By Jason Zweig

When the United States of America was almost strangled in the crib, it was rescued by a portly old man who could barely walk.

In December 1776, the mighty British army and navy had been defeating the rebels at almost every turn. Early that month, after a five-week-long voyage across the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin staggered ashore in France to become the new nation's chief diplomat. His mission was to raise the money and buy the weapons the U.S. needed to survive and win the war.

Almost 71 years old, surrounded by spies, afflicted by severe psoriasis, gout and bladder stones, Franklin took over what seemed like a lost cause. His hotheaded colleague, Silas Deane of Connecticut, had launched one harebrained scheme after another, but raised little money for the U.S. -- although he had made plenty for himself by trading in British stocks on inside information about his diplomatic negotiations.

Franklin, by contrast, was the model diplomat: suave, patient, laconic, incorruptible and calm. Instead of begging for the attention of the French, he could get them to beg for his. As Franklin wrote in 1777, "a Virgin State should preserve the Virgin Character, and not go about suitering for Alliances, but wait with decent Dignity for the applications of others."

No one else in America could possibly have fulfilled that mission. To the French, Franklin was far more than a mere diplomat; he was a scientist, a sex symbol, an intellectual superstar and a singular sensation.

Already a star

When he arrived in Paris, Franklin had already been famous for a quarter of a century. By 1752, following the detailed instructions in his published research, local experimenters were using iron rods to draw sparks out of the sky during rainstorms.

As Franklin later recalled, after his experiments "were performed before the King and Court, all the Curious of Paris flocked to see them."

That wasn't all. Although Franklin spoke French haltingly, he had taught himself to read it "with Ease" as a young man, as he recalled in his autobiography. His "Poor Richard's Almanack" brimmed with Franklin's own wit and wisdom, but it also bore the influence of such French writers as Montaigne, Rabelais and Voltaire. Translated into French, "Bonhomme Richard's" aphorisms were almost as popular in French as in English.

The French went ga-ga over him, in what Pennsylvania State University historian Carla Mulford calls "Franklin chic." As Franklin wrote to his daughter, Sarah Bache, in 1779, he was so popular in France that his face adorned rings, snuffboxes and countless other household objects, making "your father's face as well known as that of the moon."

Franklin's image became so ubiquitous that it irked the king himself. Louis XVI gave at least one of Franklin's admirers a porcelain chamber pot featuring the American's face on the inner surface.

Franklin's "very person qualified as propaganda," the historian Stacy Schiff has noted.

Franklin milked his popularity for all it was worth. As he wrote in 1779: "Somebody, it seems, gave it out that I lov'd Ladies; and then every body presented me their Ladies (or the Ladies presented themselves) to be embrac'd, that is to have their Necks kiss'd. For as to kissing of Lips or Cheeks it is not the Mode here; the first is reckon'd rude, & the other may rub off the Paint. The French Ladies have however 1000 other ways of rendering themselves agreable; by their various Attentions and Civilities, & their sensible Conversation. 'Tis a delightful People to live with."

When Franklin hobbled along in the Bois de Boulogne, he drew a crowd, one companion noted at the time, "and all the ladies both old and young were ready to eat him up." Word had it that Franklin was so popular, some Parisians would even pay to get a viewing place when his carriage was about to pass by.

A New World everyman

Ensconced in the mansion of an aristocrat in Passy, a wealthy area then on the outskirts of Paris, Franklin gallivanted with the wives and consorts of government officials, charming the women into softening up the men who wielded the power. They wanted him; he wanted their money for the American cause.

For the French, he personified the revolution and the U.S. itself. With his fur cap, simple charm, self-deprecating humor and husky build from decades of labor in a print shop, Franklin was a kind of New World everyman, an unthreatening upgrade of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "noble savage." Yet he had also traveled widely in North America, Britain and France, and was one of the world's most eminent scientists and greatest writers. So he could also move with ease and confidence at the royal court.

As the economist and government official Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot wrote in 1776, Franklin had "snatched the lightning from the skies and the scepter from the tyrants." Only someone with all of Franklin's gifts could have made it palatable for a plutocratic monarchy to support a revolution.

He had to walk a diplomatic tightrope. When, in 1777, French ports harbored some American warships, Britain warned that it would declare war on France unless they were sent away. The French hated the British, but feared going to war directly against them. The U.S. ships were driven off.

By late 1777, Franklin's fellow diplomats debated whether to tell the French government that the American Revolution would fail unless France immediately agreed to a financial and military alliance.

Franklin defiantly refused "to state that we must give up the contest without their interposition." He believed, correctly, that the French wouldn't let the U.S. fail for lack of funding; the American Revolution was too valuable to them as a proxy war that would weaken the British.

Late in 1777, the news arrived that the U.S. had defeated British forces at the Battle of Saratoga, N.Y., electrifying French public opinion.

At the same time, Franklin discreetly leaked to the French government that a British spy had approached the Americans to discuss a possible peace deal. France almost immediately proposed and sealed an alliance with the U.S., assuring the fledgling nation's survival.

Drawing on his printer past

Franklin not only led the negotiations with the French to finance the war, but he personally printed many of the documents that made the funding possible. In his spacious home in Passy, Franklin assembled a full-scale printing press and even a foundry where his servants cast the lead type for the press.

Franklin, who had spent years printing money in America, knew that forgery was one of the greatest threats to successful financing. Lenders would balk if they had no way to verify that the loan documents were genuine.

So Franklin designed and printed the loan indentures himself, with elegant fonts, a decorative border and a special hand-cut wavy edge of multicolored marbled paper -- a unique combination of features that minimized the odds of counterfeiting.

Over the 13 months it took to negotiate the alliance with France, Franklin's fellow diplomats, including the testy John Adams, often despaired. Dining out six days a week, wheedling foreign aid out of government ministers and bombarding the French public with propaganda, Franklin never lost his optimism.

Ultimately, France funded the uniforms, the guns and the very survival of the U.S. military and the newborn republic. The French provided at least 1.1 billion gold livres of financial and military aid to the American Revolution, historians estimate, a vast sum equivalent to as much as $37 billion at today's gold prices.

Franklin even coaxed the French government into providing 6 million livres, in his words, "not as a Loan, but as a Free Gift." Other loans came interest free.

In 1783, Franklin was one of the lead negotiators for the Treaty of Paris, which sealed the independence of the U.S. from Britain. He returned home in 1785. In 1787, he attended the Constitutional Convention, so frail that he had to be hoisted back and forth in a sedan chair.

An ungrateful nation

The democracy that would have been stillborn without Franklin turned its back on him in its infancy.

Congress wouldn't even reimburse all the expenses he incurred overseas. His former diplomatic colleagues John Adams, Arthur Lee and Ralph Izard sniped at him behind his back.

Many of Franklin's fellow statesmen resented him for spending the war years in Europe; young John Quincy Adams called him "more a Frenchman than an American."

The huge debts that France incurred to finance the birth of the U.S. contributed to the collapse of its own economy, helping ignite the French Revolution in 1789.

Franklin died in 1790 at age 84, an old man in a new republic. The U.S. Senate wouldn't even pass a resolution requiring its members to wear mourning.

Back in Paris, French revolutionaries carved memorial statuettes of him out of stones taken from the Bastille.

Although Franklin struggled all his life to stifle his vanity, the epitaph he wrote for himself is both humble and apt:

"The Body of B. Franklin, Printer; like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost; For it will, as he believ'd, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended By the Author."

Jason Zweig writes The Intelligent Investor column for The Wall Street Journal. Email him at intelligentinvestor@wsj.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 04, 2025 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.