Old diplomacy: As a trapper to the Paris evening party

When Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States, arrived in France as his country’s diplomatic representative in 1776, he was celebrated like a pop star on the streets of Paris. This scene can also be found right at the beginning of the series “Franklin,” in which 79-year-old Michael Douglas plays the controversial co-author of the American Declaration of Independence.

The then 70-year-old was known in France for his scientific work on electricity, as Benjamin Franklin is considered the inventor of the lightning rod. Over the next eight years, which he spent in Paris, he found it much more difficult to negotiate diplomatic negotiations to obtain France’s support in the War of Independence against England. In the end, the printer, publisher and writer from Boston, who was actually completely inexperienced in diplomatic matters, was very successful with his mission. The seven-part series “Franklin,” which is based on the 2005 non-fiction book “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America” by biographer and journalist Tracy Schiff, tells of this year-long stay.

At the beginning of his diplomatic mission, Benjamin Franklin failed to even begin official negotiations with the French government. In the back room he sat with Foreign Minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes (Thibault de Montalembert) and negotiated arms deliveries and possible support from troops. But the newly founded USA threatened to collapse within a short time in the war against the overpowering global colonial power Great Britain. France took a wait-and-see approach for a long time and only adopted a cautious support course from 1777 onwards.

It was, among other things, Franklin’s diplomatic legwork that led to this. The series also vividly and vividly tells of the cultural shock that the bourgeois Franklin experienced in absolutist France, where for years he stayed as a guest in the estate of a rich, wasteful entrepreneur who himself hoped to do business with American independence, among other things Organized weapons and ships.

Franklin’s growing grandson William Temple (Noah Jupe) worked for him as a secretary and, like his grandfather, soon became part of Paris society, where Franklin liked to attract attention in a fur hat in the style of a trapper from the forests and became the personification of the fight for independence and freedom America became. The US Congress, which was still meeting in Philadelphia at the time, soon appointed John Adams, the later second President of the USA, to his side, who is portrayed here as an annoying snot and is horrified by Franklin’s Parisian lifestyle, but he was the one who practiced his diplomacy especially at the opera and at parties.

A good decade before the French Revolution, the struggle for freedom overseas was often celebrated in Paris salons as something exotic. “Freedom or death,” even the drunken aristocratic offspring bawls during excessive drinking sessions in the series, and of course also makes fun of America. Temple’s friend and drinking buddy Marie-Joseph Motier, Marquis de La Fayette (Théodore Pellerin), who even went overseas to fight both in the American War of Independence and later, was very serious about his commitment to the young independent nation without a king and nobility played an important role as a politician in the French Revolution.

Even though the series begins almost a bit too arbitrarily as an opulently staged historical tale, it develops a thrilling narrative dynamic over the course of the seven episodes. This historical drama is also a crime thriller, a love story, tells of secret service activities, great power politics, family disputes and spreads out a cultural, political and social panorama of the upper ten thousand of pre-revolutionary France.

Some of the shots, for example when the aristocratic Parisian youth celebrate uninhibitedly in smoky rooms and are wearing over-the-top make-up, crouching close together and bawling, almost seem like an opulent oil painting. At the very end there is the Peace of Paris (1783), which was largely negotiated by Benjamin Franklin, and 13 independent colonies, which begin to celebrate themselves in this series two years before the 250th anniversary of their founding.

Available on Apple TV+