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War profiteering was pandemic. The story goes that he was rushing to play the stock market, and no doubt he was. It inspired the French to launch their own revolution for liberty and equality. Once he was installed as sole envoy in Paris, I should have it in my power to call those to account, through whose hands I know the public money has passed, and which will either never be accounted for, or misaccounted for, by connivance between those, who are to share in the public plunder. The Hortalez ships, scattered as they were at Marseilles, Bordeaux, Nantes, Le Havre, and Dunkirk, were still too conspicuous to be missed by the busy British spies. The capture of the Bastille ignited one of the greatest social upheavals in Western . England, Franklin said suavely, could hardly object to France sending the battleships with their crews, since Britain herself was borrowing or hiring troops from other states. 3. However, Franklin had boarded the Reprisal for that very purpose. On July 23 he wrote a memoir to Louis XVI declaring that the moment had come when France must resolve either to abandon America or to aid her courageously and effectively. He urged a closer alliance to prevent a reunion of Britain and America. The sacred British mails were rushed down to Passy, and then the storm broke at Versailles. First these navies quarreled head-on, in the English Channel and then in the entirety of the Atlantic Ocean, in a war of escorts. The American Revolution occurred during a period that some historians refer to as the "Second Hundred Years War" between France and Britain. Now she was acknowledged as a nation in her own right, a nation whose treaties protected her commerce on the seas and her growing space on land, a rising people for whose friendship Britain and France must compete. And finally Franklin played his trump card, the possibility that America might be forced back into the British Empire unless some powerful aid is given us or some strong diversion be made in our favor. He knew that the Bourbon nightmare was the picture of Britain, reunited with her American colonies, sweeping Spain from the lower Mississippi and both Bourbon powers from the Caribbean.