In “A Great Improvisation,” Stacy Schiff gives the answer. She provides an impressively researched, fine-grained account of Franklin’s Paris years, and his critically important mission to secure French support and French money for the rebellious colonies. Later, after the tide had turned in America’s favor, he was responsible, along with John Jay and John Adams, for negotiating the treaty with Britain that would turn the American experiment into an established international fact.
This was a tall order for a man, already in his 70s, with only a rudimentary command of French, no legal training, and no financial expertise. Yet Franklin muddled through, despite malicious attacks on two fronts, from his colleagues in Paris and from critics in the Continental Congress.
As Schiff’s title suggests, Franklin made things up as he went along. A diplomat without a recognized country, he relied on his vast reserves of charm, wit, equanimity, and native shrewdness to make up for lack of experience and the unfortunate fact that, most of the time, he had no cards to play.
As Schiff points out, Franklin was in a very odd position, “charged with appealing to a monarchy for assistance in establishing a republic.” Fortunately, France had its own reasons for supporting the Americans, although the Count de Vergennes, its wily foreign minister, eked out the money and the supplies according to his own complex formulas.
Franklin turned out to be quite good at the French diplomatic dance.
Back in Philadelphia, it looked as if Franklin had crawled in bed with the French. Not so. “A master of the oblique approach, a dabbler in shades of gray,” Franklin was, Schiff writes, “genial and ruthless.” When the Battle of Saratoga gave America the momentum, he pressed his advantage, tormenting Vergennes with the possibility that America might find it advantageous to strike a deal with Britain.
Later, with independence won, Franklin and his colleagues coldly and duplicitously worked out a peace agreement with Britain, cutting their erstwhile ally and benefactor out of the negotiations entirely.
Schiff, the author of “Saint-Exupery” and “Vera,” a biography of Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, adopts a preening style in “A Great Improvisation.” Each phrase is polished to a high gloss. The highly wrought prose grows tiresome over the course of 400 pages and makes the complicated diplomatic maneuverings Schiff describes even harder to follow.
But Schiff paints a beguiling picture of the man whom France embraced with such ardor and generosity.
Franklin returned home in 1785, ailing but serene, to tepid applause. “There would be no reward, no settling of accounts, nor – most stunning – a syllable of gratitude for the French mission,” Schiff writes. It’s a sad note to end on. The French adventure, as Schiff convincingly argues, should be remembered as Franklin’s finest hour.