Ep. 93 | FRANKLIN - The American Revolution’s French Connection
FRANKLIN (2024)
Michael Douglas and Jeanne Balibar in FRANKLIN Photo: Apple TV
Ep. 93 is also available on Apple Podcast | YouTube | iHeartThe 7th podcast in the Revolution to Rights: America at 250series (Episode 93). The Boston Sisters (Michon and Taquiena) talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff—co-executive producer of the 2024 Apple TV series FRANKLIN (starring Academy Award-winner Michael Douglas) inspired by her award-winning book A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America.
We get into the real Franklin: the improvised diplomacy that the Continental Congress never quite understood, his fascinating and fraught partnerships with the powerful women of the French court, his bitter rivalry with John Adams, and the painful estrangement from his loyalist son William.
“It’s Franklin who reminds us that you could be a patriot, but it doesn’t mean that you have to be a nationalist. You can believe in America without discrediting the rest of the world.”
REVOLUTION TO RIGHTS: AMERICA AT 250
Episode 92 is part of REVOLUTION TO RIGHTS: AMERICA AT 250, a 10-episode podcast series from Historical Drama with The Boston Sisters® that takes you on a journey through America’s 250-year history of advancing freedom and justice since the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
GUEST
Stacy Schiff
Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize. Published to ecstatic reviews, her Cleopatra: A Life was a #1 bestseller. Named one of the New York Times’s Top Ten Books of 2010, it has been translated into 35 languages and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. David McCullough greeted Schiff’s 2015 The Witches, also a #1 bestseller, as "brilliant from start to finish;" the New York Times hailed it as “an almost novelistic, thriller-like narrative.”
Schiff’s most recent book, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, was a Wall Street Journal Top Ten Book of 2022 and figured as well on President Obama’s list of Favorite Books of 2022.
The Wall Street Journal has called Schiff “perhaps the most seductive writer of nonfiction prose in America in our time.” Among other honors, Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, where she has been named a Library Lion. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has been made a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government.
Connect with Stacy Schiff: Website
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Purchase Stacy Schiff’s A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America from our affiliate bookstore. You’ll find that and other related titles about the historic quest for freedom for all people in the U.S. on the REVOLUTION TO RIGHTS bookshelf.
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FRANKLIN
FRANKLIN (2024) Apple TV
Based on Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff's A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, Franklin stars Academy Award-winner Michael Douglas as Benjamin Franklin alongside Noah Jupe as his grandson Temple. In December 1776, as American independence hangs in the balance, the world-famous scientist embarks on a secret mission to France. At 70, without diplomatic training, Franklin must convince an absolute monarchy to underwrite America's experiment in democracy. By virtue of his fame, charisma, and ingenuity, he outmaneuvers British spies, French informers, and hostile colleagues to engineer the Franco-American Alliance of 1778 — a mission historians regard as the greatest ambassadorial tour of duty in American history.
Franklin also stars Thibault de Montalembert as comte de Vergennes, Daniel Mays as Edward Bancroft, Ludivine Sagnier as Madame Brillon, Eddie Marsan as John Adams, Assaad Bouab as Beaumarchais, Jeanne Balibar as Madame Helvetius and Théodore Pellerin as Marquis de Lafayette.
In addition to Douglas, the creative team includes Emmy and WGA Award-winning writer and executive producer Kirk Ellis (JOHN ADAMS) and Emmy, WGA and Pulitzer Prize Award-nominated writer and executive producer Howard Korder (BOARDWALK EMIRE). Emmy and DGA Award-winning director Tim Van Patten (MASTERS OF THE AIR) serves as director and executive producer.
FRANKLIN Apple TV press website
Benjamin Franklin’s French Connections
Benjamin Franklin at the Court of France - Source: National Archives and Records Administration
Descriptions from the “Cast of Characters” in Stacy Schiff’s A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America
1783 - Treaty of Paris
“On Wednesday morning September 3, Franklin, Adams and Jay converged on the rue Jacob to affix their signatures to what was to be known as the Treaty of Paris, identical to the preliminaries negotiated a year earlier, and America’s declaration of independence.”
“Treaty of Paris” by Benjamin West (1783). Winterthur Museum. From left to right: John Jay, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens, and William Temple. British negotiators refused to sit for the painting.
