Review of the Franklin series

The historical biographical series Franklin, starring Michael Douglas, tells the story of how one of the American founding fathers, a former printer and inventor from Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, who became a politician and diplomat, came to Paris with his young grandson to convince the French politicians to provide America with money and weapons.

Help was needed to defeat the British colonists and help the United States to be born free of the imperialist yoke. And at the same time, to give France a chance to get back at England after a series of humiliations, because it had taken away a bunch of colonies; and at the same time to teach the green young man, whose father, Franklin’s son, is rotting in an American prison for his loyalty to the British crown, refined and relaxed Parisian manners.

The series is based on the book by the American writer and journalist Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize winner for her biography of Vladimir Nabokov’s wife. And it is certain that Benjamin Franklin would hardly have come to life in full and in full volume in the lens of this academic program if it were not for the filigree performance of Michael Douglas, who paints a monument to Franklin with his eloquently prominent profile alone and at the same time organically puts into the mouth of this “giant”, this “icon” piercing self-irony (for example, about his old age, blocked colon, and the noose around his neck, which, of course, would have upset him in the event of his execution by hanging, but “helped him empty his bowels”).

It is interesting that the series about the canonical achievement of canonical American freedom does not show America directly at all, because the whole action takes place exclusively in France. An old, erudite, wise, generously endowed with a sense of humor and the gift of subtle, effective communication, a Philadelphia man (and it was not yet “always sunny” in Philadelphia at that time, as it became later), sails to the European shore to either die very far from home or return with guarantees of protection and victory.

And here, in Paris, some (the prim court beau monde) greet him as an overseas curiosity, coming from wild, furious and… sexual lands; some (cautious officials who value the national interests of France, or rather their own interests, more than any Freedom Manifesto and any beautiful idea) – as a possible threat and maybe even an English “Trojan horse”; some (the great French educator and playwright Pierre Beaumarchais) – as “the first man on the moon,” a man of a new era and a new formation: “If Beaumarchais is something new in the world of theater, then you are something new in the world of people.”

The series, which at first looks textbook, anachronistic, irrelevant…, can be read as timely and relevant. After all, everything that happens to Benjamin Franklin in Paris, with the barely born America left out of the picture and the old Europe in the focus, which agrees to help “just enough to equalize the forces, but not enough to let America win”… rhymes with the present day.

Only instead of the America of the time, it is today’s Ukraine, the same country that is fighting for democracy and independence from the imperialist yoke, only Moscow’s instead of Britain’s. And in the place of the then France, which was cautiously considering the extent and scope of its alliance, we have the United States and the European Union. So, yes, the configurations change, but the principle of history, its general equation, somehow repeats itself again and again.

In front of the powdered Parisian elite, where nobles and jesters are hardly distinguishable from each other, the shrewd Franklin puts on an “American” fur hat made of Canadian marten, specially brought from the “wild lands” of the white (from the word “whitewash”) continent, to look… “American” (“What are you doing with that hat? – I’m pretending to be an American”). Because he understands that a fetishized thing, a visual symbol, can be more convincing than arguments, let alone requests.