"When you're working on the Revolutionary War, as I'm doing now,
you realize what the French did for us. We wouldn't have a country
if it weren't for them," McCullough claimed in his recent interview
with American Heritage. And though it is usually fruitless to speculate
about "what if's," a look at the facts shows that French
support was indeed vital for the success of the American Revolutionary
War.
In February 1762, French
foreign minister Choiseul had declared that he had "only one foreign
policy, a fraternal union with Spain; only one foreign policy for war,
and that is England." [222] He
thought that war might come within five years. It took thirteen years,
but the shots fired at Lexington and Concord had hardly been heard in
Paris when French financial and military aid began flowing to the rebellious
colonies via Beaumarchais. Almost 100 volunteers, some more useful than
others, provided crucial expertise for American artillery, engineering,
and map-making. The victory at Saratoga was won with French guns and
French powder. A few months later, in February 1778, France became the
first foreign country to recognize the United States as an independent
nation; military action beginning later that year occupied British forces
from Gibraltar to India and from Senegal to the Caribbean, keeping them
from the American theatre of war. In the spring of 1780, the comte de
Rochambeau brought over 5,000 officers and men across the ocean and
forced the surrender of Lord Cornwallis fifteen months later. Yet the
presence of Rochambeau's forces on the American mainland had consequences
well beyond its small numbers. By the time most of them departed from
Boston in December 1782, they had decided the outcome of the war.
In July 1780, Rochambeau
had arrived with over 5,000 officers and men; the ships that left Boston
on Christmas Eve 1782 carried about 1,000 fewer men. About 700 men remained
behind, the last of which returned to France in November 1783. A few
days later, on January 8, 1783, Rochambeau and a small entourage of
officers sailed from Annapolis for France. A final transport of 85 sick
soldiers left Baltimore on October 5, 1783. The expédition
particulière had come to an end.[223]
During the 30 months that the 492 officers and 6,038 men of the
expédition particulière had been in, or on their way to
and from America, about 600 men (including 70 in the six months following
the return in 1783) died, though only about 75 of them from battle or
battle-related wounds. Another seven were executed. Some 316 men, of
whom only 26 were native Frenchmen, deserted, including 80 men recruited
in America.[224] 140, including
30 "American" recruits, were discharged. 31 officers, but
only 14 enlisted men, retired with military pensions in the New World.
To put these figures into perspective: within six months of returning
to France, Rochambeau's units discharged 832 men whose enlistment had
expired![225]
Unlike German or German-speaking
soldiers from Alsace or Lorraine, French soldiers rather risked the
dangerous transatlantic voyage than stay in America. Despite officially
fostered friendhip and numerous addresses of gratitude -- the Boston
Gazette and Country Journal claimed in its issue of December 9, 1782,
that the "Behaviour of these Troops … sufficiently contradicts
the infamous Falsehoods and Misrepresentations usually
imposed on the World by perfidious Britons -- Franco-American
relations had always remained tenuous at best. The allies simply never
trusted each other. Axel von Fersen informed his father in November
1782 that "the time we have passed with them (the Americans) has
not taught us to love or esteem them." Even an enlisted man such
as Flohr felt the mistrust in an alliance held together only by a common
enemy. For mid-December 1782 he reported in his journal: "Since
we continued to remain there (in Providence) for some additional time,
the Americans never felt quite at ease but continued to believe that
the French wanted to make continued use of that area (i.e. permanently
occupy it) since they didn't seem to want to move on at all, and thanked
us a second time for the aid we had provided." Such fears, as we
know, were unfounded, but their continued existence even after the victory
was won and after all that France had done in support of American independence,
shows how deep-seated and long-living they were!
Because Rochambeau's
troops were not the only French forces to fight in America before, or
after, Yorktown. In fact they represent only a fractions of the total
number of Frenchmen fighting for American Independence, which historians
have estimated at 18,000 soldiers and 31,000 sailors. At Yorktown alone,
some 14,000 Frenchmen, including 5,200 Marines in reserve, joined 5,800
American Continentals and 3,000 Virginia militias against 6,000 British
and their German allies. It was French expertise in siege warfare, not
to mention the French siege artillery brought by Rochambeau's forces,
which eventually forced the surrender. The French contribution to American
victory becomes even more obvious when we look at the role of the French
navy. It was Admiral de Grasse' fleet which kept the Royal Navy from
making contact with Cornwallis when it sailed out to meet the challenge
in the Battle of the Capes in early September 1781. Without the French
fleet, British Admiral Graves might just have succeeded in rescuing
Cornwallis from Yorktown. The Continental Navy would have been unable
to stop him: in 1781, the Royal Navy had about 140 ships of the line,
the French had 67 capital ships, Spain had 58, the Dutch 19, and the
United States had none.
French expenditures
for the war were enormous: Robert D. Harris sets the total French cost
for the war for the years 1776-1782 at 928.9 million livres (as opposed
to 2,270.5 million livres for the British), with another 125.2 million
to be added for the year 1783! At the same time the total ordinary income
of the French crown stood at 377.5 million livres for the year 1776.
More than half of the cost of the war had to be funded by loans, and
by the end of 1782 the total constituted debt of the French monarchy
had reached 4,538 million livres. Even if most historians agree today
that these additional outlays for the war were not the primary cause
of the French Revolution, there can be no doubt that an extra billion
livres in expenditures, and annual expenditures of some 207 million
livres just to service the debt, did nothing to enhance the financial
situation of the French monarchy between 1783 and the outbreak of the
revolution in 1789.[226]
Most of these funds
were spent on the navy: the annual naval budget rose from 33 million
livres in 1775 to 169 million in 1780 and peaked at almost 200 million
livres in 1782.[227] During these
same years, however, the army budget increased only marginally from
93.5 million in 1775 to 95 million in 1783.[228]
Expenditures on the American war were minimal within the overall
French war effort. According to Claude C. Sturgill, "all of the
monies directly appropriated for the entire cost" of Rochambeau's
little army amounted to exactly 12,730,760 livres or a little over 1%
of the total cost of the war![229]
In addition the American rebels received 18 million in loans, to
be repaid after the war, as well as outright subsidies of about 9 million
from the foreign affairs department and other aid for a total of about
48 million livres spent in support of the American Revolution.
For France, the American
struggle for independence was never more than a side-show, a convenient
"excuse" for resuming the century-old struggle against British
supremacy in Europe and on the oceans of the world. But the financial
figures are just one indication for the marginality of the expédition
particulière within the French war effort. A look at the
number of personnel involved also helps to place Rochambeau's army in
perspective. In 1780, the budgeted strength of the French line infantry,
cavalry, and light troops stood at some 130,000 officers and men: the
6,000 men of Rochambeau's troops formed but a small fraction of the
total French military strength. In 1776, France had stationed 19 battalions
of infantry in her Caribbean possessions; in the course of the war she
sent another 29 battalions there for a total of 48 battalions. Rochambeau
brought all of 8 infantry battalions with him in 1780. At Yorktown,
Rochambeau suffered not even 200 casualties in dead and wounded: between
March and December 1781, the French navy operating in the Caribbean
suffered over 5,000 casualties, the equivalent of almost the entire
force under Rochambeau's command. In the disastrous defeat in the Battle
of the Saints in April 1782, Admiral de Grasse suffered over 3,000 casualties,
more than fifteen times what Rochambeau had lost before Yorktown.
What did France have
to show for all her exertions? The answer is: not much if anything,
not least because of the actions of her American allies. Not that she
had wanted any territorial gain: in article 6 of the alliance of February
6, 1778, Louis XVI had "renounce[d] for ever the possession of
the Islands of Bermudas as well as of any part of the continent of North
america which [had been French] before the treaty of Paris in 1763."
Besides taking revenge on Britain for that treaty, Vergennes had wanted
exclusive fishing rights off Newfoundland, or at the very least keep
the British out. But when the time came to negotiate the peace settlement,
he found out to his dismay that Franklin and his fellow commissioners
had made peace without him in clear violation of article 8 of their
1778 agreement. "Neither of the two Parties shall conclude either
Truce or Peace with Great Britain, without the formal consent of the
other first (my emphasis) obtain'd."
But that was exactly
what Franklin and his colleagues had done when they signed the Preliminaries
of Peace in November 1782, thereby forcing the French hand. Franklin
told Vergennes that his negotiations with Britain behind Vergennes'
back were "a mere breach of etiquette," but the Frenchman
was under no illusion that if he would not agree to end the war on British
and American terms, the Americans would sign a separate peace treaty
with Britain, leaving the French to continue the war by themselves.
France did not even gain the exclusive fishing rights she had wanted.
In article 3 of the preliminaries the United States and Great Britain
had agreed "that the People of the United States shall continue
to enjoy unmolested the Right to take Fish of every kind on the Grand
Bank, and on all the other Banks of Newfoundland; Also in the Gulph
of St Laurence, and at all other Places in the Sea where the Inhabitants
of both Countries used at any time here-tofore to fish." An embittered
Vergennes wrote to the Chevalier de la Luzerne, French representative
in Philadelphia, that if "we can judge the future by what passes
presently before our eyes we shall be paid badly for what we have done
for the United States of America, and for having assured them of that
title."[230]
In the short run it
seemed as if Vergennes' prediction would come true. The alliance of
1778 had been an alliance of convenience, which had served its purpose
once American independence had been won. In 1793, now President, Washington
abrogated the 1778 treaties in light of the events of the French Revolution
and the French declaration of war on Austria. The United States must
not, and would not, get drawn into European affairs, the "foreign
entanglements" of Washington's Farewell Address.
Seven years later,
in December 1800, the United States rather unceremoniously cancelled
the "Perpetual Alliance" of 1778 and subsequent agreements
altogether since they were not "able to agree at present"
as to what the treaties implied. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 reaffirmed
American isolationism, and for the remainder of the century America
looked west, to the Pacific Ocean, rather than east across the Atlantic.[231]
Events in Europe in the
second decade of this century forced the United States to look to the
Old World and to abandon her isolationist stance, at least temporarily.
It was then that Vergennes too was proved wrong. In 1783, Count de Aranda,
Spanish Ambassador to France, had written to Louis XVI that in America
a "federal republic is born a pygmy but a day will come when it
will be a giant, a colossus, formidable for this country.".[232]
That day came in 1917. Almost 135 years after France had helped
ensure American independence, America "paid her debt to Lafayette,"
first in 1917/18, and again in 1944, when American troops under General
Dwight D. Eisenhower helped liberate France..[233]
France honored General
Eisenhower and his men with a Voie de la Liberté tracing
their route from the beaches of Normandy to Paris and victory. Maybe
the time has come for America to honor the comte de Rochambeau and his
men -- French, German, Irish, Dutch, Swiss and Swedish, Black and white
-- with a Voie de l'Indépendance tracing their route
from Newport across Connecticut to Yorktown and victory.