The Bill for America

17 Mar 1790

A key in Virginia. In the central passage of George Washington’s house at Mount Vernon hangs the main key to the Bastille, the royal prison in Paris. The Marquis de Lafayette sent it in 1790, with a drawing of the ruined fortress, to the general he called his adoptive father. The record shows how it got there. What the war that made Washington famous had to do with the fall of that prison is something historians answer in different ways, and this story lets each of them speak.

1776

Secret aid. France had lost Canada to Britain in 1763, and a Library of Congress blog post says Louis XVI was eager to use the American rebellion to weaken Britain. Foreign Minister Vergennes agreed to help in secret: the government loaned one million livres to a made-up trading firm, Roderigue Hortalez and Company, which bought arms for the Americans. Whether that early aid was a loan or a gift was never clear, the State Department notes, and the argument ran on to the XYZ Affair of 1797.

6 Feb 1778

6 February 1778. Vergennes had hesitated, and the State Department’s historians say news that the British had surrendered at Saratoga decided him in December 1777. In February 1778 Benjamin Franklin and two other American commissioners signed a treaty of alliance with France. Neither side could make peace with Britain alone. A craze for Franklin and all things American had swept France, and it helped.

1781

The books are opened. A textbook says French finances were already “in a dreadful state” when Necker became finance minister in 1777. In 1781 he published the king’s accounts, a first in France; the editors of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity count 100,000 copies, and Vergennes wrote to the king that “twenty-thousand” were on the street and that this English habit insulted French patriotism. The textbook says the report called the finances sound and hid the war’s cost. That is one account, and this story could not open the modern work that reassesses the report.

19 Oct 1781

Yorktown, 1781. The alliance paid off in Virginia. The French navy fought off a British fleet and protected Washington’s forces, and the articles of capitulation were signed on 19 October 1781 by Washington, Rochambeau and Admiral de Grasse on one side. A Library of Congress blog post says the U.S. could not have won there without the French army and fleet, and that the defeat pushed Britain toward peace talks.

16 Jul 1782

The contract, 1782. At Versailles in July 1782 Franklin and Vergennes signed a contract that counted twenty-one receipts, eighteen million livres at five percent interest. The king forgave the interest until peace and gave twelve years to repay. France had also guaranteed a Dutch loan of ten million livres. France 24 says the monarchy spent over a billion livres on the whole war from 1778 to 1783, so these loans were under three percent of it. Other estimates differ, and this story found no scholarly count it could open.

1785

Peace, and an unpaid bill. The war ended in 1783. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress had little power to tax, and the editors of Jefferson’s papers write that no interest or principal was paid from 1785 until a remittance in December 1790. Jefferson’s table of 1793 shows $4.79 million due through 1791, $3.37 million paid and $1.42 million unpaid. No source here links that sum to the French deficit.

1786

The deficit, 1786. Charles Alexandre de Calonne became finance minister in 1783. At first, the textbook says, he would not cut spending and borrowed more. By 1786 he told the king that taxes had to rise, including on the wealthy. The editors of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity put the deficit that year at a sixth of the royal budget. A 1990 essay gives Simon Schama’s view that the American war was the source of more debt for a regime already in financial trouble.

22 Feb 1787

The Notables, 1787. To win support, the king called an Assembly of Notables, nobles, clergy and officials who could advise but not decide. Calonne proposed one land tax on all land, Church lands included. The textbook says many in power still believed Necker’s report that all was well, and that when the Notables asked to see accurate accounts the king refused and dismissed them. The editors of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity write that, with public opinion behind them, they forced the king to call the Estates-General, which had last met in 1614.

Jul 1788

Hail and bread, 1788. Money was not the only strain. The textbook says France had only three good harvests between 1770 and 1789, and that in normal times a family might spend 35 to 50 percent of its income on bread. In the summer of 1788 hailstorms destroyed much of the harvest. By August the state was “virtually bankrupt,” the king called the Estates-General for May 1789, and Necker came back.

5 May 1789

5 May 1789. At Versailles the Estates-General met for the first time since 1614. The American Gouverneur Morris wrote that Louis XVI’s speech was cheered so warmly that tears came to his eyes, and that Necker was “loudly and repeatedly clapped.” The Third Estate, 95 percent of the people, had been given as many deputies as the other two orders together, but not the vote by head, and the meeting stalled. On 17 June a group of deputies declared themselves the National Assembly.

3 Jun 1789

Jefferson’s charter, 3 June. The U.S. minister in Paris, Thomas Jefferson, talked over the deadlock with Lafayette and the deputy Rabaut de Saint-Étienne on the evening of 2 June. On 3 June he sent them a sketch of a charter the king might sign. It would end tax privileges and adopt “the National debt.” He called it “offered merely as a canvas,” and told Lafayette he was writing Rabaut an apology for his “meddling in a business where I know so little.” The sources here do not say what became of it.

14 Jul 1789

14 July 1789. The Bastille held only seven prisoners, but it stood for the king’s power, and the Paris crowd took it. Jefferson was not there. He wrote to John Jay from reports, and added that “how they got in” was impossible to discover, since those who claimed to have been of the party told so many different stories. The editors of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity say the day ended the absolute monarchy.

26 Aug 1789

The Declaration, August 1789. On 11 July, three days before the Bastille, Lafayette presented his own draft declaration of rights to the Assembly. He had asked Jefferson to return that draft, which he called “the Bill of Rights,” with Jefferson’s notes. The editors of Jefferson’s papers write that Jefferson’s influence on the draft is certain, though its extent cannot be fixed. The Assembly approved its own text on 26 August, and Article 14 gave citizens the right “to know to what uses” taxes are put.

Aug 1790

The key crosses the sea. Thomas Paine was to carry the key, but his trip was delayed, so it apparently went with John Rutledge Jr. and reached New York in August 1790. Washington called it a “token of victory gained by Liberty over Despotism.” Not all were moved: Chateaubriand, who had watched the attack and later saw the key in Philadelphia, wrote that the keys of the Bastille were sent “to all the important simpletons.” The editors give 1858 as the year the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association received it; the association’s own record says 1860.

3 Jan 1793

An American watches. Months after the monarchy fell and before the king’s trial ended, Jefferson, now Secretary of State, wrote to his former secretary William Short, who had condemned the French Jacobins. He defended the end of the monarchy as necessary and wrote that “rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.” He claimed that “99 in an hundred” Americans agreed. The editors of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity add that the Terror later made him reconsider, though he did not renounce the Revolution.

21 Jan 1793

The king falls. In June 1791 Louis XVI tried to flee and was arrested at Varennes. On 10 August 1792 he took refuge with the Legislative Assembly, which arrested him. Lafayette, forced out of his command, fled to avoid arrest. In January 1793 the Convention found the king guilty and sentenced him to death, by what the editors of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity call a single vote on the penalty; he was executed on 21 January.

17 Sep 1793

The Terror. From 1793 the Republic, while at war, tried suspected enemies before revolutionary tribunals. In February 1794 Robespierre told the Convention of “virtue without which terror is evil, terror without which virtue is powerless.” The editors of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity write that two-thirds of the Revolutionary Tribunal’s executions came after the law of 10 June 1794. This story gives no count of the dead because it found no source it could open that does.

6 Jun 1793

Who pays whom, 1793. France’s new republic asked the U.S. to pay its debt early, to buy American food. The editors of Jefferson’s papers say the cabinet agreed to refuse; the quarrel was over how to say it. Hamilton would give no reasons. Jefferson wanted them given, privately listed a lack of confidence in the French government’s future as the first, and was for paying that year’s instalments early if it was safe. The State Department says regular payments resumed in 1790, and that the debt to the French government was settled in 1795 through the banker James Swan.

1789

Weighing the bill. No source in this story shows that the American war’s debt alone ended the monarchy, and none makes the whole chain from the alliance to the king’s fall. A 1990 essay describes Simon Schama as treating the American affair as a source of more debt, and the debt as the result of decisions, not of structure. In 1989 Eugene White wrote that the old regime’s fiscal record was underrated and that peacetime deficits came only in the mid-1780s; in 1995 he wrote that most histories neglect the deficit. Velde and Weir (1992) point to the crown’s inability to tax, and the textbook adds harvests, unequal taxes and ideas, while warning that the weight of ideas is hard to judge.