Benjamin Franklin's Triumph of Reason

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2005 by Allen, Brooke

As president of the Pennsylvania constitutional convention, Franklin wrote a constitution for the new state that proposed a unicameral legislature and a plural executive-confirming him in his fast-growing reputation as the very rankest democrat among the Founders. This constitution earned him the enmity of Adams, who believed in the balance of powers system that would eventually triumph in the other state constitutions as well as the national one, but it gained him the admiration of the French philosophes for his implicit refusal to imitate the English system. (The French would themselves adopt the unicameral system after their own revolution, with famously disastrous results.)

In 1776 Franklin was dispatched to France, along with Silas Deane of Connecticut and Arthur Lee of Virginia, on his famous mission to procure French arms and money in service of the American cause. It was one of the most successful diplomatic missions of all time, since it seems doubtful whether the Revolution could have been won without French aid. Franklin's colleagues came and went-Deane and Lee, and later Jefferson and Adams, were all employed in this vital effort-but the French alliance, and the resounding victory that came with it, were essentially Franklin's alone.

Where Franklin's diplomatic methods outdid everyone else's was in his ability to balance French national interests with what he insisted was the country's native idealism. England was France's hereditary enemy, and had brutally beaten them in the Seven Years' (or French and Indian) War only two decades earlier; the temptation to drive England out of America must have been overwhelming for the French government. But French motives were not merely mercenary, as Franklin wrote to Robert Livingston. "This is really a generous Nation, fond of Glory and particularly that of protecting the Oppress'd." To tell the French governing class-that is, the nobility-that "their Commerce will be advantag'd by our Success, and that it is their Interest to help us, seems as much as to say, Help us and we shall not be obliged to you." This is an absolutely brilliant insight: we should appeal to France's perceived interests, he said, without spelling them out. One could wish that America had had a Franklin during the de Gaulle years-or during the Chirac years, for that matter.

Adams, with his puritan busyness, could not understand Franklin's magic touch with their French hosts, and he resented it, calling him "the Old Conjurer." "He is too old, too infirm, too indolent and dissipated, to be sufficient for the Discharge of all the important Duties," Adams complained, not understanding that, as the historian Anne-Claude Lopez has said, "In colonial America it was sinful to look idle, in France it was vulgar to look busy." Adams was disgusted by the sight of the old man's abject French fans having "the honour to see the great Franklin, and to have the pleasure of telling Stories about his Simplicity, his bald head and scattering strait hairs, among their Acquaintances," and he was shocked at the ladies who flocked around the sage, especially Franklin's particular girlfriend, the widowed Madame Helvétius.