I feel like I learned about the American Revolutionary era in school about a million times, but found it so deeply boring that I retained very little of it. It wasn’t until I watched the John Adams miniseries a few years back that I learned/was reminded that Benjamin Franklin had gone to France to try to whip up support for the American cause during that period. This book tells that story in detail. Almost exhaustive detail, honestly. This is my second Stacy Schiff, I’d previously read her very well-regarded book on Cleopatra and not understood the hype. And with a second very meh experience with her work in this book, I think I’m ready to draw the conclusion that she’s not for me. There’s a lot of interesting information here, honestly, about how delicate the situation actually was and the challenges Franklin faced in trying to extract the money, goods, and personnel from France that were crucial to America’s successful independence, but the book as a whole is so overstuffed that’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Which is what a good history should do, at least as I see it as a reader. It should create a narrative and sense of momentum, both of which I found lacking. I felt like I was slogging through it for the most part, though Schiff is often witty and the humor kept it from getting completely bogged down. But there were so many things that could have been cut down significantly, like Franklin’s flirtations with French women, without sacrificing the core of the events that she’s trying to relate. It was fine. I wished it was better. ( )

My 2-star review is not a reflection on the quality of research, but on the way-too-academic-for-my-taste writing style. ( )

50. A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (Audio) by Stacy Schiff, read by Susan Denaker (2005, 21 hours 57 minutes, 512 pages in text form, Listened August 4 - September 2)

A long audio book, I kind of let this run along in the background, while being careful not to think about other audio books I might want to read next. I could enjoy it as long as I didn't ask too much in any one sitting. That being said, it's a pretty major work.

Benjamin Franklin spent nine years in Paris as a US Ambassador during and after the US War Revolutionary War. I always saw that as a footnote, but his roll was fundamental to the success of the war. It was French aid that allowed the US to separate from Britain, and it was French political decisions that allowed the US to then immediately become an independent entity without foreign ties. And yet, poor France not only never benefited from US independence, but spent so much on it, that this specific debt would play a key roll in the fall of the Bourbon monarchy and the beginning of the French revolution. Franklin was in center of this aide. Not only was he key to getting this kind of non-interfering French help, but he was one of very few, maybe the only one who could pull it off so well.

But the book is not so much a history of events as it is an effort to spend a lot of time with Ben Franklin, see what it was like to be him, see how he acted, what he was like in his many different relationships, see how he worked and thought and how he handled the various challenges that came his way. How he dealt with developed his relationship with the key French minister, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, and how he handled the various British ministers in Paris with their varying personalities.

This was an old Franklin with serious health problems that would only get worse. He was 70 years old when he arrived in Paris, and he brought along (illegitimate) grandsons. And he arrived as a hero. France went crazy over him, celebrated him as the celebrated their own Voltaire, to the point that Franklin had little privacy.

And there were many different Franklins. There was the playful one that flirted in with married woman, goaded those about him. The ever curious one involved in all sort of scientific endeavors, including a famous expose of Franz Mesmer (who gave us the word mesmerizing). There was the theatre going the Franklin, and the frugal one who limited his expenses, and the very hard working one. There was the distant and not at all warm family man, who chastised at length any of his children's or grandchildren's interests in anything not frugally responsible, and yet who, by necessity, offered associates children anything they might request. And there was simply brilliant and energetic famous Franklin who published newspapers, dashed off inventions, started postal and fire services. And then there was the foreign statesman, and here truly was a different Franklin, one who used all his strengths and charms, one who built relationships, balanced methodologies, worked in many different ways at the same time, who mastered the art of never committing to anything, one with common sense, and one who brought with him a wealth of well-rounded wisdom. It's quite amazing how it all came together so well - how he was such an elegant master of diplomacy.

There are a lot odds and ends I could mention here. There was French-American culture clash, where the royalty obsessed French valued honor, but had to learn that the greatest compliment they could give to an American was that he was sensible. Americans simply didn't get the French. Sam Addams' not so helpful diplomatic efforts stand out. Brilliant in many ways, rightly suspicious of France, he was an open book, and diplomatic disaster who went straight after everything and openly wore his disdain for the needed French on his sleeve. He couldn't stand, and never got, Franklin's inability to commit to anything. His hatred of Franklin only subsided when Franklin's health deteriorated. Adams comes across as a buffoon - and he was one of the better diplomats. Thomas Jefferson later did get Franklin. After Franklin left, King Louis XVI, in a question, asked if Jefferson was Franklin's replacement. Jefferson replied that no one could replace Franklin, and he was merely Franklin's successor. Adams could never have managed to say that.

And there is Franklin's legacy. His American legacy is mixed, at best. An American hero, yet he has been butchered by American intelligentsia as unsophisticated, inelegant, practical, and distant. He returned from Paris to become elected to the equivalent of governor of Pennsylvania, but Congress would never pay him his expenses from Paris. His contemporaries never came to terms with Franklin's nine years away. Yet, in France Franklin arrived a hero and left an even bigger hero, praised by the many great French thinkers throughout history.

My complaint with this book would be the length and lack of movement. Trying to get the most out of every moment, Schiff slowly drags through the years, and in audio it reads even slower. For someone looking to fall in love with Franklin, this would be a nice place to spend time. I found it enjoyable, but felt a constant itch to have things move along a bit.

2014
https://www.librarything.com/topic/179643#4834557 ( )

An engrossing and informative account that goes far beyond common knowledge of the French involvement in the American Revolution and shows additonal sides of important founding fathers. ( )

Interesting what different positions my previous LT reviewers took on this book. It is of course hardly a full blown biography of Franklin, but one that focuses on his French experience. I would judge it competent. ( )