By Émilie Mitran

On September 19, 1791, Louis XVI addressed the United States as his “very dear, great friends and allies.” Five days earlier, he had sworn to uphold the new French Constitution. Three months earlier, his flight to Varennes exposed the fracture between the king and the Revolution. But his letter, countersigned by foreign minister Armand Marc de Montmorin, announced his acceptance of the constitutional settlement and renewed the language of “sincere friendship” with the United States. The formula belonged to well-oiled diplomatic protocol, yet its timing gave it unusual weight: a weakened monarchy was emphatically reminding a distant republic of its friendship: “We take this occasion to renew to you assurances of the sincere friendship we bear you.”[1]

19 September 1791, Letter from Louis XVI to President George Washington (public domain)

When the letter reached Philadelphia on March 2, 1792, President George Washington answered in the same register. He received France’s constitution as a “new proof of friendship” and, in a response shaped with the help of Thomas Jefferson, celebrated Louis XVI as a “friend and patron of the rights of mankind.”^[2]  This was the language of diplomatic intimacy at its most polished. France and the United States appeared joined by affection, shared memory, and sympathy for each other’s political fates. Yet this warmth raised two questions. What had a monarchy stood to gain by helping republican rebels overthrow another monarchy’s imperial rule? How could two sovereign nations, governed by different regimes, and pursuing separate interests, maintain a friendship? France and the United States were allies, but their alliance rested on a temporary convergence of interests, while the language of friendship helped each government claim the other’s support without surrendering its own freedom of action.

From one empire to another?

Historians have long explained French intervention in the American struggle for independence by referencing European balance-of-power politics. From Edward S. Corwin and Samuel Flagg Bemis to Jonathan Dull, they have shown that French rivalry with Britain in the realms of commerce and naval strategy mattered more at Versailles than ideological sympathy with the American colonists. More recent global and Atlantic histories have also restored to the story the Spanish contribution and the networks that made French support effective. My book, Des Américains en France 1776-1792, builds on these approaches but shifts the scale and chronology: following American envoys in France from 1776 to 1792, I treat friendship as part of the diplomatic craft to request assistance, test obligations, and obscure divergent aims.

Figure of Louis XVI and B Franklin Charles-Gabriel Sauvage, 1780–85 – Public domain

This metaphor grew out of the terms in which Britain defended its authority over the colonies. Before France could become an American ally, Britain had to cease being regarded as a “mother.” The imperial relationship was represented as a family bond: Britain the protecting parent, and the colonies its children. This vocabulary made dependence appear natural and separation an act of filial ingratitude.[3] In Common Sense, Thomas Paine exposed the political work performed by this kinship. Britain had protected the colonies for trade and dominion; its motive was “interest, not attachment.” Its wars had created enemies for Americans who had no independent quarrel with them. France and Spain opposed the colonies because they belonged to Britain, so those inherited enmities might end with the severing of dependence. By enlarging the colonies’ European origins beyond England alone, Paine broadened their imagined family and the range of political relationships with which they might freely associate.[4]

With the decision to declare independence, an alliance with France became conceivable, though hardly self-evident to colonists who associated Catholic France with despotism and popery. Rejecting Britain’s claim to natural obedience turned an approach to its hereditary rival into an exercise of American sovereignty. It was also a military necessity as the Insurgents needed arms, credit, recognition, and, above all, a navy. France could provide these all and had strong reasons to do: American independence would divide Britain’s empire, weaken its naval supremacy, improve France’s position in North America, and open commercial opportunities. France did not need to embrace republican principles to recognize the American Revolution’s geopolitical value; the constitutional divergence between the two countries remained, despite their interests temporarily converging.

John Adams embodied that convergence and its limits. Few American statesmen were more suspicious of French intentions, yet few argued earlier that independence and negotiations with France had to proceed together. British victories in the Seven Years’ War had strengthened Britain’s navy and left French colonies exposed, so the colonies’ separation served a clear French interest. Adams never confused that calculation with benevolence. His Plan of Treaties of 1776 sought trade, supplies, and recognition while protecting future American neutrality. His advocacy of a French connection and his distrust of French policy arose from the same premise: France could be relied upon where French and American interests coincided; independence required knowing when they no longer did.[5]

Supporting an Oppressed People, Not Fueling a Revolution

This balance explains the delay and initial form of French intervention in the American war for independence. After months of lobbying by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the French playwright and royal secret agent, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, France’s foreign minister, persuaded Louis XVI that covert assistance to the rebellious colonies would weaken Britain and give France time to prepare for a possible war. Despite financial objections from Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, the controller-general of finances, and the king’s reluctance to support rebellion against a legitimate monarch, Louis approved one million livres on May 2, 1776.[6] The funds were channeled through Roderigue Hortalez & Company, a trading house established by Beaumarchais to conceal royal involvement in supplying the colonies. By presenting these shipments as private commercial transactions, the company enabled weapons, uniforms, gunpowder, and other supplies to reach the colonists while Versailles maintained its official neutrality. ^[7]

Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, ministre, © Château de Versailles, Dist. RMN / © Christophe Fouin

The Battle of Saratoga changed the calculous of French policy. When news of the American victory arrived in Versailles in early December 1777, the French government informed the American commissioners that the states had now demonstrated their ability and determination to remain independent. Vergennes also secretly feared that London might answer defeat with generous terms and draw the colonists back toward reconciliation. On December 13, he warned Armand-Marc, comte de Montmorin Saint-Hérem, the French minister to Spain, that without prompt Bourbon support, public pressure in the colonies might force the commissioners toward accommodation with Britain.[8]  France had to act while American resistance remained viable, and the negotiations culminated in the treaties of February 6, 1778.

The treaties placed strategic calculation within the language of affection: the Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1778 promised a “true and sincere Friendship,” while its most-favored-nation clauses translated favor into reciprocal commercial rights. Signed on the same day, February 6, 1778, the Treaty of Alliance pledged coordinated military action around the preservation of American liberty, sovereignty, and independence. Friendship now had legal force and limits.[9] Paine’s lesson nevertheless survived: gratitude for French assistance did not override American sovereignty. France, in turn, could support independence without welcoming every growth in American power. American colonists wanted French power directed against Britain without restoring French ascendancy in North America; France wanted Britain divided, but not an expansive new republic. Some expectations were explicit, while others remained conveniently unspoken.

A Strategy of Containment

That gap became visible during the peace negotiations. In September 1782, John Jay received a translation of an intercepted letter from François Barbé-Marbois, secretary of the French legation in the United States, addressed to Vergennes. Marbois opposed American participation in the Newfoundland fisheries. Jay connected this position with Gérard de Rayneval’s confidential journey to England to sound out British peace proposals, and French reservations about American territorial claims. He concluded that France would support the United States only as far as French interests required and did not wish to see it become a “great and formidable People.”[10]

In his letter to Robert R. Livingston, Jay presented parts of his interpretation as conjecture. The intercepted letter did not prove a settled Franco-British conspiracy, but it did show that a French diplomat could favor American independence while opposing claims that would strengthen the new state. The episode exposed the reciprocal guardedness at the heart of the alliance. French officials calibrated support to French aims; American negotiators resisted anything that constrained the sovereignty they intended to exercise.[11] If the alliance had promised independence, France had fulfilled its central purpose. If friendship required supporting the power the United States hoped to acquire afterward, Marbois’s intervention looked more troubling. France and the United States could therefore be friends, allies, and rivals at once. Independence did not resolve that tension, rather it made it impossible to ignore. As the alliance unfolded, the United States showed it had learned its lesson to follow reason, and not attachment, despite all the pretenses of diplomatic rhetorical niceties.

What Does Friendship between Nations Entail?

The treaties had expressed friendship through precise obligations between sovereign equals. Emer de Vattel, whose Law of Nations systematized the rights and duties of states, made equality a principle of international law: “a small republic is no less a sovereign state than the most powerful kingdom,” he wrote.[12] France’s monarchy and the American republic could therefore contract as equals. But legal equality guaranteed no diplomatic favor.

The whale-oil dispute of 1788 exposed the distinction. A French regulation included American oil in a general import prohibition. After first attributing a related restriction to a clerk’s “meer error,” Jefferson prepared a detailed memorandum and urged Montmorin, minister of Foreign Affairs, Claude-Guillaume Lambert, councilor of state and former Controller-General of finances, and Jacques Necker, Controller-Generals of finances, to recognize that an exemption served both countries. The French arrêt of December 7 finally exempted American whale and fish oils and baleen from the ban.^[13] Even for a Francophile such as Jefferson, friendship guaranteed no automatic commercial privilege.

In 1792, Gouverneur Morris entered this unsettled relationship as the first American minister plenipotentiary appointed under the federal Constitution. He presented his credentials at the court of Louis XVI in June; the monarchy fell in August. As revolutionary governments succeeded one another, Morris tried to preserve the alliance while remaining personally attached to representatives of the Old Regime, which had aided his republic. Friendship now had to connect a federal republic with a revolution moving beyond constitutional monarchy. The Genêt crisis of 1793 would show the danger of assuming that alliance gave the law of nations a shared political meaning.^[14]

When Policy Became Personal

The delicate art of diplomacy in revolutionary times stands at the center of Des Américains en France, 1776-1792, which I published earlier this year. From Silas Deane’s clandestine mission to the eve of the Genêt crisis, the book follows diplomats, merchants, and political intermediaries to show how the alliance changed with the people charged with sustaining it. France entered the relationship to weaken Britain, protect its imperial position, and gain commercial advantage. The United States accepted indispensable assistance while defending the independence that assistance was meant to secure. The treaties of 1778 fixed obligations without erasing these divergences, using the language of friendship to do so.

Never truly fraternal in its institutional logic, the alliance remained a bilateral calculation, an opportunity seized in pursuit of mutually intelligible interests. Over the next fourteen years, disputes over trade, money, recognition, and politics repeatedly forced both governments to define their relationship anew. Contemporaries and later generations could wrap the arrangement in sentiments, but beneath the rhetorical varnish remained the colder mechanism that skillful diplomacy had partially concealed: governments will defend national interests first and disillusionment is part of the price of mistaking a contingent convergence of interests for an enduring bond of affection.

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Émilie Mitran, PhD, is a historian of the early American republic and Revolutionary France, based at the University of Toulon, France. Her research explores Franco-American diplomacy within its intellectual and political contexts. She is the author of Gouverneur Morris, traducteur de la Révolution française (Rennes: Les Perséides, 2022) and Des Américains en France, 1776-1792 (Paris: Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2026), and co-editor and co-translator of the French edition of Morris’s diaries (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2018-2022).

Title Image: Treaty of Paris, by Benjamin West, 1783

Further Reading:

Dull, Jonathan R. A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Ferreiro, Larrie D. Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

Lyons, Benjamin. “The Law of Nations and the Negotiation of the Treaty of Paris (1783).” Journal of the Early Republic 42, no. 2 (Summer 2022): 205–25.

Murphy, Orville T. Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes: French Diplomacy in the Age of Revolution, 1719–1787. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982.

Paul, Joel Richard. Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009.

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[1] “Louis XVI to George Washington, 19 September 1791,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-08-02-0377. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 8, 22 March 1791 – 22 September 1791, ed. Mark A. Mastromarino. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999, p. 541.] On the Flight to Varennes, see Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Harvard University Press, 2003).

[2] “George Washington to Louis XVI, 14 March 1792,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-10-02-0058. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 10, 1 March 1792 – 15 August 1792, ed. Robert F. Haggard and Mark A. Mastromarino. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002, pp. 108–109.]

[3] On the familial language of imperial authority see Winthrop D. Jordan, “Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1776,” Journal of American History 60, no. 2 (1973): 294-308; Boyd, Richard. “Thomas Paine’s Greatest Revolution: Nationality, Citizenship, and Civic Identity in America.” The Review of Politics (2026): 1-23. Web. These metaphors cast imperial dependence as a natural relationship supported by parental protection and filial obedience. Paine thus turned this logic against Britain: imperial violence betrayed its parental obligations, while shared ancestry could not in itself justify continued political allegiance.

[4] Paine, Thomas. Common Sense (1776), para. 63, Project Gutenberg, eBook no. 147,

[5] “I. A Plan of Treaties, [ante 18 July 1776],” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0116-0002. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Papers of John Adams, vol. 4, February–August 1776, ed. Robert J. Taylor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, pp. 265–278.]

[6] Vergennes, « Considérations » et « Réflexions » dans Doniol, Henri. Histoire de la participation de la France à l’établissement des États-Unis d’Amérique: correspondance diplomatique et documents. Vol. 1. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1886-1892. See also Jonathan R. Dull, The French Navy and American Independence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774-1787 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 30–49. For Beaumarchais’s successive appeals, see “Au Roi,” 22 September 1775, and “La Paix ou la Guerre. Au Roi seul,” 29 February 1776, reproduced in Louis de Loménie, “Beaumarchais, sa vie, ses écrits et son temps,” Revue des Deux Mondes, 2nd series, 2 (1853): 1027-59.

[7] On Hortalez, French funding, and the Spanish contribution, see Dull, French Navy, 89–94, and “The Franco-American Revolution, Part 1,” Library of Congress: https://blogs.loc.gov/international-collections/2021/06/the-franco-american-revolution-part-1/.

[8] “Vergennes to the Comte de Montmorin, 13 December 1777: Extract,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-25-02-0209. [Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 25, October 1, 1777, through February 28, 1778, ed. William B. Willcox. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986, pp. 282–285.]

[9] See the Plan of the Treaty of Alliance and Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1778): https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/fr1778m.asp

[10] “John Jay to the Secretary for Foreign Affairs (Robert R. Livingston), 17 November 1782,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jay/01-03-02-0076. [Original source: The Selected Papers of John Jay, vol. 3, 1782–1784, ed. Elizabeth M. Nuxoll. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013, pp. 225–255.] For Rayneval’s instructions, his exchanges with Shelburne, and the distinction between Jay’s evidence and inference, see Jacobs, Seth. Rogue Diplomats: The Proud Tradition of Disobedience in American Foreign Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

[11] John Ferling underlines, “Vergennes had sought American independence, though he preferred that the new American nation be small and largely surrounded by British-held territory, rendering the United States a client state – a dependency – of France”. (Ferling, John. “America’s Forgotten Founder: Comte Charles Gravier de Vergennes”, in Journal of the American Revolution, April 17, 2025. https://allthingsliberty.com/2025/04/americas-forgotten-founder-comte-charles-gravier-de-vergennes/)

[12] Vattel, Emer de. The Law of Nations, or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns. Edited by Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore. Para. 18. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008. Online Library of Liberty.

[13] “Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, with Enclosure, 23 May 1788,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-13-02-0111. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 13, March–7 October 1788, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956, pp. 188–197.] and “IV. Observations on the Whale-Fishery, 14 November 1788,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-14-02-0064-0005. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 14, 8 October 1788 – 26 March 1789, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958, pp. 242–256.]

[14] Mitran, Émilie. Gouverneur Morris, traducteur de la Révolution française. Les Perséides, Rennes, 2022.