Status Updates From The Fate of the Day: The Wa...

Franklin's privateers, their successes and failures. And the loss of the ship that had brought him to Europe, reminding us just how chancy travel was in that day. How different things might have been if it had gone down earlier...

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Benjamin Franklin in France, and how he won the hearts of the aristocracy by being his rustic Colonial self rather than trying to become an ersatz French nobleman. How he led the French king to provide covert aid to the Continental forces, even bending his own laws to do so.

The elaborate ceremonies of Versailles, intended to entrap a rebellious aristocracy, but now becoming a cage for the royals themselves, as protocol hardens into immutable law.