The French Alliance: Key to Winning the American Revolution with Dr. Richard Bell

The climactic battle of the American Revolution, the Siege of Yorktown in October 1781 was a decisive win for George Washington’s Continental Army. Yet it was also a triumph for the unlikely wartime alliance forged between patriot revolutionaries and the French King Louis XVI. Together, a massive Franco-American force succeeded in vanquishing British and Hessian troops, led by Lord Cornwallis. The result was a victory so lopsided that peace talks to end the entire revolutionary war began in earnest soon afterward. 

This conversation explores the inside story of this essential alliance as it evolved from small-scale privateering and gun-running to formal recognition of the United States following the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. It examines Benjamin Franklin’s pivotal role in persuading the French court to wade into this civil war between Britain and its rebel colonies; it explains how the scope and global reach of the war changed when France joined the fight; and it reconstructs the experiences of ordinary French soldiers and sailors as they pitched in alongside the patriots. 

At Yorktown, there would be almost as many French soldiers on the field as Continentals—along with 29 French warships under the Comte de Rochambeau filling the Chesapeake Bay. French seapower, firepower, and manpower were critical to Cornwallis’ capitulation. After the British surrender, French forces also provided Washington the troop strength he needed to round up and re-enslave thousands of Black Virginians who had taken the British King’s side during this long, tumultuous freedom war.