| 6. "We're always pulling the French out of a jam. Did they ever do anything for us?" They did. They helped us out of one of the greatest jams we were ever in. During the American revolution, when almost the entire world stood by in "non intervention" or was against us, it was France who was our greatest ally and benefactor. France loaned the thirteen states $6,000,000 - and gave us over $3,000,000 more. (That was a lot more money in those days than it is now.) 45,000 Frenchmen volunteered in the army of George Washington. - Thev crossed the Atlantic Ocean in small boats that took two months to make the voyage. Washington's army had no military engineers; it was French engineers who designed and built our fortifications. The name of Lafayette is one that Americans will never forget, and the French are as proud of that name as we are. You can judge the measure and meaning of French aid to our Revolution from the letter George Washington sent on April 9, 1781 to our military envoy in Paris, asking for help from France: "We are at this hour suspended in the balance; not from choice but from hard and absolute necessity... Our troops are fast approaching nakedness... our hospitals are without medicines and our sick without nutrition... in a word, we are at the end of our tether, and... now or never our deliverance must come." It was France that came to our aid in our darkest hour. |