Smitten though they were with Franklin, few Frenchmen could locate the American colonies on a map. It seemed equally likely that they bordered the Black Sea or were part of India. Nor did the two countries make for natural partners. “I cannot deny that the Americans are somewhat difficult to handle, especially for a Frenchman,” was the candid verdict of the Marquis de Lafayette. The partnership was held together by various illusions about the past and a general misunderstanding about the future. Even Lafayette at one point assumed that Washington would eventually be appointed dictator.
Vergennes engaged throughout in a familiar calculation: The only danger greater than not helping the Americans at all, he insisted in discussion after discussion at Versailles, was not helping them enough. He carried the day. The majority of the guns fired on the British at Saratoga had been French. The surrender four years later at Yorktown would be to troops that were equal parts French and American, supplied and clothed by France, all of them protected by a French fleet.
Few 18th-century Europeans expected America ever to play a role on the world stage. Versailles assumed that 13 disparate colonies strung over 1,000 miles of coastline would inevitably quarrel. History had proved republics to be fragile. This new one was unlikely, Vergennes contended, to develop any great appetite for expansion. Before it did, French vices would have infected America, stunting its growth and progress.
It would be well over a century, to cries of “Lafayette, nous voici,” before America acknowledged its French debt. A generation later, with the Lend-Lease Act of 1941, Franklin Roosevelt appointed America the “arsenal of democracy,” a role we have since reprised regularly. The rhetoric soared but the logic was as self-serving as had been that of the Comte de Vergennes. These outlays were investments in what Mitch McConnell recently called “cold, hard American interests.” The idea was “to help degrade the military of a major adversary.” The 1941 Act is known more fully as “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States.”
Some 250 years after Franklin’s French errand, Congress is again debating the entanglement of a young republic — one that actually does border the Black Sea — with a wealthy benefactor. Political considerations aside, it pays to remember that the United States itself was, with its own bid for freedom, once the infant republic in dire need of munitions. No one at Versailles knew that the man waving about a 38-page shopping list would be remembered as one of the greatest diplomats in our history. Nor did anyone suspect that granting his requests would help to create an “arsenal of democracy,” a power that might one day, for the most high-minded and the most self-serving of reasons, assist another nation in its struggle for autonomy. Neither mattered when it came to the French calculus, based on something more fundamental. As one French gunrunner reminded Congress in September, 1776, “The enemies of our enemies are more than half our friends.”