French Volunteers in Benjamin Franklin's Correspondence: The American Revolution as Mirror of a Military Crisis

Abstract: The French who took part in the American War for Independence have been the subject of many historical studies. However, the correspondence of Benjamin Franklin offers new elements about these numerous volunteers coming from multiple geographical and social backgrounds. In their letters to the American commissioner, military men, nobles, ecclesiastics, surgeons, lawyers, engineers, peasants, and even convicts—most of whom never left the France—explained their motives for crossing the Atlantic Ocean to fight the British army on the side of the Patriots. From that epistolary source emerges also the perception those subjects of Louis XVI had of the Americans and the United States. All this information reveals a French society imbued with many contradictions, such as the public attraction for enemies fought during the Seven Years' War and the glorification of ancestral nobiliary values through a war for the benefit of a young republic.