Treaty of Alliance — France Enters the War
France signed a treaty of alliance with the United States in February 1778 and turned a colonial rebellion into a world war. The French had been supplying the Americans covertly since 1776 through a front company run by Beaumarchais, the playwright, which shipped muskets, powder and uniforms from royal arsenals and billed a fiction. Something like ninety per cent of American gunpowder in the early war came from abroad. What Vergennes, the foreign minister, would not do was commit openly until the Americans showed they could win something. Saratoga in October 1777 supplied it. Burgoyne's surrender of an entire British army reached Paris in December, and the treaties were signed within eight weeks — one of amity and commerce, one of alliance, with a mutual undertaking that neither would make peace without the other and a French renunciation of any claim to territory on the North American mainland. Franklin had spent a year in Paris cultivating precisely this, in a fur cap. The motive was not sympathy for republics. France had lost Canada and India in 1763 and wanted the British Empire cut down. Spain joined in 1779, the Dutch in 1780, and Britain found itself fighting in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, off India and at Gibraltar, without an ally in Europe. The French fleet at the Chesapeake in 1781 is what made Yorktown possible. The war bankrupted France and helped produce its own revolution. Lafayette and the officers who served in America came home with a working example of a republic, and the debt Vergennes ran up to fund the war is what forced Louis XVI to call the Estates-General in 1789. The alliance is the clearest case in modern history of a monarchy financing the ideas that destroyed it.
- Year: 1778 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
