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The Founding Fathers were impregnated by the French Enlightenment. It’s common knowledge. In parts it guided their political moves.

The French Enlightenment in America: Essays on the Times of the Founding Fathershttps://muse.jhu.edu/pub/164/oa_monograph/chapter/3022292

The eleven essays originally published in 1984 under the title The French Enlightenment in America: Essays on the Time of the Founding Fathers, here reprinted, are both compelling and enjoyable. Paul Merrill Spurlin’s general hypothesis is crystal clear: French philosophes had a large influence in America—especially from 1760 to 1800. The writings of Voltaire, Diderot, Raynal, d’Alembert, Helvétius, d’Holbach, Condorcet, Bayle, Fontenelle, and Rousseau were received enthusiastically by leaders in the colonies and the new nation.

But the “Founding Fathers” absorbed more than daring political principles and moral maxims, Spurlin argues. They were also enthralled by entirely new visions of the natural world. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, as chapter 5 shows, made Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (1749) very popular—including, of course, Buffon’s wacky notion that every living being in America is either smaller or weaker than its European counterpart.

French intellectuals exerted an influence on the colonists first, and the founders later. But this could only happen, as Spurlin also argues, because French and Americans already belonged in “the same general climate of ideas.” These long-gone people were members of an “Atlantic community,” he says, a rather exclusive club of elite men who understood each other, though they rarely spoke the same language. An example: Montesquieu’s tripartite separation of powers—“the sacred maxim of free government,” as James Madison called it—was “an important article” of American political thought “long before 1776” (98).