Remembering July 2nd: The Founding Fathers, Franklin’s Paris, and a Brazilian Echo of 1776
Every year on the 4th of July, Americans celebrate the Declaration of Independence with fireworks, parades, and speeches about the document that announced a new nation to the world. But the truth, buried in the procedural record of the Second Continental Congress, is that independence was actually voted and resolved on July 2nd, 1776. The Declaration itself, the document explaining and justifying that vote, was adopted two days later and signed in the weeks that followed.
John Adams, who knew the difference better than anyone, wrote to his wife Abigail that July 2nd would be “the most memorable Epocha in the History of America,” and predicted, wrongly as it turned out, that future generations would celebrate it “as the Day of Deliverance.” He was off by two days, but he was right about everything else.
I celebrate on the 2nd rather than the 4th, partly out of a stubborn attachment to historical accuracy, and partly because this year there is a second, more personal reason. We have just published a book that remembers the Founding Fathers in a way that almost no one else would think to do: by following Benjamin Franklin not into the familiar mythology of Philadelphia and Independence Hall, but into a Paris drawing room in the village of Auteuil, and from there into a Brazilian conspiracy room more than five thousand miles away and twelve years later.
A Book About What Happens After the Signing
The book is 18th Century Globalization: The American Revolutionary Ideal Comes to Brazil, written by the historian Kenneth Maxwell and published this year as part of his “Portugal and Brazil Confront the Contemporary World” series. I had the privilege of editing it. Maxwell has spent more than five decades on this material, going back to his Princeton doctoral dissertation in 1969, when he identified a rare French-language pamphlet in the Newberry Library’s collection in Chicago: a slim, deliberately mislabeled volume called the Recueil des Loix Constitutives des Colonies Angloises, dedicated, on its title page, to “M. le Docteur Franklin.”
The book Maxwell has written is not really about the signing of any declaration. It is about what happened to the idea of the American Revolution once it left American hands. Ideas, once printed, do not stay where you put them. Franklin understood that better than most of his contemporaries, and Maxwell’s great contribution is to trace, with forensic precision, exactly how far one particular idea traveled, and how unrecognizable it became by the time it arrived at its final destination.
That destination was Minas Gerais, the gold-and-diamond heart of colonial Brazil, where in 1788 and 1789 a group of conspirators, including the poet and magistrate Cláudio Manuel da Costa and the man history remembers as Tiradentes, plotted a republican, anti-colonial rebellion against the Portuguese Crown. They had no direct experience of the American Revolution. None of them had ever met an American. What they had was a book: a copy of the Recueil, smuggled into Brazil in 1788 by José Álvares Maciel, a Coimbra-educated student who had purchased it in Birmingham, England, two years after his countryman José Joaquim de Maia e Barbalho had met secretly in Nîmes, in southern France, with Thomas Jefferson, Franklin’s successor as American envoy to Versailles, to ask, in effect, whether France or America might support a Brazilian declaration of independence of their own.
That is the chain Maxwell reconstructs, link by link, archive by archive: from Franklin’s arrival in Paris in December 1776, to the Recueil’s publication in 1778, to a chance encounter in Nîmes, to a smuggled pamphlet in Vila Rica, to a secret judicial inquiry, the devassa, that interrogated dozens of witnesses and ultimately sent Tiradentes to the gallows in 1792.
It is a history of how the words written and signed in Philadelphia in early July 1776 acquired an entirely unintended afterlife on the other side of the Atlantic.
Franklin’s Propaganda Operation
What makes Maxwell’s account so valuable, and so different from the usual hagiography of the Founding Fathers, is his insistence on showing Franklin as a working diplomat rather than a folk hero. Franklin arrived in Paris at seventy years of age already famous: a natural philosopher who had proven that lightning is electricity, a founder of the Pennsylvania Academy and the American Philosophical Society, a member of the “Republic of Letters” whose reputation preceded him into every salon in France. The French nobility adored him, not entirely accurately, as a kind of backwoods sage, a Philadelphia rustic of supposed simplicity and virtue. Franklin, characteristically, used that caricature rather than correcting it.
His real task in Paris was harder than charm. He needed to persuade the court of Louis XVI, and specifically the foreign minister Charles Gravier, the Comte de Vergennes, that the American colonies were not a chaotic rabble of radicals but a coherent, lawful, constitutional people worth the risk of French military and financial support against Britain. The Recueil was his answer. Working with Vergennes’s quiet backing, Franklin assembled a French translation of America’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, an early draft of the Articles of Confederation, and the constitutions of six of the original states, arranged to suggest an orderliness that the actual record did not support. The “Commonwealth of Pennsylvania” became, in translation, the more ennobling “Republic of Pennsylvania.” Franklin added his own footnotes, including a “Note d’un Américain” that framed the colonies as moving steadily toward abolition and blamed the Crown for the slave trade, a claim calculated to please Enlightenment sensibilities while glossing over a far more complicated American reality.
The book was, in other words, a carefully engineered piece of diplomatic propaganda, printed in Paris despite a false Philadelphia imprint designed to give the French government deniability. It worked. The Franco-American alliance that followed proved decisive in winning the war.
But Maxwell’s real subject begins where most accounts of Franklin’s diplomacy end: with what happened once the Recueil escaped Franklin’s control. Pirated editions multiplied, some claiming an equally fictitious Swiss origin. The pamphlet became, in Maxwell’s evocative phrase, an instrument of “revolution through a broken mirror,” a text that Brazilian readers, wrestling with debt, taxation, and a slave-based economy entirely unlike Pennsylvania’s, bent to fit their own circumstances. A document meant to reassure a French king that American radicals were safe constitutional partners became, a decade later and an ocean away, a handbook for overthrowing a different monarchy altogether.
My Street, Franklin’s Street
I have a confession that belongs in this story, because it is the reason Maxwell asked me to write the foreword to his book rather than simply edit it. My wife Murielle and I live in Paris, in an apartment that sits on what was once the Grande Rue d’Auteuil, in the old village of Auteuil that was annexed into the 16th arrondissement of Paris only in 1860. Franklin walked this street, regularly, for nearly a decade. From his residence at the Hôtel de Valentinois in neighboring Passy, where he lived as American envoy from 1776 to 1785, he would come to Auteuil to visit the salon of Anne-Catherine de Ligniville Helvétius, the widow of the philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvétius, a woman Franklin affectionately called “Notre Dame d’Auteuil,” “Our Lady of Auteuil.” He admired her enough to propose marriage after the death of his own wife; she, having already turned down the great economist Turgot, turned Franklin down as well, and the two remained close friends rather than spouses. Madame Helvétius’s house is long gone now, but the route Franklin took between Passy and her garden in Auteuil is, as best the historical record allows us to reconstruct it, embedded in the street grid I walk every day.
There is something genuinely strange about discovering, while editing a book on eighteenth-century globalization, that the central figure of the story spent his evenings a few doors from where you now live. Auteuil today is much changed from the semi-rural retreat Franklin knew, a place wealthy Parisians used to escape the city’s “putrid streets,” as Abigail Adams once put it (John Adams himself lived a few blocks from where we are now, during his own stretch as American minister in Paris).
But something of that village character persists: the intimate scale of the streets, the gardens tucked behind apartment buildings, the sense of a smaller world inside the larger city. It is not hard, walking here, to imagine Franklin doing exactly what I imagine him doing: easing out of the formal rigor of Versailles diplomacy and into an evening of wine, conversation, and the unglamorous, patient work of building a wartime alliance.
What strikes me most, having now spent considerable time inside Maxwell’s research, is how directly that unglamorous work in Auteuil connects to events Franklin could not possibly have foreseen and would almost certainly not have wanted. He came to this village to charm the French nobility into supporting a war for American independence.
What he built, almost as a byproduct of that charm offensive, was a textual infrastructure, a portable, translatable bundle of constitutional ideas, that would travel on its own momentum to places Franklin never visited and people he never met. The same Recueil that reassured Versailles became, in the hands of conspirators in Minas Gerais, a kind of revolutionary scripture. Franklin supplied no soldiers and no rifles to Brazil. He supplied a book, and a book, it turns out, can travel considerably farther and stranger than its author intends.
The Conspirators Who Read Franklin Wrong, and Right
It is worth pausing on what actually happened to the men who read that pamphlet in Vila Rica, because the consequences were not abstract. The Portuguese governor of Minas Gerais, the visconde de Barbacena, learned of the plot in March 1789 from a fellow conspirator turned informant, and moved with the “most judicious measures and the greatest circumspection,” as he put it in a secret letter to the viceroy in Rio, despite commanding, by his own admission, no more than seventy loyal soldiers and not a single barrel of gunpowder. A long judicial inquiry, the devassa, followed, dragging on for years and filling ten published volumes of testimony. Cláudio Manuel da Costa, the conspiracy’s most prominent literary figure, died in custody under circumstances still debated by historians. Tiradentes, who had traveled to Rio de Janeiro to try to drum up support, was hanged and quartered in 1792, his body parts displayed along the road to Minas as a warning. The Brazilian republic the conspirators imagined, modeled explicitly on the Pennsylvania constitution as Franklin’s Recueil presented it, would not arrive for another ninety-seven years, and even then by a different and far less radical route.
There is no triumphant ending to graft onto this story, and Maxwell does not try to manufacture one. What he offers instead is something more interesting: a demonstration of how thinly and unevenly republican ideas actually spread in the eighteenth century, dependent on a single smuggled pamphlet, a chance meeting in a provincial French town, a handful of Coimbra-educated students with ties to the medical faculty at Montpellier.
The Minas conspirators did not encounter the American Revolution. They encountered Franklin’s curated, propagandized, French-language version of it, complete with his footnote on slavery that Brazilian slaveholders found a convenient way to square revolutionary rhetoric with the society they actually intended to keep. Maxwell calls this “revolution through a broken mirror,” and the phrase captures something true about how political ideas travel generally: not as clean transmissions but as refractions, picking up distortions at every border they cross.
What the 250th Anniversary Asks of Us
This year happens to mark the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, and, by a pleasant coincidence, the 85th birthday of Kenneth Maxwell, who has spent the better part of his scholarly life chasing this single pamphlet through archives in Paris, Lisbon, Chicago, and Ouro Preto. T
here is a temptation, on anniversaries like this, to retell the Revolution as a closed story: a vote on July 2nd, a declaration on July 4th, signatures gathering through August, and an outcome we already know. Maxwell’s book is a useful corrective to that temptation, because it insists that 1776 was not an ending or even, really, a beginning, but a node in a much larger and far less tidy network of ideas in motion.
The Founding Fathers we usually remember on the 4th of July are static figures: marble busts, profiles on currency, men frozen at the moment of signing. Franklin in Auteuil is a different kind of figure entirely, restless, strategic, working a room, building relationships whose consequences he could only partly control and could not begin to predict. That is, I think, the more honest way to remember the Founding Fathers, not as authors of a finished document but as participants in an unfinished and still-unfolding argument about what self-government means and who gets to claim it. The conspirators in Minas Gerais believed they were claiming it. They were wrong about a great deal, including, fatally, about how much support they actually had. But they were not wrong that the words written in Philadelphia in the first days of July 1776 belonged, in some sense, to anyone willing to risk everything to read them as an instruction rather than a memory.
That is why I mark July 2nd. Not simply because it is the more historically precise date, though it is, but because the vote in Congress that day set in motion a chain of translation, adaptation, and reinvention that neither the men who cast it nor the man who would soon carry its meaning across the Atlantic could have fully anticipated.
Franklin’s walk from Passy to Auteuil was, on the surface, a small and pleasant thing, an aging diplomat visiting a friend’s salon.
It turned out to be one of the more consequential walks in the history of the Atlantic world.
I am glad, in my own small way, to be living along its route.