A Great Improvisation:
Franklin, France, and the Birth of America
by Stacy Schiff
reviewed by David Loftus
[This review appeared in the
Oregonian on April 24, 2005.]
Founding Fathers are hot stuff these days. Benjamin Franklin, with two major biographies in the past three years (by Edmund Morgan and Walter Isaacson) and re-publication of others by H.W. Brands and Gordon Wood, may be the hottest.
Into the crowd wades Stacy Schiff, whose elegant and witty biography of Vera Nabokov won a Pulitzer Prize (and whose previous bio of Saint-Exupery was a Pulitzer finalist). Why step from uncommon byways onto a crowded boulevard?
Happily, Schiff's breezy, cosmopolitan but never superficial style is excellently suited to the open-minded satirist and scientist, and a tale that reads like a cruel farce.
Schiff's new book, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America, focuses on just eight years of Franklin's 84-year life, starting in 1776, when he was sent to Paris by the Continental Congress at the age of 70 to get France into the war. Fortunately, France regarded Franklin as a celebrity genius, which was more than many of his colleagues back home thought of him.
Franklin was "honest, but not to honest, which qualifies in France as a failure of imagination," Schiff writes. He could "indulge in the ingenious and wholly specious argument, a staple of French conversation." His defense of French admiral d'Estaing was "a shining tribute to benevolent ignorance. (And one that accidentally happened to be accurate.)"
Surrounded by spies, he had papers and money stolen. The other Americans in Paris squabbled endlessly with one another, accusing the French of deceit and intrigue even more than the British. Franklin's co-commissioner, Arthur Lee, "was ideally suited for the mission in every way save for his personality, which was rancid."
Poor trans-Atlantic communications enabled the Paris delegation's enemies to poison Congress against them, especially Franklin, who risked censure several times. He also was beset by psoriasis boils, gout and bladder stones. Schiff does not neglect Franklin's poor relations with much of his family, and his flirtations with French ladies, widowed and married.
It's a wonder it all came out so well. Not a little of the credit goes to Franklin's skill as "a natural diplomat, genial and ruthless." When he was "rebuffed, he played hard to get"!
France ended up backing the Colonies' successful revolution with men, arms, and aid that would be worth $13 billion today. Americans who carp about Gallic "ingratitude" for their 1940s rescue might consider whether we were paying a 160-year-old debt.
[January 1, 2006 fell on a Sunday, and in that issue of the Oregonian, books editor Jeff Baker chose A Great Improvisation as one of the ten best books of the year, and quoted a few lines from my review.]