A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

An engaging account that really makes Benjamin Franklin come alive. With what is going on in America right now not much has changed.

What can I say? Stacy Schiff's sparkling prose is a joy. This book covers Benjamin Franklin's time in France, or in her own words:"The outline of his unfinished autobiography ends: 'To France. Treaty, etc.' This is the story of those four words, with emphasis on the last."

Schiff's book is not written for someone looking for a concise Franklin biography. Her oblique references to Franco-American relations and misunderstandings, to Franklin's position in the founding father pantheon (she shrinks Adams, who had recently seen a revival, back to size) require from the reader a good working knowledge of history. Franklin's life serves as a theme for countless improvisations and insights about the man, his time and our world.

50. A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (Audio) by Stacy Schiff, read by Susan Denaker (2005, 21 hours 57 minutes, 512 pages in text form, Listened August 4 - September 2)

A long audio book, I kind of let this run along in the background, while being careful not to think about other audio books I might want to read next. I could enjoy it as long as I didn't ask too much in any one sitting. That being said, it's a pretty major work.

Benjamin Franklin spent nine years in Paris as a US Ambassador during and after the US War Revolutionary War. I always saw that as a footnote, but his roll was fundamental to the success of the war. It was French aid that allowed the US to separate from Britain, and it was French show more political decisions that allowed the US to then immediately become an independent entity without foreign ties. And yet, poor France not only never benefited from US independence, but spent so much on it, that this specific debt would play a key roll in the fall of the Bourbon monarchy and the beginning of the French revolution. Franklin was in center of this aide. Not only was he key to getting this kind of non-interfering French help, but he was one of very few, maybe the only one who could pull it off so well.

But the book is not so much a history of events as it is an effort to spend a lot of time with Ben Franklin, see what it was like to be him, see how he acted, what he was like in his many different relationships, see how he worked and thought and how he handled the various challenges that came his way. How he dealt with developed his relationship with the key French minister, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, and how he handled the various British ministers in Paris with their varying personalities.

This was an old Franklin with serious health problems that would only get worse. He was 70 years old when he arrived in Paris, and he brought along (illegitimate) grandsons. And he arrived as a hero. France went crazy over him, celebrated him as the celebrated their own Voltaire, to the point that Franklin had little privacy.

And there were many different Franklins. There was the playful one that flirted in with married woman, goaded those about him. The ever curious one involved in all sort of scientific endeavors, including a famous expose of Franz Mesmer (who gave us the word mesmerizing). There was the theatre going the Franklin, and the frugal one who limited his expenses, and the very hard working one. There was the distant and not at all warm family man, who chastised at length any of his children's or grandchildren's interests in anything not frugally responsible, and yet who, by necessity, offered associates children anything they might request. And there was simply brilliant and energetic famous Franklin who published newspapers, dashed off inventions, started postal and fire services. And then there was the foreign statesman, and here truly was a different Franklin, one who used all his strengths and charms, one who built relationships, balanced methodologies, worked in many different ways at the same time, who mastered the art of never committing to anything, one with common sense, and one who brought with him a wealth of well-rounded wisdom. It's quite amazing how it all came together so well - how he was such an elegant master of diplomacy.

There are a lot odds and ends I could mention here. There was French-American culture clash, where the royalty obsessed French valued honor, but had to learn that the greatest compliment they could give to an American was that he was sensible. Americans simply didn't get the French. Sam Addams' not so helpful diplomatic efforts stand out. Brilliant in many ways, rightly suspicious of France, he was an open book, and diplomatic disaster who went straight after everything and openly wore his disdain for the needed French on his sleeve. He couldn't stand, and never got, Franklin's inability to commit to anything. His hatred of Franklin only subsided when Franklin's health deteriorated. Adams comes across as a buffoon - and he was one of the better diplomats. Thomas Jefferson later did get Franklin. After Franklin left, King Louis XVI, in a question, asked if Jefferson was Franklin's replacement. Jefferson replied that no one could replace Franklin, and he was merely Franklin's successor. Adams could never have managed to say that.

And there is Franklin's legacy. His American legacy is mixed, at best. An American hero, yet he has been butchered by American intelligentsia as unsophisticated, inelegant, practical, and distant. He returned from Paris to become elected to the equivalent of governor of Pennsylvania, but Congress would never pay him his expenses from Paris. His contemporaries never came to terms with Franklin's nine years away. Yet, in France Franklin arrived a hero and left an even bigger hero, praised by the many great French thinkers throughout history.

My complaint with this book would be the length and lack of movement. Trying to get the most out of every moment, Schiff slowly drags through the years, and in audio it reads even slower. For someone looking to fall in love with Franklin, this would be a nice place to spend time. I found it enjoyable, but felt a constant itch to have things move along a bit.

2014
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Magnificent

Sparkling, humorous, wonderful prose. Dr. Franklin would approve. One of the best books of its kind I have ever read. Worthy of its marvelous subject.

My 2-star review is not a reflection on the quality of research, but on the way-too-academic-for-my-taste writing style.

An engrossing and informative account that goes far beyond common knowledge of the French involvement in the American Revolution and shows additonal sides of important founding fathers.

Only because I have the utmost respect for and interest in what Franklin did in Paris did I finish this book.
The prose in this book is so contorted, and the actual information content so weak, that I had to work to finish it. Had I known how little reward would be forthcoming for the effort, I'd never have started.
I'm an avid reader of history, and I bought this book because I'd seen some good reviews for it, but I doubt that I'll ever buy another of Ms. Schiff's works again.