The ingratitude of a new nation …… or international politics? ….. when America turned on the French Revolution …. on the wireless

The surrender of British forces at Yorktown, 1781

The Franco-American Alliance 1778, from the series In Our Time was broadcast on Thursday, and I listened to it today.

“Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the treaties France entered into with the United States of America in 1778, to give open support to the USA in its revolutionary war against Britain and to promote French trade across the Atlantic. 

This alliance had profound consequences for all three. The French navy, in particular, played a decisive role in the Americans’ victory in their revolution, but the great cost of supporting this overseas war fell on French taxpayers, highlighting the need for reforms which in turn led to the French Revolution. 

The Americans, 1781

Then, when France looked to its American ally for support in the new French revolutionary wars with Britain, Americans had to choose where their longer term interests lay, and they turned back from the France that had supported them to the Britain they had just been fighting, and France and the USA fell into undeclared war at sea.

With Frank Cogliano, Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh, Kathleen Burk, 

Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London, and Michael Rapport, Reader in Modern European History at the University of Glasgow*

Producer: Simon Tillotson”

Picture; Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, John Trumbull, 1820, showing the surrender of British forces to French and American forces after the Siege of Yorktown, September 28-October 19th, 1781, from the Rotunda of the US Capitol, Washington DC

* The Franco-American Alliance 1778, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v99n