Ben Franklin’s Paris triumph

A Great Improvisation

Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

Stacy Schiff

Henry Holt and Co.: 490 pp., $27.50

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“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” wrote the Greek poet Archilochus.

British philosopher Isaiah Berlin said this means that, for all his slyness, the fox is defeated by the hedgehog’s single-minded defense, and he divides thinkers into hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs relate every act and idea to a central vision and system. Plato, Dante and Hegel belong to this category. Foxes, however, “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” Berlin included Aristotle, Montaigne and Tolstoy in the latter group.

To which does Benjamin Franklin belong? In “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America,” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stacy Schiff offers abundant reasons to qualify him as a fox. In her magnificent account of Franklin’s mission to Paris to secure French support for American independence, she portrays a man with contradictions aplenty. He pursued public morality with as much vigor as he did the married (and indulgent) French ladies.

A printer by profession, he was known to the world as the tamer of lightning. He was a latecomer to the Revolution, having devoted his years as a Colonial agent in London to the preservation of “that fine and noble China vase, the British empire.”

Franklin’s rivals would have had no doubt of his kinship with the fox, albeit not in the manner attributed to the cunning species by Berlin. William Lee, a failed American envoy to the courts of Berlin and Vienna, said he had difficulty telling “if America’s greater enemy was ‘the old mule,’ which was Great Britain, or the ‘old fox,’ which was Ben Franklin.” And John Adams, smitten by envy, grumbled that the French thought the American Revolution sprang from Franklin’s “electric wand.”

Jealousy motivated some of these malicious comments, for when Franklin arrived in France, he was the most prominent American of his time. In his first months in Paris, he would join in the sudden applause audiences would burst into in theaters -- until he learned he had been applauding himself. An endless stream of visitors to his residence offered everything from military services to a modern variety of a Trojan horse. Franklin began to dread the sound of an approaching carriage.

Not that he was unacquainted with the practical downside of fame. “I don’t know what it is about our home,” Franklin quoted his wife as having said years earlier, in Philadelphia, “but not one madman sets foot on the American continent without proceeding directly to our front door.”

Schiff has such command of tempo that she sends shivers down a reader’s spine when describing a 1780 conversation in which abbe Jean-Louis Soulavie asks Franklin about a prediction that France would one day suffer a revolution even greater than America’s. Franklin responds that he “had some forebodings.”

Schiff, whose book on Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, Vera, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography, has drawn on newly available and little exploited primary sources for the writing of “A Great Improvisation.” These do less to cast Franklin in a new light than to illuminate, in fuller scope and in finer nuance, his mission to Paris. She re-creates the majesty and squalor of a city with more prostitutes than there were soldiers in Gen. George Washington’s army, and a Franklin who could remark on the “abject state of disrepair” of Versailles’ plumbing on his first visit in 1767 yet relish the dissipation of Parisian salons.

Schiff also shows an envoy, who, for all his distractions and his almost casual style of diplomacy, persuaded the Bourbon court to bankroll American independence. As Henry A. Kissinger, a realpolitik authority, has written admiringly, Franklin was a statesman who understood the European politics of balance of power, which allowed him to obtain French support for the Revolution without trading servitude to England for one to France. So long were the periods of no contact from Congress that Franklin was forced, she says, into “a great improvisation: He was inventing American foreign policy out of whole cloth, teaching himself diplomacy on the job.”

By Berlin’s standard, Franklin was a hedgehog, albeit one in a fox’s skin. Almost alone, he defeated the guile of all his rivals and the forces conspiring against his mission in France. A consummate chess player, Franklin during a match with an old duchess made a rather unorthodox capture, Schiff writes. “We do not take kings so,” his aristocratic rival told him. “We do in America,” he replied.

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Avedis Hadjian is a former writer and editor for CNN online.