Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1989 | Volume 40, Issue 5
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1989 | Volume 40, Issue 5
The root of the trouble lay in the equivocal nature of the aid France extended to America in the 1770s. The American Revolution wore two different faces in France, and each was one of the many faces of Benjamin Franklin. On the one hand, Louis XVI was using British colonists to discommode his rival, George III, and Franklin was the courtier who pointed out the advantages of such a course to Louis’s ministers. A famous contemporary image of Franklin is the porcelain statuette group by Lemire, in which Franklin bows to the French king, who presents him with the Treaty of 1778, which allied us to France (a document that would be the subject of heated controversy just over a decade later).
A more complex picture of the diplomatic forces at work is the allegorical print by Étienne Pallièr, which shows Franklin helping unleash the French Hercules, who bashes with his club Britannia and her cowering lion. On the right side of the print, Neptune dispatches the French navy, carrying cannon forged by Vulcan. All the gods of neoclassicism move to accomplish the will of Louis XVI’s government. One king rebukes another in the balance of imperial politics. (Although the Declaration of Independence had been specifically crafted to bring France into the conflict, Louis responded only after the first substantial defeat of an English army at Saratoga.)
But to the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, Franklin bore quite another face—himself a neoclassical god now, Prometheus, the tamer of lightning and the scourge of tyrants, the scientist and the philosopher of freedom. That’s the way Fragonard drew Franklin and Marguerite Gérard engraved him, adding the heroic hexameter of Turgot, Eripuit coelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis (“He tore from heaven lightning, and the scepter from kings”). Turgot, the reforming economist, had to circulate his line of poetry anonymously, since the plural for kings (tyrannis) showed that French thinkers hoped the American Revolution would effect changes in their own society, weakening the hold of Louis XVI’s establishment, which had censored their works. Franklin encouraged this view of America’s meaning for the future, joining the