“omg.” – me, December 2016
Welcome back to The Land of Desire, a French history podcast dedicated to exploring all the weird adventures, mysteries and surprising backstories behind French cultural icons. After coming back from a long holiday, I checked my download stats and realized I’d just passed an amazing milestone: 100,000 downloads!! I’m blown away, considering this show is less than 6 months old. I’ll be keeping the rest of this year’s episodes short and sweet, but this episode is dedicated to the number 100,000. This week, we’ll take a look at a fake war, a forgotten debt, and the time your crazy grandpa tried to influence world affairs.
Special thanks to the folks at Bello Collective for including The Land of Desire in their list of the 100 Outstanding Audio Stories of 2016!
Episode 14: “100,000!”
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Thanks again to everyone who took the time to listen in! I’m planning on two more episodes before the New Year, if I can swing it in the midst of holiday madness. In the meantime, please help me wrap up the year by spreading the word about this show!
Transcript
Bienvenue and welcome back to the Land of Desire, a podcast about French art and culture! If you’re joining me for the first time, I’ve been on hiatus for the past 3 weeks after wrapping up my series on the Dreyfus Affair and taking what I consider to be a very well-earned birthday vacation to Bali. I’ll keep those episodes short and sweet for the rest of the year, so that you and I can all spend our time enjoying the holidays and drinking mulled wine all day, the way the French are doing right now.
While I was gone, The Land of Desire crossed a huge milestone: 100,000 downloads! Considering the show only launched 5 months ago, this is mind-blowing to me, and I wanted to celebrate with a special episode. Most of you live in the United States, which makes sense not only because I’m based in the United States, but also because Americans have always been fascinated by France, Paris in particular. Some of those Americans take the leap, buy a ticket, cross the sea and move to France for good. How many Americans are currently living in France? That’s right, you guessed it: about 100,000. In fact, without the first American ex-pats in Paris, the United States wouldn’t exist at all. Today, let’s spend a few brief moments appreciating America’s debt to France, and one of the quirkier means America has attempted to pay France back.
As anyone who remembers high school history class could tell you, the United States of America wouldn’t exist without France. End of story. Without French ships and more importantly, French money, the revolutionaries would have been beaten by the British, and the American revolution would be little more than a sad footnote in history. For most of the Revolutionary War, the fledgeling United States relied on two emissaries to keep the alliance strong: Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.
Most people already know about Benjamin Franklin’s time in France. He loved wine, he loved women, and it comes as no surprise, then, that he loved Paris. Paris loved him back: they loved his jokes, they loved his scientific experiments, and they really loved his efforts to fight back against their mortal enemies, the British. Throughout the war, Franklin secured just about everything his fellow American soldiers needed back home, and France was happy to foot the bill – so happy, in fact, that they bankrupted themselves just a few years later, setting off a revolution of their own. During the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin secured over $2 million in French loans, not including ships, guns, food, and more.
Meanwhile, however, John Adams wasn’t nearly as much fun. His journey to France was terrible: a long voyage at sea, mostly spent trying to keep his son, a 10 year old John Quincy Adams, from getting swept overboard during terrible storms. When they weren’t facing lightning strikes, they were being chased by British ships. Six weeks later, John Adams arrived to France as so many other Americans have done: exhausted, nervous, and unable to speak a word of French. The French soon hated him, and the feeling was mutual: they thought he was an uptight stuffed shirt; he thought they were a bunch of lazy, lousy aristocrats. Benjamin Franklin groaned and held his face in his hands at John Adams just about once a week, and everybody tried to figure out how to, just, keep the narc away from the party, you know? Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin kept securing loan after loan from the French government, just so long as he promised not to bring that annoying nerd with him to official parties.
A few years later, after France had kicked off a revolution of her own, it turned out alienating grumpy John Adams was a bad idea. As delightful as Benjamin Franklin might have been at parties, he was never actually President. Instead, grumpy John Adams took a break from moving into a new office called the White House and said, “Sorry, we only owed money to the French king. No idea who you guys are. Byeeeeeee.” That was a bit of a bad idea, because the other thing John Adams had been working on when he wasn’t watching the fresh paint dry in the Oval Office? Dismantling and selling the American Navy to pay off debts. Whoopsie. So now an angry France starts capturing American merchant ships. Like, almost all of them. John Adams told France, “Hey, knock it off!” France replied, “Yeah? You and what Navy?” For the next 2 years, America and France engaged in a seafaring slapfight, never quite coming out and declaring war, but definitely not trading friendship bracelets at recess either. The reason you’ve never heard of this Quasi-War with France is because it’s mostly pretty boring, but it had two important repercussions: 1) The United States didn’t owe money to France anymore. 2) In the most absurd moment of an absurd war, a farmer from Pennsylvania named George Logan took it upon himself to fix things up. George Logan was the equivalent of your crazy grandpa who yells at the news about how, if it were up to him, he’d make those bums sit down and figure it out already. Except that unlike your grandpa, George Logan really did sail to Paris and sit down with a room full of very amused French diplomats. The trip wasn’t as much of a disaster as you might have predicted, but when he returned home, the United States Congress veeeeery quickly passed a law called the Logan Act, which says only diplomats can be diplomats, thank you very much. Sorry, crazy grandpa, it’s still in effect today.
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Only a few cases of a Logan Act violation appear in American history. One such violation occurred in 1968, when a Republican fundraiser named Anna Chennault got on the phone with the South Vietnamese government. “Don’t engage in peace talks with Lyndon B. Johnson,” she told them. “You’ll do better under Richard Nixon once he’s elected.” Oddly enough, Anna Chennault was never convicted of violating the Logan Act – since, of course, Richard Nixon won. While South Vietnam may have expected to benefit from Richard Nixon’s election, his administration actually turned out to be a windfall for an entirely different country.
On May 21, 1987, the nation of France paid tribute to Richard Nixon. During his years in office, Nixon had overseen a very important piece of legislation, with very unintended consequences. In 1969, for the first time, Americans could claim charitable donations as deductions in their taxes. This tiny little insertion to the American tax code unleashed an enormous wave of charitable giving – and as it turned out, a staggering percentage of that wave went to France. At the time of the tribute, American investors had just financed the restoration of Versailles. Nearer and dearer to my heart, American donations almost singlehandedly financed the transformation of Claude Monet’s incredible home in Giverny into a public museum, at a cost of over $7 million. One American fundraising organization, the French Heritage Society, has raised over $10 million dollars in order to restore nearly 400 projects. Meanwhile, tax write-offs make for strange corporate bedfellows: American Express helped finance the restoration of the fortress of Mont-Saint-Michel, and I.B.M. poured money into a bunch of neglected medieval towers. Later on in the evening, nervous French officials tried to stir up American interests in the Arc de Triomphe, which in 1987 was literally falling apart, held together with netting to keep chunks of it from crashing down on tourists. For those of you planning a trip anytime soon, don’t worry, the evening was a success and the arc is safe and sound again. One can only imagine grumpy John Adams, rolling over in his grave at the thought that another American president made it easier than ever for Americans to divert money from their own government into that of France!
In 1776, just a few months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin became perhaps the first true American ex-pat living in France. With over 100,000 American expats residing there today, mostly clustered together in Paris, Franco-American relations are a two-way boulevard. For those who can’t afford a full-time apartment in Paris, charities and friendship society fundraisers offer Americans another way to give back. And as for the rest of those Americans who love France and her history and culture? Why, they listen to French history podcasts, of course!
Thank you again for listening to the Land of Desire. My name’s Diana and this is a one-woman show: I write, research and produce every episode. You can check out the show’s website, which includes lots of supplementary material, at www.thelandofdesire.com or follow the show on Facebook and Twitter. If you have a moment, please take time to subscribe to the show on iTunes, and leave a review! Finally, if you love the show, please tell your friends! Spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, forward it to your friends who put Eiffel tower charms on their keychains – let the world know! Thanks for listening, and look for the next episode in two weeks. Until then, au revoir!
Further Reading:
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris – David McCullough – I haven’t actually finished this Christmas present yet, but I love that he focuses on a lesser-studied era of Franco-American relations. Sometimes American media makes it seem as though Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were the first Americans in Paris, but it’s not true, I promise.
Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation – Charles Glass – Consider this a spoiler warning; I’ll probably share some of these stories in future episodes! Sylvia Beach is a wonder, traipsing about Nazi-occupied Paris, searching with increased desperation for fancy mustard…
A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America – Stacy Schiff – You can read an except in essay form in The American Scholar.