Our Founders' Warning by Strobe Talbott

Author:Strobe Talbott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

The founders were all Atlanticists, and Franklin was the first of them all. His teenage sojourn to England had been exhilarating and formative, and his later missions, including two trips across the Channel, had made him all the more cosmopolitan. Even before the Revolution broke out, it was well known in Paris that Franklin had stood up to the British authorities during the row over taxation.8

Because his popularity among them had been paved during earlier missions, Parisian intellectuals swooned over le rêve américain well before the War of Independence. British North America had been a subject of fascination, admiration, and hope among French reformers.

Then there were the philosophes themselves, many of whom regarded Franklin as one of their own. Voltaire, in 1759, had echoed Locke’s assertion of rights and anticipated the Declaration of Independence: “All men have an equal right to liberty, to the enjoyment of their own property, and to the protection of the laws.”9 Though he had never met Franklin, Voltaire heaped lavish praise on this intriguing character from the New World, comparing him to Newton and Galileo.10

Subsequently, Voltaire’s frequent disputant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, took both Locke and Voltaire to task for stopping short of replacing a monarchy with a republic, the only political system that he believed could live up to a legitimate social contract. Lacking that, “Man is born free and he is everywhere in chains.”11

Many of the French saw America as a model for their own dreams of eradicating the connivance between the monarchy and the church. Denis Diderot, whose erudition was matched by pungent aphorisms, was credited with this zinger: “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”12

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