History: The US's founding fathers are big business for today's publishers. Biographies of Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton and the rest consistently top the New York Times bestseller lists.
David McCullough's life of John Adams has sold more than two million copies. Since 9/11, the US has been increasingly preoccupied with its origins - not least the leadership displayed - as it uneasily debates its role as the world's only superpower.
Of all the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin is perhaps the most revered. Stacy Schiff is happy to leave him on his pedestal, but the joy of this book comes not in a new story but in the telling. Schiff is a writer of great subtlety and imagination. The revealing detail, beautifully expressed, is her hallmark. The result is a wonderfully rich and indulgent story, full of intrigue, betrayals and eventual triumph, told in a superbly paced narrative. Dr Franklin Goes to France is a book to curl up with and to savour (probably with a bottle of burgundy).
Six months after the US declared its independence in July 1776, congress sent Franklin to France to solicit money and arms for the war against the British. He was chosen because, as a philosopher and scientist of world renown, he was the country's most famous son. His arrival in Paris caused a sensation. "The French were in love with the concept of America and a man named Franklin before either of them materialised," writes Schiff.
To European eyes, Benjamin Franklin was every inch the philosopher-statesman. The vast domed forehead and wide, heavy-lidded eyes seemed to radiate wisdom and virtue. His considerable bulk (he dubbed himself "Dr Fatsides") conveyed an air of contentment and goodwill. He displayed none of the English airs and graces of his Harvard- or Yale-educated, establishment compatriots. To susceptible Parisians, Benjamin Franklin was the ultimate American rebel, "a sort of walking Statue of Liberty".
PARIS IN THE 1770s, writes Schiff, was "at once the most opulent city in the world and the Calcutta of its day - a bustling, steaming, fetid, brimming, deafening madness". Franklin understood the power of celebrity status in that cacophony, and how to manipulate it. "The first thing to be done in Paris is always to send for a tailor, peruke maker, and shoemaker," wrote his compatriot, John Adams, "for this nation has established such domination over the fashion that neither clothes, wigs, nor shoes made in any other place will do in Paris." Franklin knew but ignored this. Inclined to French fashions while in the US, in Paris he dressed so simply that most wrongly assumed he was a Quaker. Sensationally, he did not wear a wig, donning instead a plush fur cap. Amazingly, Paris soon adopted the coiffure à la Franklin.
Franklin's greatest skill as a diplomatist was his ability to argue either side of an issue with equal conviction, a quality known in some circles as open-mindedness and in others as duplicity. The French elite added this to their reasons for adoring him. He soon grasped that "you must come to dinner" actually meant "I hope never to see you again", and that to be "prodigiously obsessed" with a subject signalled at best a mild interest. "Lush bouquets of compliments bloomed spontaneously, distributed themselves widely and signified nothing," observes Schiff. Franklin became a master of the art.
For eight years, Franklin worked on the French for guns and money while the conflict with Britain ran its course. When he returned to Philadelphia in 1785, after helping to negotiate a peace, he was welcomed back with bells, cannons and street parades.
FRANKLIN'S WAS A hero's return, which Schiff thinks he deserved. Her sympathies are never in doubt, although there is enough in the book to glimpse another side to the story. John Adams, writing in 1783, reviewed American foreign policy from 1776, deeming it a fiasco. The principal architect of that failure, he judged, was Franklin, whose French entanglements had prolonged the war. Moreover, he concluded, "I must and do most solemnly deliver it as my opinion that French policy has obstructed the progress of our cause in Europe, more than the British".
It was Adams - the US's second president - rather than Franklin who would carry the US's future with him. Britain's Anglo-Saxon values, often uneasily shared, would turn out in the long run to matter more in shaping the New World than (old European) French ones.
Richard Aldous teaches modern history at UCD. His Macmillan, Eisenhower and the Cold War was published this year by Four Courts Press
Dr Franklin Goes to France: How America was Born in Monarchist Europe By Stacy Schiff. Bloomsbury, 477pp. £20