| When Benjamin Franklin
arrived in Paris in 1776 to serve as
ambassador for the United States,
he wore a beaver hat to protect
his bald head.“By luck or by design"
Writes George Goodwin, he had
created exactly the image that
the French aristocracy Wanted,
that ofthe frontiersman savant'.
One suspects it was by design.
Goodwin's enjoyable biography
argues that as Well as a polymath,
Franklin was also a genius of
disguise.The reason why his
Personality seems so complex
- so multifaceted, so difficult
to summarise - is because he
wore a different mask for each
audience. To Americans, he was
the defender of colonial interests
and values. To Europeans, he
was an enlightenment sophisticate:
a 'Prometheus of modern
times' (Immanuel Kant) and 'the
sage whom two worlds claim'
(Mirabeau). Not everyone fell in
love with him instantly. Louis
XVI 'commissioned a chamber
pot with Franklin's face on the
bottom of its inner surface'.
Goodwin's book focuses
on the years Franklin spent in
London, from the mid-1750s to the mid -1770 , a period that
shaped his colonial politics.
On the one hand, the scientist
lived rather well : a house in a
nice, central location, honorary
degrees, friendship with
luminaries and access to the
higher reaches of power. On the other hand, he endured humiliation
from aristocratic snobs.
Despite the insults, he remained
a royalist almost until the end,
until he was forced to flee abroad
to escape arrest. Goodwin's work reminds us that the American War of Independence
was really a civil war between
men who both claimed liberty for
their cause. Sometimes the emphasis
upon Franklin's intellectual
revolutionary spirit clouds
some of the baser motivations for
independence: hunger for Native
American land, hatred of Catholicism
in Canada and a refusal
to pay for the huge upkeep of a
contested colony on the frontier
of civilisation.
Goodwin's tour ofrSthcentu
ry society is full ofwonderful
detail. London is a place
of shade and dark: of poverty
and crime but also the luxury
of Empire. Anyone who was
anyone ate turtle; there were
curries with spices from India.
Gout struck, along with kidney stones and bad skin: an allergic
reaction, Benjamin fancied, to
his excessive consumption of
beef. Franklin exercised with
dumbbelis and walking up and
down the stairs, having deduced
that it ate up far more calories
than travelling along flat roads.
Thi wa a society that was obsessed with exploring the natural and physical worlds, like a child discovering the proper use of its
own feet. In France, the king's
official experimenter tested his
theories about conductivity
by passing an electric current
between 200 Carthusian monks
and making them jump up into
the air simultaneously. Franklin,
of course, was famous for
having done something similar
with a kite. No physical event,
great or small, passed by without
examination or comment. After
Franklin fled England following
the Hutchinson Affair and the
Boston Tea Party, he spent part of
the voyage 'taking water samples
in an attempt to understand the
workings ofthe Gulf Stream'.
Franklin was not a perfect
politician. He misunderstood
the mood of his fellow Americans,
seeking conciliation where
many preferred resistance to the
British. He admitted that he was
not the best of speakers, but
believed that the new media
of publishing rendered demagoguery
unnecessary (he was
wrong about that). And he would
sometimes slip into long silences
that were mistakenly thought
enigmatic. Goodwin does not
say it explicitly but some readers
might infer that he was a gadfly,
drawn to politics in the same
way that he was drawn to nature
studies or chess. He relied heavily
on charm and sometimes came
across as a suck-up.
For all his sycophancy, he
failed to promote a vision of an
empire that was a fair and equal
partnership, for which he can not
take the blame. That rested with
an arrogant London administration
which cast aside one of the
best friends that the Empire ever
had. Franklin said au revoir to
England and bonjour to France and
secured the latter's aid in a
war that would sever the British
Empire for good. In a final twist
of irony, it was an absolutist monarchy
that rescued the republican
revolution from the armies of a
parliamentary democracy.
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