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continue to drive statesmen at
    Versailles in the reign of Louis XV’s ill-starred successor.
    That France’s daunting “international mission” was not to be shirked
    was made retrospectively clear in a note that the new minister of foreign
    affairs, the comte de Vergennes, submitted to Louis XVI several years
    into his reign. “The deplorable Peace of 1763, the partition of Poland,
    and many other equally unhappy causes had profoundly undermined the
    9 Ramsey, Anglo-French Relations , p. 163.
    10 The second volume of Rohan Butler’s projected three-volume study of Choiseul should throw valuable new light upon this minister’s role in the Falkland crisis. But, for now, see William Doyle, “The Parlements of France and the Breakdown of the Old Regime,
    1771–1788,” French Historical Studies 6 (1970): 415–58.
    11 Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), esp. pp. 75–79.
    The ancien régime
    19
    consideration due the crown of France, which in earlier days, had been the
    object of terror and jealousy. . . . I confess, Sire, [that] all the arrogance and
    insults against which my heart revolted made me . . . search for the means to
    change a situation so little compatible with the elevation of your soul and
    the grandeur of your power.”12 Not for nothing had Vergennes imbibed
    the philosophy of Choiseul; and not for nothing, it is equally obvious,
    had he been schooled in the remorseless ways of power politics through
    diplomatic service in Germany and at Constantinople and Stockholm. For
    if, on the one hand, the new foreign minister hotly resented the crushing
    defeat inflicted on French colonial and mercantile interests by London in
    the Seven Years’ War, on the other hand he brooded over the spoliation
    of France’s traditional Polish ally by the three East European powers and
    over the pressure exerted by Catherine the Great’s Russia on those other
    redoubts of French influence to the east, Sweden and Ottoman Turkey.
    How, then, to retain for France a secure and prestigious role in Europe’s
    competitive affairs?
    Recent scholarship suggests strongly that the paradoxical and problem-
    atic key lay, for this statesman, in improved relations with the English. Such
    a reconciliation would in time allow for the diversion of French resources
    from the navy to the army. Even more important, cooperation between
    Versailles and London would greatly limit the ability of the other major
    continental countries to wage large-scale wars: having the armies but not
    the funds to engage in such hostilities, they could only draw the needed
    subsidies from France or England. The immediate problem Vergennes envi-
    sioned, however, was that Pitt’s England was contemptuous of the French.
    Hence, France had first to “reduce England to a position of equality, . . . to
    take from her a share of her strength, her monopoly of American trade
    and markets.”13 Vergennes, accordingly, came to project a two-stage re-
    lationship with the British. First, Versailles would work at humbling the
    “modern Carthage” by assisting the North American colonists in what
    looked very much like becoming a full-scale revolt against London. Subse-
    quently, Great Britain might somehow be enlisted in a campaign to coun-
    terbalance the grasping, unscrupulous geopoliticians at Berlin, Vienna, and
    St. Petersburg. In discharging the first task, Vergennes, his sovereign,14
    and all their patriotic countrymen could indulge their prejudices against
    12 Cited in Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes , p. 217.
    13 For this exposition of Vergennes’s views, see Dull, The French Navy , esp. pp. 8–15. But also see Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes , esp. pp. 211–21; Singh, French Diplomacy in the Caribbean , p. 148; and Jean-Franc¸ois Labourdette, “Vergennes ou la tentation du‘ministériat’,” Revue historique 557 (1986):