stubbornness which were part of his psychosis would now and then hamper the working of his great information machine. Somehow the wild Irishman, repeating the maneuver of the sound and sober Wickes, created an infinitely greater reaction. Whatever disaster happened in 1777, he wanted to build a friendship between the French and American peoples which would last for many generations, and he calmly laid the foundations of that friendship in his own daily associations. Early in 1774 Franklin had written from London to a friend at home that he wished Americans might know what we are and what we have. After much private groping and anguish he had discovered what he was: not a colonial American, but that new man, an American. France had been secretly aiding the American Colonies since 1776, because France was angry at Britain over the loss of Colonial territory in the French and Indian War. By April American privateers had taken so many British seamen prisoner that the British fleet was not half manned, and Stormont hinted to Vergennes that peace could not last much longer if France continued to arm the United States. C.) It encouraged the French to adopt the government system of popular sovereignty. His sense of competition for the favor of America was plain in the letter he immediately wrote the French ambassador at Madrid. The dreadful thing is that Arthur Lees nightmare was accepted by perfectly sane men and that it not only outlived the Eighteenth Century but has persisted in a shadowy form into the Twentieth. "Rear alliance"), aiming at allying with countries situated on the opposite side or "in the back" of an adversary, in order to open a second front encircling the adversary and thus re . France had 26 battleships ready, and by spring Spain would have thirty. Bancroft is entirely an American and every word he used on the late occasion was to deceive; perhaps they think Mr. Wentworth has been sent from motives of fear and if that is Franklins opinion the whole conduct he has shewn, is wise and to me it [unravels] what other ways would appear inexplicable.. No charge was made against Deane, but for two years Congress kept him in Philadelphia at its pleasure while the press vilified him. The Reprisal was carrying a cargo of indigo worth 3,000 which was intended to pay the early expenses of the Paris mission. Congress had sent the King the Olive Branch Petition, which paralyzed war efforts for many months. His private period of turmoil and decision lay behind him, and he could think calmly of what must be done to make Jeffersons great charter a reality. He gave Franklins courier a verbal message: due to Mr. Lees unflagging labors with the French embassy in London, Versailles had been persuaded to send goods worth 200,000 (Hortalez had said 25,000) to the Caribbean as an outright gift. As a result of Lees carelessness in leaving his portfolio in his room when he went out to dine, the commissioners had to abandon the building of a great frigate in Amsterdam, and she was sold to Louis XVI at cost. In the interval, quite unsuspected by his compatriots, he did high-level work for Eden. With Deane and Carmichael, and all those shadowy young Americans who helped the great privateering drive of 1777, he organized an underground system for escapes. The historian Henri Doniol, who edited the secret French archives of the period, claimed that Franklin did more than coach the Whigs; that he in fact started an international gunrunning ring by quiet negotiations with certain arms manufacturers and exporters in England, Holland, and France. She was starting out as a beggar at the court of Versailles, and she would have to keep on begging until the war was over. By this process of elastic diplomacy the amenities were preserved while both sides gained time for war preparations and spared their exchequers the drain of active hostilities. The French loan was a godsend. However, Franklin had boarded the, But now he had something serious to report: My informations says that the, In later reports Sir Joseph drew such an alarming picture of Dutch gunrunning, especially to the Caribbean, that the British sent a Navy sloop and cutter to spend the winter at Texel Island near Amsterdam. The war provided Great Britain enormous territorial gains in North America, but disputes over . He had spent eighteen years in England as colonial agent and the last eighteen months at home in the Continental Congress. When Deane left Philadelphia on his mission to France, Franklin suggested that Edward Bancroft would be a useful consultant on European affairs, and so it proved. However, Beaumarchais put his whole soul into his character as friend of the American Revolution. There is a distinct anomaly in the fact that even with captures from British transports Congress scraped together for Washingtons use in 1775 only about forty tons of gunpowder. Many of them were now flocking to Europe, for the word had been passed of the hospitality of French and Spanish ports if the proper techniques of evasion were followed. It was run, personally and in great detail, by George III himself, who spent hours reading the reports of agents scattered over America, the West Indies, and Europe. William Lee was rewarded with office as alderman of the city, a title which he did not relinquish until the war was almost over and he knew which side would win. Soon the old names were changed to the Committee of Foreign Affairs and the Commercial Committee to make this distinction clear. He spent much of the latter half of 1776 in Paris as mentor to the inexperienced American, and the close friendship thus begun lasted as long as Deane lived. Because of the Family Compact, Spain would have to approve the alliance with America, and accordingly Vergenness memoir was sent to Madrid with its proposal for a triple offensive and defensive alliance. The first similarity between the two revolutions are their origins. A growing fleet of American privateers had already brought prizes into the various French ports, and a system had been perfected for their disposal. It was February, and the ominous shift in the ministry from the friendly Grimaldi to the hostile Floridablanca was taking place. In August, 1774, Sir Joseph Yorke, for years the British ambassador at The Hague, wrote his superior, the Earl of Suffolk: As the contraband trade carried on between Holland and North America is so well known in England I have not thought it necessary of late to trouble your Lordship with trifling details of ships sailing from Amsterdam for the British Colonies, laden with teas, linnens, etc., But now he had something serious to report: My informations says that the Polly , Captain Benjamin Broadhurst, bound to Nantucket has shipped on board a considerable quantity of gunpowder. Silas Deane was invaluable. how did the french alliance contribute to the american revolution. Only a frayed rope anchored the nations to peace, and Franklin believed that an implement lay ready to hand which would saw through the hawser. After that opening wedge, which tacitly killed the embargo, Franklins resolution for world trade was bound to go through. Louis XVI was making a new advance of 3,000,000 livres to Congress. Franklins experiment had been a complete success in the laboratory sense; the sea raids had brought England and France to the verge of war. What major problem did the Continental army face in the winter of 1777? This kept him out of personal debates and increased his potential. France is a major contributor to the Defeat-ISIL Coalition. He was lulled by the specious truce with Francebut how would he feel if Captain Wickes captured a royal packet carrying the royal mails? No peace would be made except by the general consent. Despite his own best efforts, Lees mission turned out to be a success. One of his parts was acting as confidential agent for the King, for his circumspection was as profound as Franklins. It did contribute to the huge French debt that was the root cause of the French Revolution by accepting Military and economic assisstance from France during the American Revolution. Now he felt the reinforcement of those thousands of his countrymen who had won the campaign in the North. Americans, for instance, were forbidden to trade directly with foreign countries or with the foreign islands of the Caribbean, except in a few commodities which could be sold under cumbersome and expensive restrictions. She had stolen Hollands priority on the seas and had swept France from the American continent and the best part of her fisheries. This rule was so thoroughly disobeyed that great shipping houses like Willing & Morris of Philadelphia kept factors, or at least correspondents, all over Europe and the Caribbean to take care of their trade. This must not happen again. The Continental Navy would never be able to take on the larger British units. The story goes that he was rushing to play the stock market, and no doubt he was. No doubt the colonies hoarded local supplies for their own defense, and the merchants hoarded their stocks for higher prices. Sieur Montaudoin shared many interests with Franklin; both were members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, enthusiasts of the new physiocratic school, and Masons. Lee could not bear to lose Beaumarchais and tried to detach him from Deane. was part of a larger war between Britain and France. Some inner mechanism in the Lee genes transmuted whatever was wrong with the Lees into something much worse that was wrong with their enemies. A member of the Royal College of Physicians, in 1773 he was elected to the Royal Society under the sponsorship of Franklin, the astronomer royal, and the kings physician. Franklin enjoyed the brief engagements. The Sugar Act, was made to try and stop the smuggling of sugar and molasses. During this period of watchful waiting, Franklin applied political pressure. The British had many other secret agents in France, and other avenues of information. They were in the best possible hands; Captain Lambert Wickes was one of the few masters seasoned in the merchant fleet who had joined the Continental Navy. The trouble with Silas Deane was tragically simple: he was never quite sure who he was. Soon Franklin and Deane had a group of young men busy in the various ports, helping merchantmen and privateers speed on their way, informing them of shifts in French regulations and dangerous areas patrolled by British warships, recruiting French seamen to fill out depleted ships companies, finding masters for ships and ships for masters. These crucial French contributions exemplify the global character of the . His future United States included Canada and the Floridas and the British West Indies, especially Bermuda and the Bahamas. He was to evoke this nightmare more than once, but it never lost its effect. His association with Hortalez was a stroke of luck. A courier was on his way to Madrid, and the decision of Charles III should be known within three weeks. Arthur Lee, who would have ruined the secret project if he had been in Paris to interfere with it, was busy elsewhere. Late in October, 1776, Benjamin Franklin sailed for France to direct the foreign sector of the extraordinary war into which his young country had been plunged. It was a fine moment for his debut. They were based on the Plan of 1776, drafted chiefly by Franklin, and they laid down his cherished, and essentially modern, principles of free trade and settled the wholly new problem of how a republic should conduct its relations with a kingdom. Now she was acknowledged as a nation in her own right, a nation whose treaties protected her commerce on the seas and her growing space on land, a rising people for whose friendship Britain and France must compete. And so the man who believed that there never was a good war or a bad peace, old Dr. Benjamin Franklin, a man laden with the worlds honors who might easily have pleaded age and weariness, set out for France in his seventy-first year to secure these necessities for his country.