text:  Continental Army needed French support, and Franklin was the perfect person to dispatch to France for this mission because he understood them. He understood you don't connect business over breakfast as John Adams would have it. You do it over dinner with a bottle or five of wine. And that was quite consequential just for the future of the United States of America. I would argue that there would be no United States of America if it were not for Ben Franklin's great seduction of France in the late 1770s.