A Great Improvisation ─ Franklin, France, And the Birth of America

“Stunning . . . a remarkably subtle and penetrating portrait of Franklin and his diplomacy.”—The New York Review of Books
When Benjamin Franklin embarked for France in 1776, he well understood that he was taking on the greatest gamble of his career. The colonies were without money, munitions, gunpowder, or common cause; dispatched amid great secrecy, across a winter sea thick with enemy cruisers, Franklin was seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French. His eight-year posting there serves not only as Franklin’s most vital service to his country—it was in large part on account of his fame, charisma, and ingenuity that France underwrote the American Revolution, and it was Franklin who helped negotiate the peace of 1783—but as the most revealing of the man. The French mission would prove the most inventive act in a life of astonishing inventions.
In A Great Improvisation, Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff draws from new and little-known sources to illuminate the least-explored part of Franklin’s life. From these pages emerge a particularly human and yet fiercely determined Founding Father, as well as a profound sense of how fragile, improvisational, and international was our country’s bid for independence.