The most recent work I can think of concerning the French involvement in the American Revolution is Citizen Soldiers and the Key to the Bastille, by Julia Osman. As the title indicates, the book is more focused on the path to the French Revolution, but it includes a strong chapter or two about the American war. While the geopolitical reasoning for France taking a chunk out of the British Empire is pretty obvious, Osman also examined the propagandized view of the Revolution presented in France by both American diplomats and Enlightened French aristocrats.
France was the cradle of the Enlightenment, and the American rebels laid claim to the political ideals espoused by French philosophes in Paris’ numerous salons. To French eyes, the American militiamen who attacked British regulars outside of Boston were citizen-soldiers on the Greco-Roman model, patriotically motivated volunteers that had scored an unlikely victory against paid mercenaries of a distant and foreign king. This action fit Enlightenment ideals, which glorified personal sacrifice on behalf of one’s community and deplored the power a standing army gave a government. To the French, the American Revolution seemed to embody the most fashionable ideals of the age, and thus enjoyed the support of influential French intellectuals independent of the geopolitical implications of a colonial rebellion.
Ben Franklin was famously eager to lean into French stereotypes of American colonists. A wealthy and educated gentleman, Franklin appeared before the French court in a fur hat and homespunclothes, wearing a kind of national costume that reinforced perceptions of Americans as rugged frontiersmen. Showing the French what they wanted to see became the primary strategy for American agents in France.
Less famous than Franklin, but arguably more important, was the work of American propagandists catering to the salon set through the French press. The newspapers Gazette de Leyde and Gazette de Paris helped keep the literate French public informed of the American Revolution and advocated supporting the American cause. De Leyde was advised by Ben Franklin and Silas Deane, a Congressman who also helped organize the gun-running front company Hortalez et Cie. The Gazette de Leyde was the primary arm of the American propaganda effort outside of Franklin’s theatrics before the French court. De Leyde frequently published propagandized accounts of British atrocities in America while reinforcing ties between Americans and the classical archetype of the citizen-soldier. In de Leyde, Americans were portrayed as virtuous farmers that eagerly rushed to defend their rights any time the British army dared to make an appearance. Like the Roman hero Cincinnatus, they did not fight to conquer. Rather, once the threat was defeated, they would return peacefully to their farms. The gazette also inflated the military zeal of the American populace, portraying unified martial ardor among a population dedicated to drive an invader from their shores. Every military success enjoyed by American arms proved to the literate French that civic virtue trumped dull, mercenary professionalism of the British regulars.
Of particular fascination to the French was the American officer class. In France, military leadership was nearly inseparable from social position. While merit could secure an elevation in rank or a better commission, the barrier between officers and enlisted men was nearly impenetrable. To the French, the democratically elected officers of the American army were both a curiosity and, to proponents of the Enlightenment, refreshing proof that a society could function without ancient privilege and social ranks. Just as philosophes educated themselves in Enlightenment philosophy, these officers learned the science of war either from diligent study or lived experience. De Leyde played to this fascination, publishing a steady stream of biographies of American officers that accentuated their civic virtue and their martial prowess. If the literate French saw in the Revolution the Enlightenment given shape, these the officers of the American military were everything a virtuous philosophe could aspire to be.
American propaganda held up George Washington as the personification of all that was admirable about the American cause. Accounts in de Leyde portrayed the Virginian general as selfless and dedicated to the cause of his country, the very spirit of Cincinnatus given flesh. One French author, Paul Ulrich Du Buisson, complied American propaganda into a history of the war, titled A Precise Guide to the Anglo-American Revolution since its beginning in the year 1774 until the first of January 1778. Among this book's many exaggerations was a claim that Washington paid for the entire American war effort out of his own pocket. Washington confirmed his brilliance in French eyes through his dramatic winter campaign of 1776-1777, where he won victories over British outposts at Trenton and Princeton. This offensive, made in cold and stormy weather that kept the more conventional British army indoors, seemed to guarantee the success of patriotic American arms. The campaign inspired an overjoyed French thinker to say “Washington can conduct his fellow citizens so well that without soldiers, she [the United States] resists professional armies.” Jouy, a Parisian wallpaper manufacturer, celebrated Washington’s success with a new design, featuring the general seated, next to a female personification of America, in a chariot drawn by twin leopards. Propaganda and celebration turned Washington into a superheroic figure, the personification of virtue, bravery, and Enlightenment ideals.
French fascination with the American Revolution led some French authors to create a genre of fictional stories set in War of Independence. These stories accentuated the purity of the American spirit and the cruelty of British officers. Typical of the genre was Mis Mac Rea, by Michel-Rene Hilliard Auberteuil. This novel was based on the story of Jenny McCrea, a British camp follower that was killed by two Iroquois warriors during a drunken dispute during the Saratoga campaign. The novel moved McCrea’s story from 1777 to the British 1776 campaign around New York, removed her (or at least her family’s) loyalist sympathies, added some romance, and painted the Indians as collecting American scalps for British bounties. At the story’s conclusion, McCrea was avenged by her father and the men of her town, an entirely fictional embellishment to the original story. The fact that French authors produced propaganda like Mis Mac Rea without direct American patronage showed the far-reaching impact the idea of the Revolution had on the literate French.
With such a positive image of in the minds of members of the French elite, the American Revolution enjoyed a great deal of political support in the court of Louis XVI. To French idealists, material support for the Revolution in the form of money, weapons, and eventually a formal military alliance was more to than a way to nettle an imperial rival. The American Revolution provided an opportunity for France to re-cast itself as a defender of liberty and progress. Victory in such a righteous cause would allow the French to overturn “an effeminate century,” marred by repeated defeats by the English, and reaffirm France’s national virility. When coupled with the practical benefits of wounding Great Britain and possibly regaining a foothold in North America, the temptation to support the American rebels proved irresistible to France.
