Book Reviews: Benjamin Franklin after 200 years

Abstract

The papers of Benjamin Franklin , ed. Claude A. Lopez. New Haven: Yale University Press, Volume 27,1988. Pp. 727. £45. ISBN 0-300-04177-2. This chunky volume of 727 pages covers four months of Franklin’s life, from July to October 1778. As it happens, these months are probably the least significant four months in Franklin’s years in Paris. The treaty of alliance with France had been signed in February, and it was bringing a French army, a French fleet and vast quantities of munitions to aid the American cause; and it took France into war with Britain, as part of that second Hundred Years’ War that began in 1702 and ceased only in 1815. But whatever Franklin’s public fame in Paris as a scientist and as a Voltaire from the backwoods, and whatever his skill as architect of the alliance, the French Foreign Minister, Vergennes, having committed his country to the American cause, preferred to deal with the American Congress via his minister-plenipotentiary in Congress, ConradAlexandre Gerard, rather than through the quarrelsome American envoys in Passy. He liked and appreciated the sagacity of Franklin, but he found it hard to be patient, as did Franklin himself, with the prickly Lees, Arthur and William, and with vain and irascible John Adams, whom he tried to persuade Franklin to have recalled.