OUR FIRST ALLIANCE 



521 



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 Ver- 

 sailles — 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 Ro- 

 chambeau, when they saw him in Amer- 

 ica, 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 con- 

 ferred on man." 



AN ALLIANCE WHICH FORBADE CONQUEST 



This answer to "Messieurs les Sau- 

 vages" is an enlightening one ; it shows 

 what was the latent force that sur- 

 mounted all obstacles and caused the 

 French nation to stand as a whole, from 

 beginning to end, in favor of the Amer- 

 icans, 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 pos- 

 sessions. This force was the increasing 

 passion among the French for precisely 

 "that natural liberty which God has con- 

 ferred 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 ex- 

 isted, 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 consid- 

 eration, 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. 



It is often forgotten that this time was 

 not in France a period of Anglophobia, 

 but of Anglomania. Necker, so influen- 



tial, 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, phil- 

 osophy, sports, clothes, parliamentary in- 

 stitutions, Shakespeare, just translated 

 by Le Tourneur, with the King and 

 Queen as patrons of the undertaking; 

 but, above all, wrote Count de Segur, 

 "we were all dreaming of the liberty, at 

 once calm and lofty, enjoyed by the en- 

 tire body of citizens of Great Britain." 



THE MAGIC WORDS TO CONJURE WITH 



Such is the ever-recurring word. Lib- 

 erty, philanthropy, natural rights — these 

 were the magic syllables to conjure with. 

 "All France," we read 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 enthusi- 

 asm 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 Es- 

 prit des Lois had had 22 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." 



AN ALLIANCE WITH NO HATRED FOR THE 

 COMMON ENEMY 



Another of the master minds of the 

 day, the economist, thinker, and reformer 

 Turgot, the one whose advice, if fol- 

 lowed, 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 na- 

 tion was, ardently pro-American, but not 

 anti-Engdish. 



