Location

France

France had been Britain's great imperial rival in North America long before it became the indispensable ally of the United States. The defeat of New France in the Seven Years' War transformed the balance of power on the continent, but it also set in motion the imperial financial pressures that helped produce the American crisis after 1763. Once the colonies broke with Britain, French statesmen gradually concluded that the rebellion offered a chance to weaken their old enemy, and Benjamin Franklin's arrival in Paris in late 1776 gave the American cause a diplomat capable of turning sympathy into policy. Franklin's prestige, joined by the efforts of Silas Deane, Arthur Lee, and later John Adams in Europe, helped secure the 1778 Treaty of Alliance and Treaty of Amity and Commerce, which brought French money, materiel, fleets, and troops into the war. The alliance changed the character of the conflict, because after Saratoga the struggle was no longer a colonial insurrection alone but part of a wider international war in which Britain had to divide its strength. The military partnership reached its climax in 1781, when French troops under Rochambeau and the fleet of de Grasse enabled the Yorktown campaign that trapped Cornwallis. France therefore mattered to founding history because the independence of the United States was not secured by American valor alone; it also depended on diplomacy, alliance politics, and the willingness of a European monarchy to help create a republic that would soon write a constitution of its own.