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By Root 931 0

of Lafayette—whose charm won Washington to love him like a father and Congress to appoint him Major General, and American recruits, who did not like to serve under foreigners, to fight willingly under his command—the young nobles of France flocked to volunteer in the American battle. Restless in the boredom and vacuum of court life, where the only excitement lay in vying for a nod from an overfed King in a powdered wig or a languid wave of his hand inviting their presence at the morning ritual in his dressing room, they craved manhood in military exercise, traditionally the path to reward, and a chance to devote their valor to the magic goddess Liberty, who was opening hearts of men in the tired and quarrelsome realms of the Old World. “Government by consent of the governed,” that magic phrase promised by the American Declaration of Independence, thrilled the minds and hearts of subjects ruled for generations by the dictatorship of monarchs and nobles. The promise seemed personified by the young new nation fighting for birthright in America. Her appearance in the world, they felt, would herald a new order of liberty, equality and the rule of reason for old Europe. What higher task could there be for men of liberal mind than to dedicate their arms and fortunes to aid the coming of that event?

A more mundane desire to retaliate for the loss of Canada revived the old impulse to fight the British that had stirred in their bones ever since William the Norman found a reason for quarrel in the 11th century. The King and Vergennes, his astute and hard-driving Minister for Foreign Affairs, thought rather of keeping the Colonies’ battle alive as a military cat’s-paw in France’s power struggle against Britain. By strengthening and augmenting the rebels’ resources, they could blunt the British sword, gain for themselves the advantage in North America, and by harassing British sea power and seizing a sugar island or two, they might even break down those wooden walls to invade the British hearth.

French purpose as conceived by Vergennes was not to assist the Colonies to victory or strengthen them to a level that might lead Britain to offer a reconciliation, leaving her once more free to knit up the torn fabric of empire and again concentrate her forces against France. Rather, it was to reinforce the Colonies enough to keep their battle going and keep Britain occupied in its toil.

So it was that out of desire to replace Britain as top dog, Bourbon France, placing a large block of irony across the path of history, lent her finances, fighting men and armaments in aid of a rebellion whose ideas and principles would initiate the age of democratic revolution and, together with its drain on the French budget, would bring down the ancien régime in the tremendous fall that marked forever the change from the Old World to the modern.

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“A Successful Battle May Give Us America”

IF THE FRENCH did not recognize the significance to themselves of what they were doing in aiding the rebels, neither did the British as a whole consider what place their conflict with the American Colonies had or would have in history. They thought of it simply as an uprising of colonial ingrates which had to be put down by force. To those with a larger world view, it was an imperial power struggle against France.

Ideologically, in the eternal struggle of left and right, the rebellion was seen as subversive of the social order, and the Americans as “levelers” whose example, if successful, would set alight revolutionary movements in Ireland and elsewhere. The British government and its partisans, as opposed to Whigs and radicals, felt themselves to be the upholders of right and privilege who should be receiving Europe’s support instead of hostility in their fight for existence. With France and Spain as enemies and Holland about to be another, and with the prospect of the Neutrality League contesting sovereignty of the seas, Europe in not coming to Britain’s aid, or in actively aiding the Americans, was seen as cutting her own throat; if the Americans won, she