Nathaniel Popkin

Stacy Schiff, 2005
A Philadelphian arrives in Paris

If you click the above link, you’ll end up in the world of the New York Times, 1922. Then, Paris was the third largest city in the world, Philadelphia the tenth (today, Paris is 79th, Philadelphia 129th); here is a time when these cities mattered (Paris does still, alas), when the center of gravity hovered over the Atlantic.

In A Great Improvisation Stacey Schiff takes us back to the beginning of the Paris-Philadelphia alignment, to an historical moment when these two cities, so opposite in intent and function, pushed the world along to Modernity. It is ostensibly a biography of Franklin told through the lens of his iconoclastic diplomacy. Indeed, in that regard, the present leaders of the United States have much to learn from this book. Schiff paints Franklin as patient foremost, clever, hypocritical, resilient, and as one of the world’s first true celebrities. She credits his skills of realpolitik in winning the American Revolution; on the other hand, the rest of the Founding Fathers come off as petty—more like the present Congress (or City Council) than a wise group of visionaries. If they had their way undermining Franklin, the Revolution would have failed.

But Schiff’s genius is to enable us visualize the Western world of the late eighteenth century; its poles of influence; its conflicting instincts; its sense of what scientifically and politically was about to happen. She provides the urban armature—a two-sided world of Philadelphia (practical, self-governing, boring) and Paris (opulent, demagogic, teeming)—making this a critical book for our understanding the role of cities in the Western world. What a delicious moment she paints!

The Paris into which Franklin rode in 1776 was at once the most opulent city in the world and the Calcutta of its day. A decade earlier Franklin himself marveled at the city’s “prodigious mixture of magnificence and negligence.” His was a more indulgent analysis than that of Voltaire, who reduced the European capital to “an appalling luxury and a hideous misery.” Approached from the tree-lined Versailles road, as Franklin entered it, Paris was almost blinding in it pearly splendor, a twinkling constellation of steeples bathed in hazy light…To Philadelphia eyes it would have been particularly imposing. French visitors to America noted that the only building of any distinction in that provincial city was the prison.

Schiff cleverly metes out the genius of both places—Philadelphia streets were clean and well-lit, its printing industry uncensored—and it’s in that context we get to see Franklin struggle, apprehend, and come to play one world view off the other. We also get a moving glimpse of Franklin together with Voltaire, the geniuses of these two inter-locked nations along the banks of the Seine. —NRP