The French Alliance: A Rebellion Becomes a World War

For two years, Benjamin Franklin had worked in Paris to secure formal French support for American independence, while France quietly supplied weapons and money without committing openly to a war against Britain. The surrender of an entire British army at Saratoga in October 1777 changed the calculation. On February 6, 1778, Franklin and his fellow commissioners signed a Treaty of Alliance with France in Paris, transforming what had been a colonial rebellion into a global conflict. The treaty's actual text survives at the National Archives. Washington's own letter expressing his reaction, and the General Orders he issued for how the army at Valley Forge would mark the occasion, both survive at Founders Online.

Franklin arrived in Paris in December 1776 as part of a three-man commission tasked with securing French support, joined by Silas Deane and later Arthur Lee. France had already been providing covert assistance, weapons, money, and supplies funneled through intermediaries, but King Louis XVI hesitated to commit openly to an alliance. A formal treaty meant war with Britain, and the French king had genuine reservations: the financial risk was enormous, and supporting a rebellion against a monarch was an uncomfortable position for a monarch of his own to take, regardless of how much he disliked the British.

The American military record through 1777 gave France little confidence that the rebellion could actually succeed. That changed in December 1777, when word reached Paris that an entire British army under General Burgoyne had surrendered at Saratoga. French Foreign Minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, moved quickly once the news arrived, working to persuade Louis XVI that the moment to act had come.

The American commissioners met with French representative Conrad Alexandre Gerard on the evening of February 6 to finalize two documents: a Treaty of Amity and Commerce establishing trade relations, and a Treaty of Alliance committing both nations to mutual defense if Britain declared war on France as a result. The alliance bound each nation not to make a separate peace with Britain.

Franklin and Deane wrote to Continental Congress president Henry Laurens two days later with the news, in a letter that conveys something of the relief and significance the moment carried for men who had spent two years working toward exactly this outcome.

Word of the alliance took nearly three months to cross the Atlantic and reach Washington's army, still encamped at Valley Forge. When official confirmation arrived, Washington wrote to Congress describing his reaction in terms he rarely used in his official correspondence.

Washington issued General Orders on May 5, 1778, directing how the army would mark the occasion. The celebration he organized was deliberately public and military in character, intended to demonstrate the army's renewed strength and morale to anyone watching, including any British observers who might hear of it.

The celebration came just nine days after the army that had been rebuilt under von Steuben's training that winter would march out of Valley Forge entirely. The timing was not coincidental to how the war's remaining years would unfold: a French fleet, French money, and eventually French troops on American soil would become decisive factors in the campaigns that followed, culminating in the combined American and French operation that ended the war at Yorktown three years later.

Britain declared war on France on March 17, 1778, formally widening the conflict beyond its American origins. Spain entered the war as a French ally in 1779. What had begun as a dispute between Britain and thirteen of its own colonies had become, within less than three years, a war involving multiple European powers contesting territory and trade across multiple continents. The alliance did not win the war by itself, the fighting continued for three more years, but it provided the United States something it had lacked entirely on its own: a navy capable of contesting British control of American waters, and a source of credit, supplies, and eventually troops that the Continental Congress could never have generated alone.