when they saw him in America, how it was that his king could think fit to help other people against “their own father,” their king.
Rochambeau replied that the latter had been too hard on his subjects; that they were right, therefore, in shaking off the yoke, and we in helping them to secure “that natural liberty which God has conferred on man.”
An alliance which forbade conquest
This answer to “Messieurs les Sauvages” is an enlightening one; it shows what was the latent force that surmounted all obstacles and caused the French nation to stand as a whole, from beginning to end, in favor of the Americans, to applaud a treaty of alliance which, while entailing the gravest risks, forbade us all conquest, and to rejoice enthusiastically at a peace which after a victorious war added nothing to our possessions. This force was the increasing passion among the French for precisely “that natural liberty which God has conferred on man.”
Hatred of England, quickened though it had been by the harsh conditions of the Treaty of Paris bereaving us of Canada, in 1763, had much less to do with it than is sometimes alleged. Such a feeling existed, it is true, in the hearts of some of the leaders, but not of all; it did in the minds also of some of the officers, but again not of all.
What predominated in the mass of the nation, irrespective of any other consideration, was sympathy for men who wanted to fight injustice and to be free. The cause of the insurgents was popular because it was associated with the notion of liberty; people did not look beyond.
It is often forgotten that this time was not in France a period of Anglophobia, but of Anglomania. Necker, so influential, and who then held the purse-strings, was an Anglophile; so was Prince de Montbarey, minister of war; so was that Duke de Lauzun who put an end for a time to his love affairs and came to America at the head of his famous legion.
All that was English was admired and, when possible, imitated: manners, philosophy, sports, clothes, parliamentary institutions, Shakespeare, just translated by Le Tourneur, with the King and Queen as patrons of the undertaking; but, above all, wrote Count de Ségur, “we were all dreaming of the liberty, at once calm and lofty, enjoyed by the entire body of citizens of Great Britain.”
The magic words to conjure with
Such is the ever-recurring word. Liberty, philanthropy, natural rights—these were the magic syllables to conjure with. “All France,” we read in Grimm and Diderot's correspondence, “was filled with an unbounded love for humanity,” and felt a passion for “those exaggerated general maxims which raise the enthusiasm of young men and which would cause them to run to the world's end to help a Laplander or a Hottentot.”
The ideas of Montesquieu, whose Esprit des Lois had had 22 editions in one year, of Voltaire, of d'Alembert, were in the ascendant, and liberal thinkers saw in the Americans propagandists for their doctrine. General Howe having occupied New York in 1776, Voltaire wrote to d'Alembert: “The troops of Doctor Franklin have been beaten by those of the King of England. Alas! philosophers are being beaten everywhere. Reason and liberty are unwelcome in this world.”
An alliance with no hatred for the common enemy
Another of the master minds of the day, the economist, thinker, and reformer Turgot, the one whose advice, if followed, would have possibly secured for us a bloodless revolution, was of the same opinion. In the famous letter written by him on the 22d of March, 1778, to his English friend, Doctor Price, Turgot showed himself, just as the French nation was, ardently pro-American, but not anti-English.
