Paul Cheney

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Paul Cheney | A False Dawn for Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism? Franco-American Trade during the American War of Independence | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

A False Dawn for Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism? Franco-American Trade during the American War of Independence

THOUGH it may have helped to give birth to the exceptional nation par excellence, the American War of Independence was hardly an exception among eighteenth-century conflicts. Viewed from Europe, the alliance of France and the United States against Great Britain in this war exemplified and in a sense epitomized a pattern of development in Anglo-French warfare. As Europe moved from the War of the Spanish Succession to the War of the Austrian Succession and finally to the Seven Years' War, armed contests lost their traditional dynastic character, moved increasingly off the Continent and into Europe's colonial periphery, and came to be understood by most observers, even outside the ministerial circles that guarded the arcana imperii, simply as wars of commerce. Beyond the seeming obfuscations of its title, the 1778 Franco-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce could be more clearly defined as an attempt to strip Britain of its North American possessions and trade in compensation for French losses in the Seven Years' War. In short it was only more of the same, expressing the commercial, colonial character of the Anglo-French rivalry more fully than previous conflicts. This impression is only strengthened by consulting the thoughts of one of the architects of the alliance, France's minister of foreign affairs, Comte Charles Gravier de Vergennes, who was insensitive, if not downright hostile, to the larger dimension of this struggle as the first of the wars of colonial liberation. Far from announcing a new political order in the Euro-Atlantic world, the commercial motives for France's involvement in the American War of Independence seemed to mark it as yet another expensive episode of colonial-mercantile warfare in the zero-sum game of international trade.¹	1
Viewed from a different angle, however, the geopolitics of eighteenth-century commerce do not negate the idealism of the Franco-American alliance; rather, its utopian political dimension is intelligible only through a consideration of commerce. Literary collaborators and future revolutionaries Étienne Clavière and Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, like many others, saw in the American Constitution a "philanthropic system ... conforming to the laws of nature," but this system was thought inseparable from the equally philanthropic reign of free trade. The manner in which the political and economic logic fit together is neatly summarized in the prospectus for the Société Gallo-Américaine that Clavière and Brissot appended to their 1787 treatise, De la France et des États-Unis: "By its arms, France has helped to affirm the independence of Free America. A treaty of commerce based upon the interest of both countries must unite them more and more intimately. The moral and political well-being of the two nations must be the principal object and result of these commercial liaisons."²	2
This logic did not entirely pan out when it was applied to Franco-American relations, but commercial provisions of the 1778 treaty had real effects on the course of the war. During the Seven Years' War, the British had easily occupied Guadeloupe and Martinique because colonists on these islands, dissatisfied with the commercial restrictions imposed on them by their metropolitan masters in France, acted with "treason or benevolent neutrality." Precious military resources were diverted from the French effort in North America to the Antilles, which contributed to French defeat. By contrast provisions of the 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce liberalized trade between France's sugar colonies and the United States, thus cooling long-simmering resentments among colonists, who rallied this time to France's defense against the British. Trade liberalization protected the soft underbelly of France's commercial empire, which helped the French prevail against Britain.³ Commercial cosmopolitanism, in the form of demands for laissez-faire policies, decisively affected the balance of European power, to which mercantilist restriction had formerly been believed to hold the key.	. . .

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