As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week, Jonathan looks at a French plan to send covert aid to the American rebels. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors
On April 19, 1776—250 years ago this week—patriot leaders marked one year since the Revolutionary War had begun with the Battles of Lexington and Concord or, as the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson would later put it, “the shot heard round the world.” Across the Atlantic Ocean, no one had awaited the sound longer and more eagerly than the French.
In the usual telling of the Revolutionary War, the story of Franco-American relations revolves around Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic mission to France and the Marquis de Lafayette’s quest to fight for liberty in America. But long before those two men crossed the Atlantic in opposite directions, a more secret history was being written by a French playwright named Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. By the first anniversary of the war, he and his allies neared approval for one of the war’s greatest pieces of theater: a covert plan to aid the American rebels.
