Word: franklins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...neither side could agree on when, precisely, it was over--is all the more astonishing for having been based on mutual illusion. What was for France a revenge and a romance was for America a solemn matter of principles and practicalities. Effecting and sustaining that marriage of convenience required Franklin to leave many of those famed Franklinian virtues--the aversion to tyranny, the commitment to tolerance--at home. It was his job to court an absolute monarchy on behalf of a country to which civil liberties, freedom of the press and the right to dissent were to be sacred. Nowhere...
...Franklin could have begun with those about himself. America's original back-room operator was welcomed in France as a "noble savage," in sense and sensibility a joint production of Voltaire and Rousseau. The French embraced him as a frontier philosopher, which Franklin was not on either count. When consulted for information on farming, he confessed to thorough ignorance, having lived in cities all his life. His pages of political philosophy make for a skimpy offering. He was dismissive when his sister inquired after these: "I could as easily make a collection for you of all the past parings...
...Here Franklin's improvisational genius came into play, as did his restraint. Adams would snarl that Franklin would receive undue credit for having set out "to abolish monarchy, aristocracy, and hierarchy, throughout the world." If he could, he might well have; he had long been allergic to titles and idle elites and dynastic privilege. Fifty-three years before he sailed to France, he noted that Americans do not speak of "Master Adam" or "the Right Honourable Abraham" or "Noah, Esquire." Those observations had not endeared him to the ruling elites of America or Britain any more than his humble origins...
...What Franklin did have to do was extend to prerevolutionary France a tolerance that did not come easily to a devout republican and a man who seldom met with anything--from bifocals to popcorn to spelling to the Lord's Prayer--that he did not feel he could improve on. While he might well write off European peerages as "a sort of tar-and-feather honour, a mixture of foulness and folly," he kept this view to himself while consorting with the aristocrats who eased the U.S. into being. A year before his return, Franklin did concede, "There...
...discretion Franklin differed from his countrymen, who almost universally found the Paris posting a Calvary and who were vocal on the subject. One swore he would prefer a farm in America to a dukedom in France. Adams wailed that he would rather be a doorman in Congress. Among his torments was Franklin himself, who understood that some American qualities--piety, earnestness, efficiency--did not go far in 18th century France. Franklin remained at all times a pragmatist and an astonishingly flexible thinker. He was realistic about the prospects of conducting business in a land of radically different habits...