The American war had been for five years in progress; for two years a
treaty of alliance, having as sole object "to maintain effectually the
liberty, sovereignty, and independence, absolute and unlimited, of the
United States," bound us French to the "insurgents"; successes and
reverses followed each other in turn: Brooklyn, Trenton, Brandywine,
Saratoga. Quite recently the news had come of the double victory at sea
and on land of d'Estaing at Grenada, and Paris had been illuminated. The
lights were scarcely out when news arrived of the disaster of the same
d'Estaing at Savannah. All France felt anxious concerning the issue of a
war which had lasted so long and whose end continued to be doubtful.
When, in the first months of 1780, the report went about that a great
definitive effort was to be attempted, that it was not this time a
question of sending ships to the Americans, but of sending an army, and
that the termination of the great drama was near, the enthusiasm was
unbounded. All wanted to take part. There was a prospect of crossing
the seas, of succoring a people fighting for a sacred cause, a people of
whom all our volunteers praised the virtues; the people led by
Washington, and represented in Paris by Franklin. An ardor as of
crusaders inflamed the hearts of French youths, and the intended
expedition was, in fact, the most important that France had launched
beyond the seas since the distant time of the crusades. The cause was a
truly sacred one, the cause of liberty, a magical word which then
stirred the hearts of the many. "Why is liberty so rare?" Voltaire had
said--"Because the most valuable of possessions."
All those who were so lucky as to be allowed to take part in the
expedition were convinced that they would witness memorable, perhaps
unique, events, and it turned out, indeed, that they were to witness a
campaign which, with the battle of Hastings, where the fate of England
was decided in 1066, and that of Bouvines, which made of France in 1214
a great nation, was to be one of the three military actions with
greatest consequences in which for the last thousand years the French
had participated.
A striking result of this state of mind is that an extraordinary number
of those who went noted down their impressions, kept journals, drew
sketches. Never perhaps during a military campaign was so much writing
done, nor were so many albums filled with drawings.
Notes, letters, journals, sketches have come down to us in large
quantities, and from all manner of men, for the passion of observing and
narrating was common to all kinds of people: journals and memoirs of
army chiefs like Rochambeau, or chiefs of staff like Chastellux, a
member of the French Academy, adapter of Shakespeare, and author of a
_Félicité Publique_, which, Franklin said, showed him to be "a real
friend of humanity"; narratives of a regimental chaplain, like Abbé
Robin, of a sceptical rake like the Duke de Lauzun, the new Don Juan,
whose battle stories alternate with his love reminiscences, handsome,
impertinent, licentious, an excellent soldier withal, bold and
tenacious, marked, like several of his companions, to mount the
revolutionary scaffold; journals of officers of various ranks, like
Count de Deux-Ponts, Prince de Broglie, he, too, marked for the
scaffold; Count de Ségur, son of the marshal, himself afterward an
Academician and an ambassador; Mathieu-Dumas, future minister of war of
a future King of Naples, who bore the then unknown name of Joseph
Bonaparte; the Swedish Count Axel de Fersen, one of Rochambeau's aides,
who was to organize the French royal family's flight to Varennes, and to
die massacred by the mob in his own country; notes, map, and sketches
of Baron Cromot-Dubourg, another of Rochambeau's aides; journal, too,
among many others, of a modest quartermaster like Blanchard, who gives a
note quite apart, observes what others do not, and whose tone, as that
of a subordinate, is in contrast with the superb ways of the "seigneurs"
his companions.
From page to page, turning the leaves, one sees appear, without speaking
of Lafayette, Kosciusko, and the first enthusiasts, many names just
emerging from obscurity, never to sink into it again: Berthier, La
Pérouse, La Touche-Tréville, the Lameth brothers, Bougainville, Custine,
the Bouillé of the flight to Varennes, the La Clocheterie of the fight
of _La Belle Poule_, the Duportail who was to be minister of war under
the Constituent Assembly, young Talleyrand, brother of the future
statesman, young Mirabeau, brother of the orator, himself usually known
for his portly dimensions as _Mirabeau-tonneau_, ever ready with the cup
or the sword, young Saint-Simon, not yet a pacifist, and not yet a
Saint-Simonian,[1] Suffren, in whose squadron had embarked the future
Director Barras, an officer then in the regiment of Pondichéry. All
France was really represented, to some extent that of the past, to a
larger one that of the future.
Many of those journals have been published (Cromot-Dubourg's only in an
English version printed in America[2]); others have been lost; others
remain unpublished, so that after all that has been said, and well said,
it still remains possible, with the help of new guides and new
documents, to follow Washington and Rochambeau once more, and in a
different company, during the momentous journey which led them from the
Hudson to the York River. The Washington papers and the Rochambeau
papers, used only in part, are preserved in the Library of Congress. A
juvenile note, in contrast with the quiet dignity of the official
reports by the heads of the army, is given by the unprinted journal, a
copy of which is also preserved in the same library, kept by one more of
Rochambeau's aides, Louis Baron de Closen, an excellent observer, gay,
warm-hearted, who took seriously all that pertained to duty, and merrily
all the rest, especially mishaps. Useful information is also given by
some unprinted letters of George Washington, some with the
superscription still preserved: "On public service--to his Excellency,
Count de Rochambeau, Williamsburg, Virginia," the whole text often in
the great chief's characteristic handwriting, clear and steady, neither
slow nor hasty, with nothing blurred and nothing omitted, with no
trepidation, no abbreviation, the writing of a man with a clear
conscience and clear views, superior to fortune, and the convinced
partisan, in every circumstance throughout life, of the straight line.
The British Government has, moreover, most liberally opened its
archives, so that, both through the recriminatory pamphlets printed in
London after the disaster and the despatches now accessible, one can
know what was said day by day in New York and out of New York, in the
redoubts at Yorktown, and in the French and American trenches around the
place.
I
Lieutenant-General Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de
Rochambeau, aged then fifty-five, and Washington's senior by seven
years, was in his house, still in existence, Rue du Cherche-Midi,
Paris,[3] at the beginning of March, 1780; he was ill and about to leave
for his castle of Rochambeau in Vendomois; post-horses were in readiness
when, in the middle of the night, he received, he says in his
memoirs,[4] a "courrier bringing him the order to go to Versailles and
receive the instructions of his Majesty." For some time rumors had been
afloat that the great attempt would soon be made. He was informed that
the news was true, and that he would be placed at the head of the army
sent to the assistance of the Americans.
The task was an extraordinary one. He would have to reach the New World
with a body of troops packed on slow transports, to avoid the English
fleets, to fight in a country practically unknown, by the side of men
not less so, and whom we had been accustomed to fight rather than
befriend, and for a cause which had never before elicited enthusiasm at
Versailles, the cause of republican liberty.
This last point was the strangest of all, so strange that even Indians,
friends of the French in former days, asked Rochambeau, 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."
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.[5]
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."[6]
Such is the ever-recurring word. Liberty, philanthropy, natural rights,
these were the magic syllables to conjure with. "All France," read we 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 twenty-two 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."
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. He deplored the
impending war, which ought to have been avoided by England's
acknowledging in time "the folly of its absurd project to subjugate the
Americans.... It is a strange thing that it be not yet a commonplace
truth to say that no nation can ever have the right to govern another
nation; that such a government has no other foundation than force, which
is also the foundation of brigandage and tyranny; that a people's
tyranny is, of all tyrannies, the most cruel, the most intolerable, and
the one which leaves the least resources to the oppressed ... for a
multitude does not calculate, does not feel remorse, and it bestows on
itself glory when all that it deserves is shame."
The Americans, according to Turgot, must be free, not only for their own
sake, but for the sake of humanity; an experiment of the utmost import
is about to begin, and should succeed. He added this, the worthy
forecast of a generous mind: "It is impossible not to form wishes for
that people to reach the utmost prosperity it is capable of. That people
is the hope of mankind. It must show to the world by its example, that
men can be free and tranquil, and can do without the chains that
tyrants and cheats of all garb have tried to lay on them under pretense
of public good. It must give the example of political liberty, religious
liberty, commercial and industrial liberty. The shelter which it is
going to offer to the oppressed of all nations will console the earth.
The ease with which men will be able to avail themselves of it and
escape the effects of a bad government will oblige governments to open
their eyes and to be just. The rest of the world will perceive by
degrees the emptiness of the illusions on which politicians have
festered." Toward England Turgot has a feeling of regret on account of
its policies, but no trace of animosity; and, on the contrary, the
belief that, in spite of what some people of note were alleging, the
absolutely certain loss of her American colonies would not result in a
diminution of her power. "This revolution will prove, maybe, as
profitable to you as to America."[7]
Not less characteristic of the times and of the same thinker's turn of
mind is a brief memorial written by him for the King shortly after, when
Captain Cook was making his third voyage of discovery, the one from
which he never returned. "Captain Cook," Turgot said, "is probably on
his way back to Europe. His expedition having no other object than the
progress of human knowledge, and interesting, therefore, all nations,
it would be worthy of the King's magnanimity not to allow that the
result be jeopardized by the chances of war." Orders should be given to
all French naval officers "to abstain from any hostile act against him
or his ship, and allow him to freely continue his navigation, and to
treat him in every respect as the custom is to treat the officers and
ships of neutral and friendly countries."[8] The King assented, and had
our cruisers notified of the sort of sacred character which they would
have to recognize in that ship of the enemy: a small fact in itself, but
showing the difference between the wars in those days and in ours, when
we have had to witness the wanton destruction of the Louvain library,
the shelling of the Reims cathedral, and the Arras town hall.
An immense aspiration was growing in France for more equality, fewer
privileges, simpler lives among the great, less hard ones among the
lowly, more accessible knowledge, the free discussion by all of the
common interests of all. A fact of deepest import struck the least
attentive: French masses were becoming more and more thinking masses.
One should not forget that between the end of the American Revolution
and the beginning of the French one only six years elapsed, between the
American and the French Constitutions but four years. At the very time
of the Yorktown campaign Necker was issuing his celebrated _Compte
Rendu_, which he addressed, "pro forma" to the King, and in reality to
the nation.[9] This famous account of the condition of France, the piece
of printed matter which was most widely read in those days, began,
"Sire," but ended: "In writing this I have proudly counted on that
public opinion which evil-minded persons may try to crush or to distort,
but which, in spite of their efforts, Truth and Justice carry along in
their wake."
To which may be added as another token of the same state of mind that
the then famous Count de Guibert had some time before printed his _Essay
on Tactics_, so full of advanced ideas, notably on the necessary
limitation of the power of kings, that it had been suppressed by the
authorities; and he had dedicated it not to a prince nor to any man, but
to his mother country: "A ma Patrie."[10]
Six years after the end of the American war, on January 24, 1789, the
King of France ordered the drawing up of the famous _Cahiers_,
desiring, he said, that "from the extremities of his kingdom and the
most unknown habitations every one should be assured of a means of
conveying to him his wishes and complaints." And the _Cahiers_,
requesting liberties very similar to those of the Americans, came indeed
from the remotest parts of France, the work of everybody, of
quasi-peasants sometimes, who would offer excuses for their wild
orthography and grammar. The notes and letters of the volunteers of our
Revolution, sons of peasants or artisans, surprise us by the mass of
general ideas and views which abound in them. It was not, therefore, a
statement of small import that Franklin had conveyed to Congress when he
wrote from France: "The united bent of the nation is manifestly in our
favor." And he deplored elsewhere that some could think that an appeal
to France's own interest was good policy: "Telling them their commerce
will be advantaged by our success and that it is in their _interest_ to
help us, seems as much as to say: 'Help us and we shall not be obliged
to you.' Such indiscreet and improper language has been sometimes held
here by some of our people and produced no good effect." The truth is,
he said also, that "this nation is fond of glory, particularly that of
protecting the oppressed."[11]
The treaty of commerce, accompanying the treaty of alliance of
1778,[12] had been in itself a justification of this judgment. Help from
abroad was so pressingly needed in America that almost any advantages
requested by France as a condition would have been granted; but that
strange sight was seen: advantages being offered, unasked, by one party,
and declined by the other. France decided at once not to accept anything
as a recompense, not even Canada, if that were wrested from the English,
in spite of Canada's having been French from the first, and having but
recently ceased to be such. The fight was not for recompense but for
liberty, and Franklin could write to Congress that the treaty of
commerce was one to which all the rest of the world, in accordance with
France's own wishes, was free to accede, when it chose, on the same
footing as herself, England included.[13]
This was so peculiar that many had doubts; John Adams never lost his;
Washington himself had some, and when plans were submitted to him for an
action in Canada he wondered, as he wrote, whether there was not in them
"more than the disinterested zeal of allies."[14] What would take place
at the peace, if the allies were victorious? Would not France require,
in one form or another, some advantages for herself? But she did not;
her peace was to be like her war, pro-American rather than anti-English.
Another striking trait in the numerous French accounts which have come
down to us of this campaign against the English is the small space that
the English, as a nation, occupy in them. The note that predominates is
enthusiasm for the Americans, not hatred for their enemies. "In France,"
wrote Ségur in his memoirs, "in spite of the habit of a long obedience
to arbitrary power, the cause of the American insurgents fixed the
attention and excited the interest of all. From every side public
opinion was pressing the royal government to declare itself in favor of
republican liberty, and seemed to reproach it for its slowness and
timidity." Of any revenge to be taken on the enemy, not a word. "No one
among us," he said further, "thought of a revolution in France, but it
was rapidly taking place in our minds. Montesquieu had brought to light
again the long-buried title-deeds consecrating the rights of the people.
Mature men were studying and envying the laws of England."
Summing up the motives of the new crusaders, who were "starting off to
the war in the name of philanthropy," he found two: "One quite reasonable
and conscientious, the desire to well serve King and country ... another
more unique, a veritable enthusiasm for the cause of American liberty."
Ministers hesitated, on account of the greatness of the risk, "but they
were, little by little, carried away by the torrent." During the sea
voyage only the chiefs knew exactly whither they were going; some
officers thought at one time they might have to fight elsewhere than in
America. One of Rochambeau's officers, the aforementioned Mathieu-Dumas,
confided his misgivings to his journal: "Above all," he wrote, "I had
heartily espoused the cause of the independence of the Americans, and I
should have felt extreme regret at losing the honor of combating for
their liberty."[15] Of the English, again, not a word; what he longed
for, like so many others, was less to fight against the English than for
the Americans.
More striking, perhaps, than all the rest: shortly after we had decided
to take part in the war, the question of our motives and of a possible
annihilation of England as a great power was plainly put, in the course
of a familiar conversation, by the president of Yale University to the
future signer of the Louisiana Treaty, Barbé-Marbois, then secretary of
our legation in the United States. "Mons. Marbois," Ezra Stiles confided
to his diary, on the occasion of the French minister, La Luzerne, and
his secretary's visit to Yale, "is a learned civilian, a councillor of
the Parliament of Metz, æt. 35, as I judge; speaks English very
tolerably, much better than his Excellency the minister. He was very
inquisitive for books and American histories.... Among other things I
asked Mons. Marbois whether the Powers of Europe would contentedly see
Great Britain annihilated.
"He said, no; it would be for the interest of Europe that Britain should
have weight in the balances of power.... France did not want to enlarge
her dominions by conquest or otherwise."[16]
For the French diplomat, a man of great ability and well informed,
addressing, as he was, one to whom a "yes" instead of a "no" would have
caused no pain, far from it, the motive of our actions was neither a
prospective loss by England of her rank nor the increase of our own
possessions, but simply American independence.