Episode Details

In the winter of 1776, a 70-year-old man in a fur cap stepped off a ship in France with the fate of the American Revolution resting on his shoulders. This is the story of how Benjamin Franklin won France. The colonies could not beat the British Empire alone — they needed a great power at their back, and there was exactly one candidate. Franklin, already the most famous man alive, turned his plain coat and his fur cap into a weapon, charming a nation while its foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, coldly calculated that America’s fight was France’s chance to avenge a lost war. Behind the scenes a playwright ran guns through a fake company; in the open, Franklin waited two grinding years for the one thing France demanded — proof the Americans could win. When the news of Saratoga finally reached Paris, the old man who had once stood silent and humiliated before the lords of England played his last card. What he was about to bring home would turn a colonial rebellion into a world war.