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72 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lively, witty, and fun, May 9, 2005
Founding Fathers are hot stuff these days. Benjamin Franklin, with two major bios in the past three years (Morgan and Isaacson) and re-publication of others by H.W. Brands and Gordon Wood, may be the hottest. Into this crowd wades Stacy Schiff, whose elegant and witty biography of Vera Nabokov won a 2000 Pulitzer (and whose previous bio of Saint-Exupéry garnered a nomination). Why step from uncommon byways onto a crowded boulevard?
Happily, Schiff's breezy, cosmopolitan, but never superficial style is excellently suited to the open-minded satirist and scientist, and a tale that reads like a cruel farce. _A Great Improvisation_ focuses on just eight years of Franklin's 84-year life, starting in 1776 when he was sent to Paris by the Continental Congress at the age of 70 to get France into the war. Fortunately, France regarded Franklin as a celebrity genius, which was more than many of his colleagues back home in Congress thought of him.
Franklin was "honest, but not too honest, which qualifies in France as a failure of imagination." He could "indulge in the ingenious and wholly specious argument, a staple of French conversation." His defense of French admiral d'Estaing was "a shining tribute to benevolent ignorance. (And one that happened accidentally to be accurate.)" Surrounded by spies, he had papers and money stolen. The other Americans in Paris squabbled endlessly with one another, accusing the French of deceit and intrigue even more than the British. Franklin's co-commissioner, Arthur Lee, "was ideally suited for the mission in every way save for his personality, which was rancid."
Poor trans-Atlantic communications enabled the Paris delegation's enemies to poison Congress against them, especially Franklin, who risked censure several times. He also was beset by psoriasis boils, gout and bladder stones. Schiff does not neglect Franklin's poor relations with much of his family, and his flirtations with French ladies, widowed and married. It's a wonder it all came out so well. Not a little of the credit goes to Franklin's skill as "a natural diplomat, genial and ruthless." When he was "rebuffed, he played hard to get"!
France ended up backing the colonies' successful revolution with men, arms, ships, and aid that would be worth $13 billion today. Americans who carp about Gallic "ingratitude" for their 1940s rescue might consider whether we were paying a 160-year-old debt.
With writing this good, it's startling to encounter a false note: more than once, Schiff uses "adverse" when "averse" is the word she wants. The book also shows rare but regrettable signs of sloppy editing. Franklin's grandson Temple is said to be 18 upon their arrival in Paris in mid 1777, but thirty pages and five months later he is 17. The news of Burgoyne's capture as a prisoner after the Battle of Saratoga is reported to hit Paris on Dec. 4, 1778, which is a year late.
Nevertheless, Schiff handles a broad array of characters and events with élan. Her book reads like a spirited production by Merchant-Ivory.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Benjamin Franklin deserves his place on the face of the $100 bill!, January 28, 2007
In my British ignorance, I had led myself to believe that there was only one version of the life of Benjamin Franklin - that of the unique and unparalleled polymath and all-American hero, born in the British Empire but buried at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the great republic that he helped to create.
But Stacy Schiff's extremely readable and obviously well-researched book that covers the period of Dr. Franklin's life when he was an envoy of the second Continental Congress to the Court of King Louis XVI of France also covers the controversy that surrounded this amateur ambassador, stirred most particularly by the brothers Arthur Lee and William Lee of Virginia and John Adams of Massachusetts, later to be the second President of The United States. The former seem to have been motivated by Southern superciliousness and arrogance, 'qualities' battered out of their kind in the later 'War for Southern Independence' by the descendants of the likes of the latter, possessors of their own special sort of sanctimonious superiority complexes.
I can forgive the Lee family for almost anything, for one of my all-time American heroes is General Robert Edward Lee, but it is clear that his older relatives, Arthur and William, disgraced themselves, Virginia and their infant nation by their constant sniping at the one man who was winning over French opinion and, more importantly, attracting French cash and much, much more, for General Washington's army. As to Adams, his distaste for the venerable Dr. Franklin is sufficiently well-documented not to be doubted. The motive for this distaste can reasonably be attributed in part to his narrow and God-fearing New England background, especially when contrasted with Franklin's leading and learned role in enlightening America. The one was old Massachusetts, through and through, whilst the other early 'escaped' to Philadelphia.
I don't suppose it suited some of his critics that Benjamin Franklin was a 'liberal,' not only in his personal and family life but also in his general tolerance of others and his enjoyment of the female attractions of the French Court and of Paris. Of course, they might just have been jealous of the old boy, who, well into his seventies, was getting away with what a twenty-year-old might not have dared to attempt.
Not all were detractors of the good doctor: I was delighted to read - and will remember - the marvellous quote (which I hope is not apocryphal) of the Virginian who was to become the third President of The United States. Mr Jefferson, upon arriving at Versailles in May, 1785, is said to have been asked: "Is it you, Sir, who replaces Dr. Franklin?," to which another of my all-time American heroes replied: "No one can replace him, Sir; I am only his successor."
But, for me, the most surprising portion of this book is its thorough cataloguing of the ingratitude of America and Americans towards Franklin and towards France, without whose financial sacrifices and physical support in the shape of armies and navies, the War of Independence was more likely to have gone the way of innumerable other local revolts. In the absence of French help and of the efforts of Franklin, King George III and his successors would likely have remained the supreme governors, based in London, of all of the squabbling colonies.
Indeed, it seems that it was not until 1917 that the American Government realised - even if it did then - that a deep debt of gratitude was owed to France. By then, of course, Dr. Franklin and King Louis XVI were long dead, but the damage of unpaid debts had been done. France, her treasury depleted by the equivalent of the many billions of dollars spent in the name of America, was riven asunder by her own dreadful revolution that has coloured the judgements of world statesmen and French politics ever since. I well remember, back in the 1960s, when my wife and I first took our young children to visit the areas of northern France that had been fought over so many times in two great wars. We stopped off in a small and attractive village to buy a newspaper and all that was available was "L'Humanité," the Communist party's organ. Some sections of the left-leaning French peasantry still contrast sharply with my right-facing fellow peasants of rural England, a reflection of our different histories.
By my British lights, perhaps Dr. Franklin should have done that which his contemporary critics claimed he was doing - fail. But succeed he did, and America and Americans, at least, can and should be grateful for that, to him and, of course, to France, as well as to her eminent foreign minister at the time of Franklin's vital assignment, the half-forgotten Comte de Vergennes.
On balance, I believe that Benjamin Franklin deserves his place on the face of the $100 bill, and Stacy Schiff's first-rate and five-star book deserves to be read; and not only read, but marked, learned, and inwardly digested.
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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Some original material but anecdotal and baroque prose, June 7, 2006
I wanted to like this book, which delves more deeply than
others--and through previously unmined sources--into Franklin's years as Revolutionary America's representative in France. It was there that he established his most significant historic legacy, by securing French support in manpower and money which was both critical to the success of the American Revolution and an unintended catalyst for the subsequent French Revolution.
But I come away from the book rather disappointed, because while the writer has done her homework and obviously knows her source material, all that learning has been imperfectly translated into written form. And the reason appears to be that Ms. Schiff is more a literary stylist (and a good one) than a historian, and she is so intent on producing a witty book with turns of irony and serendipity on almost every page, that it gets in the way of a clear history. The language of the book itself often resembles the convoluted baroque aesthetic characteristic of the France Franklin experienced--meaning it is often a slow and less than transparent read, even if eventually entertaining.
But too entertaining. The effort to offer up humorous anecdotes sometimes takes the author down irrelevant byways and, above all, interferes with a clear and analytical exposition of the history. There is too much of pure daily narrative (occasionally trivial)--this happened, then that, then the other thing--without an overarching analytical framework. When that framework does sporadically appear, in particular as regards French attitudes and motives in supporting the American Revolution, it is not always internally consistent at different points of the book. Maybe French attitudes/motives evolved over time. Or maybe the book is just inconsistent, since broad synthesis is not its strength.
That said, the book is not to be dismissed. It is a contribution to the canon of Revolutionary Era histories and biographies. It does, in a bobbing and weaving manner, offer some insight into French motives for assisting the colonies (essentially to even the score with Britain for the latter's defeat of France in the French and Indian War, while hopefully ensuring that the US would remain a weak power ideally dependent on France). Above all, it well illustrates how hapless the Continental Congress was, at least as regards foreign relations; how amateurish and internally riven US representatives to Europe (and particularly in France) were during this period, acting at cross purposes and often out of petty spite. (Franklin stands out as the exception. John Adams comes in for a devastating portrait.) Above all, both in the aforementioned aspects and by focusing on how much the American Revolution depended on the foreign (mainly French) loans Franklin secured rather than American self-taxation, this book provides a new perspective--as does another recent book "Iron Tears" by Stanley Weintraub--regarding how much the American Revolution was not so much "won" by the colonies as by the largesse of the French and the mistakes of the British.
The latter contributions justify purchase of the book by Revolutionary Era afficionados. But for other audiences, I would say the book falls between two stools: it is neither rigorous, analytical history, nor pure entertainment. It falls somewhere in between, and that is its weakness.
All that said, Ms. Schiff obviously has done her homework in original sources, and deserves thanks for bringing those sources to light.
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