Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes
Vergennes brought France into the American war to break Britain, and the cost of it helped break France. He was a career diplomat from a Burgundian legal family, ambassador at Constantinople and then Stockholm, and was made foreign minister by the twenty-year-old Louis XVI in 1774. He had no enthusiasm for republics and said so; his interest in the American rebellion was that Britain had taken Canada and India in the last war and needed to be cut down. He funded the rebels covertly from 1776 through a front company that shipped muskets and powder while France was formally neutral, and waited for evidence that they could win. Saratoga was that evidence. The news reached Paris in December 1777 and he signed the treaties of alliance and commerce in February 1778, which turned a colonial rebellion into a war Britain had to fight in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and off India at the same time. He also managed the peace, and managed it badly from France's point of view: the Americans negotiated separately with Britain in 1782 in breach of the alliance, and he complained but accepted it rather than prolong a war he could no longer pay for. That is the part that matters afterwards. The war cost something over a billion livres, was financed entirely by borrowing because the tax system could not be reformed against noble resistance, and the debt service was consuming about half of royal revenue by the late 1780s - which is what forced the calling of the Estates-General. He died in February 1787, three months before the assembly of notables refused to solve the problem, and did not see what followed.
- Lived: 1719 CE – 1787 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: politician
