No sooner had Benjamin Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence than he was off, secretly, to France, on what seemed, in the winter of 1776, to be an impossible mission: to secure loans and arms from King Louis XVI.
Why would France — only a dozen years after its complete thrashing by the British in the Seven Years War and the loss of all North American colonies, in defiance of the Treaty of Paris and international law — risk helping revolutionaries? To exact revenge for their humiliating defeat? To rekindle an ancient rivalry between two royal families? And how, whether or not they succeeded, could the Americans ever repay any loans? The embryonic United States had no money, no banks and no credit.
