Antiques.(America's relations with UK and France)

I trust, that our alliance and intercourse with France may enable us, as a nation to shake off the leading-strings of Britain,--the English sternness and formality of manner; retaining, however, sufficient of their gravity, to produce, with French ease and elegance, a happy compound of national character and manners, yet to be modeled. The influence of this alliance will tend to remove the deep prejudice against France.

Entry in the journal of Elkanah Watson for 1779, from Men and Times of the Revolution; or Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, Including His Journals of Travels in Europe and America, from the Year 1777 to 1842, ed. Winslow C. Watson (1856; 2nd ed. 1857).

Next to Protestant England, the country that had the longest and most important impact on the United States was Catholic France. Not only did Americans journey to France in the early years, but countless Frenchmen visited the New World--explorers, refugees, scientists, artists, craftsmen, visionaries, propagandists, noblemen, commoners, and Huguenots. They found here a refuge from religious persecution, opportunities for building a new life, a laboratory for social study, a field for scientific exploration, and an ally (or sometimes an enemy) in politics and war. The dynamic relationship forged over the years between these sister republics goes far in explaining the fascination of Americans with France.

And the converse was also true. Anne Robert Jacques Turgot firmly believed that Americans were "the hope of the human race." It was Benjamin Franklin on his first visit to Paris in September 1767 who initiated the swell of Americanism there. To the French he seemed the complete philosopher. Then the war brought a number of other Americans to France to negotiate treaties of amity and commerce, among them John Adams, Thomas ...