Patriot Pirates by Robert H. Patton Page A

assignment in France was twofold. First, he was to arrange weapons shipments from French suppliers on the promise of future remittance with American commodities, which is to say on unsecured credit extended to a lone agent who had few funds, no official title, no political power, and no authorization from the full Congress, which had been kept in the dark about his mission. Second, he was to parlay a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, internationally famous for his study of electricity, into face-to-face meetings with French officials in order to gauge their willingness to strike a military and commercial alliance with America.
    The obstacles were considerable. Whatever social refinement Deane possessed was superficial and not indicative of a nuanced intellect suited to negotiate, in a language he barely spoke, the maze of indirection and subtext that characterizes all diplomacy, and which was the particular forté of French foreign minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, the most powerful and adroit statesman in Europe.
    In Deane’s favor, however, was France’s bitter antipathy toward Britain. Its fall from world dominance resulting from defeat in the Seven Years’ War had been a point of national humiliation ever since the Peace of Paris was signed in 1763. The wish to get even in any way possible made Vergennes receptive to Deane’s overtures.
    The French king, Louis XVI, was only nineteen when he’d assumed the throne in 1774. Cautious in his domestic rule, he was likewise skittish about provoking war and thus disinclined to push the limits of international neutrality agreements, which for many years had balanced the power in Europe between Britain and Portugal on one side and France and Spain on the other.
    Vergennes held a bolder view. At fifty-eight, experienced and wily, he manipulated policy toward his objectives and then presented it to the young king as inevitable. There was no disagreement within France that a Britain shorn of its American colonies would be a fine thing. Out of deference to his monarch’s sensitivities, however, the foreign minister couldn’t yet openly back the American rebellion. But he was prepared, in his words, “to connive at certain things.”
    Even before meeting Deane he’d approved a loan of 1 million livres (about $10 million) to Roderigue Hortalez & Company, a dummy firm created to funnel covert aid to America. Spain, as eager as France to see Britain beaten, matched the loan, as did a consortium of friends of the company’s founder, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais.
    A playwright (he later wrote
The Marriage of Figaro
and
The Barber of Seville
) and political gadfly, Beaumarchais had a zest for capitalism, court intrigues, and American liberty. Vergennes designated him Deane’s unofficial liaison to local arms dealers, and beginning in the summer of 1776 Beaumarchais and Deane began acquiring military supplies to ship to the Continental Army. They took customary commissions and planned to replenish the Hortalez accounts once Congress’s commodity shipments, especially tobacco, began arriving from America.
    The company’s funds were almost all gone when a letter came in late July from the Secret Committee apologizing “that we have been so unfortunate in our remittances to you.” The Royal Navy was raising havoc with American transports and the situation was getting worse. “Hitherto you will think yourself unlucky in these untoward circumstances,” the letter warned, adding brightly, “but this must not dispirit us.”
    Deane panicked. Hortalez was a shell, after all, a fiction necessitated by neutrality agreements among the governments of France, Spain, and Britain. Loans ostensibly made to the company were in reality extended to Congress on the basis of its promise, certified by Deane, to deliver valuable cargoes as repayment. Delay could prove “a mortal stab to my whole proceedings,” he wrote. Beaumarchais, having promised Vergennes and