Two birthdays, one story
Ask an American about July 4, 1776 and you get fireworks. Ask a French person about July 14, 1789 and you get fireworks too. What almost nobody tells you is that the two dates are joined by a very long, very expensive thread.
Holding one end of it was Louis XVI, the king who lived at Versailles. He made a decision that was generous, clever and, as it turned out, fatal: he helped thirteen British colonies become a country.
It worked. It also cost him his treasury, his throne and, eventually, his head. Not the return on investment he had in mind.
Why would a king help rebels?
Fair question. Kings, as a rule, are not big fans of people who overthrow kings.
But Louis XVI had something stronger than principles: a grudge. In 1763 France had lost the Seven Years' War to Britain, and with it Canada and most of its empire in North America. So when Britain's own colonies started a fight with London, the king and his foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, saw a golden opportunity. Why fight Britain yourself when its children are happy to do it for you?
It began in secret. From 1776, money and muskets crossed the Atlantic through a fake trading company, Roderigue Hortalez et Cie. The man running it was not a diplomat or a banker. It was Beaumarchais, the playwright who would later write The Marriage of Figaro. Only in eighteenth-century France does a comedy writer end up arming a revolution.
The most famous American in Paris
Then came Benjamin Franklin.
He landed in France in December 1776, seventy years old, and Paris fell for him almost overnight. At Versailles men wore powdered wigs; Franklin turned up in a marten-fur cap and his own thin grey hair. The French saw exactly what they wanted to see: a philosopher from the backwoods, simple, wise and free.
He settled in Passy, then a village on the hill above the Seine, and within months his face was everywhere: medallions, prints, rings, snuffboxes. He wrote to his daughter that it had become "as well known as that of the moon." Louis XVI, the story goes, got so tired of hearing about him that he had his portrait painted at the bottom of a porcelain chamber pot. A royal review, you might say.
Behind the fur cap, though, was a very shrewd negotiator. He waited. And when news arrived in December 1777 that the Americans had beaten a British army at Saratoga, he finally had what Versailles needed: proof that the rebels could actually win.
On February 6, 1778, France and the United States signed a Treaty of Alliance. France became the first great power to recognise American independence.
A teenager with his own ship
Some Frenchmen did not wait for treaties.
In 1777 the Marquis de Lafayette, nineteen years old, very rich and an orphan, bought his own ship and sailed to America against the explicit wishes of the king. Picture explaining that to your parents. Congress made him a major general. He was wounded at Brandywine, froze through the winter at Valley Forge, and became something very rare: a close friend of George Washington.
Lafayette later named his son Georges Washington. Washington, who had no children of his own, treated the young Frenchman almost like a son.
Yorktown: the day the French navy showed up
By 1781 the war had dragged on for six years. Then, in Virginia, everything clicked.
In September the French fleet of Admiral de Grasse beat the Royal Navy at the Battle of the Chesapeake and shut the door to the sea. On land, Washington's troops marched south with thousands of French soldiers under the Comte de Rochambeau. General Cornwallis found himself stuck at Yorktown with the ocean behind him and two armies in front.
On October 19, 1781, he surrendered.
Have another look at John Trumbull's painting at the top of this page. French officers on one side, Americans on the other. That is not artistic licence; that is Yorktown. Without France, the United States might have stayed a very good idea.
Peace came in 1783: the Treaty of Paris for America and, the same day, treaties with France and Spain signed at Versailles.
So who paid?
Here is the chapter American textbooks tend to skip.
France spent a fortune on the war, usually estimated at more than one billion livres. And instead of raising taxes to pay for it, the finance minister, the Genevan banker Jacques Necker, borrowed. A lot. At high interest.
In 1781 Necker published a report on the royal finances that showed a surplus. The public loved it. There was just one small detail: the cost of the war was not in it. Every accountant reading this just winced.
By the late 1780s, interest on the debt was eating roughly half of the royal budget. The kingdom that had just humbled Britain was, to put it simply, broke.
From Versailles to the Bastille
Louis XVI tried to fix things. He asked the nobles and the Church, who paid very little tax, to pay more. You can guess how that went.
Then the weather joined in. In July 1788 a monster hailstorm flattened crops across northern France, and the price of bread, the main food of ordinary families, shot up.
Out of money and out of options, the king did something no French king had done since 1614: he summoned the Estates-General, clergy, nobles and commoners, to Versailles.
They met on May 5, 1789. Six weeks later the commoners declared themselves a National Assembly. Locked out of their hall, they crowded into a royal tennis court in the town of Versailles and swore not to go home until France had a constitution. That is the Tennis Court Oath, and yes, the most important vow in French history was taken in a sports hall.
On July 14, 1789, Parisians stormed the Bastille.
The ideas came back too
It was not only debt that crossed the Atlantic. Ideas did as well.
Thousands of French officers and soldiers had fought for a republic with no king and no nobles, then sailed home to a kingdom full of both. Awkward. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, was living in Paris as the American minister in 1789, and he talked often with Lafayette while Lafayette drafted what became the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted on August 26, 1789.
And the best souvenir of all? In 1790 Lafayette sent George Washington the key of the Bastille. It still hangs at Mount Vernon. Try fitting that in your carry-on.
How it ended
The king who helped create the United States never saw it grow up.
,_rev%C3%AAtu_du_grand_costume_royal_en_1779_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg?width=900 "Louis XVI in his coronation robes, by Antoine-François Callet, 1779 · via Wikimedia Commons")
Louis XVI was executed in Paris on January 21, 1793. Marie Antoinette followed on October 16. Versailles, where the king had welcomed Benjamin Franklin in March 1778 and where the Estates-General had met, was emptied.
So when you walk through the Hall of Mirrors, think about it for a second: part of your own country's story was decided a few steps away. Not bad for a building most people visit for the chandeliers.
Where to see it today
- At Versailles: the King's Apartments, the Hall of Mirrors and the Queen's rooms, where the last royal family lived until October 6, 1789. The Tennis Court (Salle du Jeu de Paume) is a short walk away in the town.
- In Paris: Place de la Bastille (the fortress is gone, but its outline is marked in the paving nearby), Place de la Concorde where Louis XVI was executed, and Lafayette's grave in Picpus cemetery, where an American flag always flies.
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