After several trips to Britain as a colonial representative, Franklin took many trips to England as a representative of America and then goes back to Philadelphia so he can then supporter independence in the colonies. He is put on the comitte that writes the Decleration of Independence and is one of the signers as well.
In October 1776, responding to the call to the aid of a new nation to fight against a global coalition military, Franklin agreed to be part of the team of the three American envoys in France, accompanied by Silas Deane and Arthur Lee.
Frnaklin crossed the Atlantic even thoug there were many British military vessels that were after him. Once in France, he began a diplomatic career of the most successful. Won praise by the scientific and literary Paris, he is seen as the incarnation of humanistic values of the Enlightenment. Franklin and Voltaire became friends after having meet each other at the French Academy. Turgot also expresses his admiration for the diplomat.
In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Benjamin Franklin realizes that despite the desire of the French to beat Great Britain, the “rebels” of America are still too vulnerable. Franklin puts up a diplomatic organization to achieve the expected result: he multiplies contacts, bypasses British diplomacy, and develops his relations with the great French politicians.
In February 1778, after news of the British defeat of Saratoga, the three U.S. representatives reached an agreement with France. Deane and Lee returned to the United States, leaving only Ambassador Franklin in Versailles. After a British defeat at the Battle of Yorktown in Virginia, he creates the first peace talks with the representatives of the British. During the summer of 1782, when John Adams and John Jay took the road to Paris, Franklin wrote an outline of the treaty that shall prevail: it calls for total independence, access to fishing grounds of the New Territories, the evacuation by British forces from the occupied areas, and the establishment of a western border on the banks of the Mississippi.
In 1783, Adams, Jay and Benjamin Franklin, who was over seventy years, sign for the United States, a peace that guarantees independence. The treaty puts an end to the war of independence.
After returning to the United States he was elected as the Chairman of Pennsylvania. He also participates in the drafting of the Constitution.
Franklin thus becomes the only founding father of America to sign the three founding documents of the United States of America: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the American Constitution.
Benjamin Franklin comes to Montreal in 1776 as Commissioner of the U.S. Congress. It was his intervention that gives Montreal its first printer. This, Fleury Mesplet, is the distributor in Quebec of philosophical ideas, the most prominent representative is Voltaire who had been initiated at the Lodge of Nine Sisters in Paris in the presence of Benjamin Franklin.
In Montreal, the park’s name recalls Fleury Mesplet (1734-1794), a French printer who, after exile in London, immigrated to Philadelphia to work on behalf of Benjamin Franklin. During the occupation of Montreal by American troops, Mesplet accompanied Franklin to publish a newspaper in French to supportthe cause of independence of the Thirteen Colonies. Following the departure of troops, Mesplet nevertheless chose to settle in the city. He founded the first newspaper in Montreal in 1778, the Gazette of Commerce and Literature, as the English daily. The Gazette, is still in business. At McGill University in Montreal, the first true university seminars among Catholics, Benjamin Franklin is at a conference, calling on the New France to join the Union. In the French version of the constitution Thomas Jefferson will help write it.
Works Cited:
Fleming, Thomas, “The Perils of Peace: America’s Struggle for Survival”, Collins, NY, 2007
Van Horne, John C. “The History and Collections of the Library Company of Philadelphia,” The Magazine Antiques, v. 170. no. 2: 58-65 (1971).
Weber, Max The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit of Capitalism”, Penguin Books, 2002
Wolf, A., History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. New York, 1939
