Benjamin Franklin: The Diplomat Who Saved the Revolution with a Fur Hat

By 1776, Benjamin Franklin was 70 years old, which was ancient for that era and even more ancient for any era of wilderness diplomacy. He had physical limitations like gout and kidney stones that made every carriage ride a painful trip of endurance. He crossed the Atlantic in winter during the war to beg King George’s enemies for help. What he did in the drawing rooms of Paris over the next 7 years is the reason the United States exists.

Most Americans know that France allied with the American colonies during the Revolution. Not many people appreciate how crazy that alliance was, how long it took, or how it barely happened. When Franklin arrived in France in December 1776, the military situation was bad. Washington had just retreated across the Delaware. The Continental Army was dissolving. The British had occupied New York. There was a legitimate argument that the revolution was already lost.

French Foreign Minister Vergennes wanted to bleed Britain. However, he was not in the business of backing losers. Franklin's task was to convince one of the most complicated royal courts in the world that an army of farmers could defeat the most powerful military on Earth. He had no leverage, no victories to point to, and himself.

Franklin made a serious bet. He refused to wear a powdered wig, the mark of respectability in Versailles. Instead, he wore a fur cap he had picked up in Canada years before. In French court fashion, this was insane. However, it was also irresistible. The French elite went wild. Here was the American, the wilderness philosopher, the man who had tamed lightning, and he was refusing to pretend to be European. Pictures of Franklin in the fur cap became best-selling items across France.

Franklin understood exactly what he was doing. He wrote to a friend that he had become, in France, “a being from another world.” He leveraged his celebrity to create access, and he used access to create allies. He dined with dukes, charmed ministers, planted stories in the French press, and cultivated Vergennes with the patience of a chess master while everyone else was still playing checkers.

The turning point came after the American victory at Saratoga in October 1777. Franklin had the victory he needed, and within months, France signed a formal alliance. That alliance brought French troops, money, and the French fleet, without which the siege of Yorktown would have been impossible. Cornwallis surrendered to a combined Franco-American force. The revolution was won.

An old man with gout and a Canadian fur hat changed the course of human history because he understood that perception, in diplomacy, is often more powerful than reality.

Sources

Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

Stacy Schiff. A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. New York: Henry Holt, 2005.

Dull, Jonathan R. A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Lopez, Claude-Anne, and Eugenia W. Herbert. The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family. New York: Norton, 1975.

Wood, Gordon S. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.