“It’s true, of course. France is the oldest ally of the U.S.A.”
As I recall, Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States in 1777. We also have our longest, unbroken treaty with them. They supported us by granting porting and trading rights to American ships.
Does this mean Morocco is our oldest “ally”? I don’t know, but the history is fascinating. They “allied” with us to the extent their relative powerlessness compared to France allowed.
France is special not only because they provided key military support at the critical moment during the revolution, but because of our shared revolutionary ideology. The American Revolution is in many ways the product of the French Enlightenment. We are revolutionary brothers and it is no accident that both flags are blue, red, and white.
This is why the true American patriot venerates the only foreign Founding Father, General Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette; the only Frenchman to command American troops in battle and, arguably, the foreigner most worthy of that distinction.
Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.
- Marquis de Lafayette
I qualify for DAR because my great, great great...was the aid du camp for Layfette.
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“The American Revolution is in many ways the product of the French Enlightenment.”
Do you think so? I can see some elements of contemporary French thinking in the wording of some of the documents of the time but surely the overwhelming guiding influence was the Anglo-Scottish enlightenment, as well as the long history of the British struggle for liberty from tyrants from the British Bill of Rights through the English Civil War right back to Magna Carta?
The French supported the Americans in the Revolutionary War because it was a convenient way of getting a dig in at the British not out of any notion of “liberty”, LaFayette after all served an absolutist monarch who himslef was to have his head removed by revolutionaries.
The French were the enemies of Americans before 1776 and were to be their enemies again later.
The wars between the British and the Americans on the other hand were largely political civil wars between people of the same racial origins and language fighting over how far they were prepared to take the ideas of British political discourse.