France in the War

Adversaries and Allies in the American War

France and Its Neighbors

Between the Seven Years’ War and the American War, did the royal government give in to a desire for revenge and hatred toward England?

There was undeniably a thirst for revenge and a desire to fight British maritime imperialism among a significant portion of opinion-makers and even among government officials. But Louis XV, exiling Choiseul as early as 1770, and then Louis XVI, distancing the men of the King’s Secret in 1774, were careful to remove the most zealous warmongers from positions of power.

Far from any desire for aggression, royal policy was to be prepared should conflict arise. Minister Vergennes favored never entering into direct confrontation but rather supporting countries that would undertake actions whose effect would contribute to the balance of power he aspired to, by reducing the maritime hegemony of the United Kingdom. In 1773, Choiseul’s successor (d’Aiguillon) even proposed an alliance to the British government, which refused it, in an attempt to prevent the partition of Poland and protect Sweden against a threat of Russian aggression.

In a system that left little room for public opinion, the realists in government were too much in harmony with the concern for the common good that animated the young King to launch any action dictated by popular passions.

Did France declare war on England?

While it did help the insurgents as early as 1776, secretly sending military engineers and then the material aid that Beaumarchais had promoted and later managed, Louis XVI’s government long hesitated to respond to British provocations and, at the sovereign’s insistence, refused to engage in a conflict in which France would be the one declaring war.

The treaties of alliance, friendship, and commerce of February 6, 1778 thus took the form of a defensive rapprochement rather than a declaration of hostility. The King did not want to be the aggressor. He also needed this position to invoke the “Family Compact” with his uncle in Spain.

They waited a month before notifying London of the recognition of American independence (an independence that France was, until the peace treaty of September 1783, the only nation to recognize), thereby prompting the recall of ambassadors. Another month passed and the squadron of the Comte d’Estaing set sail. On June 17, a small French division clashed with the English Channel squadron, in a fight remembered for the glorious resistance of La Belle Poule.

The war had begun.

What factors led the British Parliament to accept the principle of independence for the thirteen colonies?

Undeniably, the news of Cornwallis’s capitulation at Yorktown, which would have been accepted with composure a few months earlier by King George III’s government, was the element that tipped Parliament. Indeed, it combined with other setbacks of this world war:

defeats in India, …
the loss of West Florida and Tobago, …
heavy losses of merchant convoys, …
the invasion of Minorca, …
the reappearance of Franco-Spanish squadrons at the entrance to the Channel, …
the weight of debt, …
French naval supremacy in the West Indies, …

(in Piers Mackesy: “The War for America,” Harvard UP, 1964.)

Did France wish to pursue a separate war with England?

In early June 1782, Castries was informed of the loss of five ships at the Battle of the Saintes, and, summarizing the situation in a remarkable strategic analysis, prepared a new combined intervention (probably unbeatable) against Jamaica. The two governments of Paris and Madrid entrusted it to the Comte d’Estaing. The plan quickly became known in London, thanks to its Parisian spies.

At the same time, Vergennes sought to accelerate peace negotiations. Faced with the Russian threat against Turkey, he wanted to obtain a combined intervention by France and … Great Britain! The negotiations were slowed by Spain’s demands, which, let us recall, was not an ally of the United States — whose independence it had refused to recognize — but of France.

Spain intended to have the commitment honored that the allies would not end the war before obtaining the cession of Gibraltar, … whose blockade the Royal Navy had just broken.

The cunning Franklin accelerated the process by having separate preliminaries signed, without respect for the commitments made in the alliance treaties with France. Two months apart, the peace preliminaries were signed by all belligerents (except Holland).

Finally, ceasefires came into effect successively across the different theaters of operation. On April 3, 1783 on US territory, later in India, as news took time to arrive. Just in time to save a difficult situation for British forces.

What was the scope of Spain’s contribution?

According to Jonathan Dull (A diplomatic history of the American Revolution, Yale UP, 1985), beyond deploying naval forces complementary to the French and the threat against Gibraltar — which British public opinion valued more than all its continental American colonies — the main effect of the Spanish alliance was the 1779 invasion threat that forced the adversary to immobilize precious land and sea forces in subsequent years to protect its own territory.

Let us also not forget the capture of West Florida, the capture of Pensacola, where the Chevalier de Monteil provided valuable French maritime and land support to Governor Galvez.

Did Spain finance the Yorktown campaign?

When de Grasse sought to fulfill the request to bring 1,200,000 livres to Washington’s forces, he first looked for a French solution. But the intendant of Saint-Domingue did not have that amount available and even declined the offer made by the admiral and several of his officers: Charitte, etc. They had great estates and offered to pledge them as collateral (at the death of the Comte de Grasse in 1788, his estates on the island were valued at 1.8 million livres).

Likewise, despite the mediation of Saavedra, envoy of Charles III, the Spanish intendant of Cuba declared himself without means.

It was the Creole inhabitants of Havana who pooled their resources to raise the necessary amount in 24 hours. Assistant to the governor, the man who gathered the sum was Francisco de Miranda, a precursor of the struggles for independence of Spain’s American colonies. The Creole ladies, members of a patriotic association, gave their jewelry, and the merchants, who opposed the trade monopoly exercised by Spain, answered the call.

They hoped that American independence would bring them economic prosperity by allowing them to continue trade with the United States.

The United States, saved by Cuba. A wink from history.

What were the “German” forces engaged in the War?

The answer is made delicate by the fact that Germans recognize as compatriots all those who speak their language, or once spoke a dialect related to it, whereas for us, a Frenchman is one who has chosen to be French.

Germanic lobbying in the USA, where a significant portion of the population has one or more ancestors who came from German-speaking Europe in the 19th century, has always been very active, to the point that during the first centennial of Yorktown, General Boulanger, who led the French delegation, refused to disembark as long as German colors were displayed alongside ours. An identical situation was experienced by the Sons of France at Yorktown in 2001: Deutschland über alles on Redoubt 9.

Thus, the hero of Camden, born Jean Kalb in Bavaria and having entered the French armies at age 20, serving over thirty years, married in France and having become the Baron de Kalb (the only name he ever bore in France and the United States), has been renamed “von Kalb”…

Similarly Steuben, whose delicate situation forced him to leave Paris and whom Saint-Germain directed toward Franklin: he lived the rest of his life in America as the Baron de Steuben, signing the Cincinnati constitution and his last will under that name. He was renamed “von Steuben” at the beginning of the 20th century.

There were fewer than a thousand German-speakers on the Allied side, compared to 29,166 landed in the United States by the British.

The few hundred German-speakers in the Royal Deux-Ponts and a few dozen in Lauzun’s Legion were an ultra-minority among the 35,000 soldiers and sailors fighting alongside 9,000 Americans in the battles of Yorktown. One feels as though reliving the story of the horse-and-lark pâté — half a horse for half a lark — when reading under a French pen: “there were thousands of German mercenaries in both camps.”

With, moreover, this fundamental difference: the German-speakers in Rochambeau’s corps belonged to a unit that had been an integral part of the royal army for over twenty years, recruited directly by French recruiters. Most chose French citizenship in 1789. Their chaplain became a general in Napoleon’s army. The collaboration of units rented for the duration of the war by the British government from minor German princes was of an entirely different nature.

Finally, seeing Alsace and Lorraine presented, in works inspired by men whose country did not yet exist in 1783, as outside of France is obviously something we have a duty to correct in a number of publications.