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A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America Paperback – January 10, 2006
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In this dazzling work of history, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author follows Benjamin Franklin to France for the crowning achievement of his career ● Michael Douglas stars in Franklin, premiering April 12 only on Apple TV+
"In December of 1776 a small boat delivered an old man to France." So begins an enthralling narrative account of how Benjamin Franklin--seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French--convinced France, an absolute monarchy, to underwrite America's experiment in democracy.
When Franklin stepped onto French soil, he well understood he was embarking on the greatest gamble of his career. By virtue of fame, charisma, and ingenuity, Franklin outmaneuvered British spies, French informers, and hostile colleagues; engineered the Franco-American alliance of 1778; and helped to negotiate the peace of 1783. The eight-year French mission stands not only as Franklin's most vital service to his country but as the most revealing of the man.
In A Great Improvisation, Stacy Schiff draws from new and little-known sources to illuminate the least-explored part of Franklin's life. Here is an unfamiliar, unforgettable chapter of the Revolution, a rousing tale of American infighting, and the treacherous backroom dealings at Versailles that would propel George Washington from near decimation at Valley Forge to victory at Yorktown. From these pages emerges a particularly human and yet fiercely determined Founding Father, as well as a profound sense of how fragile, improvisational, and international was our country's bid for independence.
- Print length526 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJanuary 10, 2006
- Dimensions5.45 x 1 x 8.2 inches
- ISBN-100805080090
- ISBN-13978-0805080094
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“In sparkling prose, burnished to a high gloss, Stacy Schiff tells the tale of Benjamin Franklin in Paris with piquant humor, outrageous anecdotes worthy of the finest French farce, and a wealth of lapidary observations. Her Paris unfolds as a glittering carnival of spies, rogues, frauds, and flawed reformers, eccentric nobility and perpetually squabbling American diplomats. Towering above all is the protean figure of Franklin, an improbable compound of wit, cunning, hypocrisy, courage, and tireless devotion to his country. C'est magnifique!” ―Ron Chernow, author of Alexander Hamilton
“This is a book to savor. Every page has some new nugget of insight, or some graceful turn of phrase that generates a verbal airburst over the most psychologically agile American of his time, perhaps of all time. Schiff has given a genuine jolt to the recent surge of interest in Franklin, along the way demonstrating why she is generally regarded as one of the most gifted storytellers writing today.” ―Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers and His Excellency: George Washington
“What a brilliant book. A Great Improvisation pays tribute to the extraordinary love affair between monarchist France and the republican Benjamin Franklin. Their child was America, conceived at home and nurtured into maturity by France. It is a story full of intrigue, jealousy and passion. But ultimately it is a celebration of one American's love for his country. Stacy Schiff has written a masterpiece, capturing a fleeting moment when the stars aligned between Congress and Versailles. ” ―Amanda Foreman, Author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire
“Stacy Schiff's extensive scholarship, her eye for the colorful detail, and her lively wit combine to bring alive -- in full dress and in an absorbing narrative -- the cast of statesmen, adventurers, spies, courtiers, patriots and con men who have a part in the story of Benjamin Franklin's negotiations for American independence, and to fix among them America's greatest diplomat, winning his way (and America's) in a style of calculated disarray. An extraordinary book.” ―Edmund S. Morgan, author of Benjamin Franklin
“This remarkable book breaks new ground. Stacy Schiff has dug deep into the archives of France (no mean feat!) and brought up a motherlode of gems which, polished by her wit, illuminate the doublespeak of the ambassadorial world, as well as the ferocious backbiting among the colonial envoys. From this maelstrom emerges Franklin, inventing the American foreign service as he had figured out electricity, bifocals, a new stove, the glass armonica -- step by cautious step.” ―Claude-Anne Lopez, Author of Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris
About the Author
Stacy Schiff is the author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2000, and Saint-Exupery, which was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. Schiff's work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Times Literary Supplement. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Great Improvisation
Franklin, France, and the Birth of America
By Stacy SchiffHenry Holt and Co.
Copyright © 2006 Stacy SchiffAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8009-4
Excerpt
From A Great Improvisation:Typically after an ocean crossing Franklin's eyes brimmed with tears at the sight of land; he had just withstood the most brutal voyage of his life. For thirty days he had pitched about violently on the wintry Atlantic, in a cramped cabin and under unremittingly dark skies. He was left with barely the strength to stand, but was to cause a sensation. Even his enemies conceded that he touched down in France like a meteor. Among American arrivals, only Charles Lindbergh could be said to have met with equal rapture, the difference being that Lindbergh was not a celebrity until he landed in Paris. At the time he set foot on French soil Benjamin Franklin was among the most famous men in the world. It was his country that was the great unknown. America was six months old; Franklin seventy years her senior. And the fate of that infant republic was, to a significant extent, in his hands.
(Continues...)Excerpted from A Great Improvisation by Stacy Schiff. Copyright © 2006 by Stacy Schiff. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Co..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Holt Paperbacks; First Edition (January 10, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 526 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0805080090
- ISBN-13 : 978-0805080094
- Item Weight : 1.4 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.45 x 1 x 8.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,002 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
A Pulitzer Prize-winner, Stacy Schiff is the author of several bestselling biographies and historical works including, most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692. Her previous book, Cleopatra: A Life, appeared on most year-end best books lists, including the New York Times’s Top Ten Books of 2010, and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography. Cleopatra was translated into 30 languages. Schiff’s other work includes Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d’Amérique. Schiff is a Guggenheim and NEH Fellow and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Among other honors, she was named a 2011 Library Lion by the New York Public Library, a Boston Public Library Literary Light in 2016, and in 2017 received the Lifetime Achievement Award in History and Biography from the New England Historic Genealogical Society. She received the 2019 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. In 2018 she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2019. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. She lives in New York City.
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It’s true; Schiff has the unique ability to bring the distant past to life, all to our collective benefit. Compared to Ptolemaic Egypt (“Cleopatra”) or Puritan New England (“Witches”), capturing the pulse of diplomatic life in late eighteenth-century France is a cinch for her.
“The Great Improvisation” is a great read. There are many reasons to recommend it. First is Schiff’s wonderful sense of irreverent wit. For instance, when discussing the parade of dubious French officers seeking a commission to fight in America she quips, “The French nobility included a fair number of eight-year-old majors and fourteen-year-old colonels, every one of them burning to be nineteen-year-old generals.” Or when Temple Franklin, Benjamin’s grandson and unofficial secretary in France, got his mistress pregnant, Schiff notes that the unfortunate young woman had born “Franklin’s illegitimate son’s illegitimate son an illegitimate son.”
But probably the best reason to recommend “The Great Improvisation” is that it offers a clear window into the machinations of the American delegation in Paris during the War of Independence. Schiff’s core thesis is simple: “France was crucial to American independence, and Franklin was critical to France.” She constructs her delightful narrative around this argument.
Schiff calls the American delegation a “great improvisation” for good reason. The inchoate nation in rebellion against the British had no experience at statecraft, little understanding of the recondite procedures required to conduct diplomatic affairs at the courts of European nobility, and no financial credit upon which to draw to equip an army of farmers and mechanics. Congress sent the best tool they had at their disposal: Benjamin Franklin. It was an inspired choice, according to Schiff: “Franklin was a natural diplomat, genial and ruthless… [His] stature was the most the dangerous weapon in the American arsenal.”
“The obvious man for the job on one side of the ocean [Franklin],” Schiff writes, “He was the ideal man on the other.” The French adored Franklin from the moment he landed on their shores in November 1776. He embodied everything the French wished America represented: modesty, industry, and virility. He was the tamer of lightning, proof that nature ennobled the gifted. Nevertheless, Franklin was embarking into uncharted waters. “He was inventing American foreign policy from whole cloth,” Schiff says, “teaching himself diplomacy on the job, while serving as his country’s unofficial banker.” Franklin was particularly poorly suited for the latter responsibility, according to Schiff. “By nature Franklin was a streamliner and a simplifier, while everything about the procurement business was baroque and protracted”
France may have loved their new American ambassador, but the same cannot be said for Franklin’s fellow American representatives to Europe; almost every other American sent across the Atlantic on a diplomatic mission came to despise him. “The higher Franklin rose in the [French] public pantheon,” Schiff writes, “the lower he sank in the estimation of his colleagues.” Arthur Lee, a Virginian appointed envoy to Prussia and Spain, called Franklin “the most corrupt of all men.” Ralph Izard, a South Carolinian who served as the commissioner to the Court of Tuscany, noted in his diary, “Dr. Franklin was one of the most unprincipled men upon earth: that he was a man of no veracity, no honor, no integrity, as great a villain as ever breathed.” John Adams, the future president and fellow delegate to France, had for Franklin “no other sentiments than contempt or abhorrence...” [he was] “the demon of discord among our ministers, and curse and scourge of our foreign affairs.” His only ally, besides his grandson, was Silas Deane, the Connecticut lawyer originally sent to France as a secret envoy in 1776, who was recalled by Congress in light of allegations of financial impropriety. Indeed, the rancor, backstabbing, and competing personal alliances that Schiff describes makes the American delegation at Valentois outside Versailles sound like a contemporary reality TV show: part Downton Abbey, part Real Housewives of New Jersey.
Schiff is far more forgiving of Franklin’s behavior during his nearly decade-long mission to Paris. She believes that the trouble between the commissioners could be chalked up to “miscommunication, misapprehension, and misrepresentation.” Yes, Franklin had a tendency to sleep late, not answer his mail, spend too much time with female admirers, keep poor records, and not share information freely with his co-commissioners, but he was, nevertheless, indispensable to the American mission at the court of Louis XVI. Schiff maintains that the American cause could not have survived without the French – it was “her bedrock, her polestar, her salvation” – and the French alliance may very well never have come off without Franklin. Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, conceded “[Franklin’s] age and his love of tranquility leave him with an apathy incompatible with his responsibilities,” but defended his position as essential to maintaining strong Franco-American relations.
Franklin was never given his proper due for his service abroad, according to Schiff. He returned home under a cloud of suspicion, stoked in Congress by his erstwhile co-delegates, and harbored resentment about his treatment for the rest of his life. It didn’t help that “Massive obscurity reigned in Congress as to how much aid France had extended America, and on what terms,” primarily because Franklin had failed to accurately record many of the transactions. But he was successful in getting the French to back the American cause with loans, weapons, military sundries, and – perhaps most important of all – naval support, without which the revolution would have been doomed. (The one thing the French sent that the Americans had no use for was those 19-year-old French generals.)
Like all of Schiff’s books, “The Great Improvisation” is highly recommended: it’s fun, insightful, and educational.
Ms. Schiff masterfully weaves a thousand and more strands and bits of human folly and achievement into a delightful, humorous tale of one man's often erring, sometimes stumbling but ultimate success in helping the Colonies become a nation, albeit still more states than united, and gives us a unique view of a man and the difficult birth of his nation. While you're reading and certainly when you've finished this laudable history, you may see present US politics as tame indeed, all the while wondering how we ever even managed to get started. An ugly, awkward birth it was, but thank the "man for all seasons" and any necessary reason for the USA ever finding itself on any world map as a nation. According to Ms. Schiff's account, the United States of America is truly a magnificent improvisation, and she knows who's to blame.
written by this author. Both are really good books