U.S.–France Relations

France is America's oldest ally and one of its most complicated friends. France helped win American independence, nearly went to war with the young republic a few years later, sold it the largest tract of land in its history, and crowned New York Harbor with the Statue of Liberty. The relationship has swung between deep gratitude and sharp disagreement for nearly two and a half centuries — but it began at the moment of the nation's birth, and it has never been broken.

The alliance was forged in revolution. After the American victory at Saratoga in 1777 convinced France that the rebels could win, France entered the war openly — sending money, a fleet, and an army whose presence at Yorktown in 1781 trapped the British and effectively ended the fighting. French support was not charity; it was a chance to weaken Britain. But without it American independence might not have come, and the Treaty of Paris that confirmed it in 1783 was negotiated under French auspices.

Gratitude curdled quickly. The French Revolution and the wars that followed dragged the United States into the dispute, and by the late 1790s the two former allies were fighting an undeclared naval Quasi-War in the Atlantic, inflamed by the insulting demands of the XYZ Affair. Yet the rift gave way to the relationship's greatest bargain: in 1803 Napoleon, needing cash and abandoning his American ambitions, sold the entire Louisiana Territory to the United States, doubling its size overnight.

In the modern era the bond was sealed in monument and in war. France's gift of the Statue of Liberty in 1886 made the friendship physical, a permanent symbol in New York Harbor. American troops fought on French soil in both World Wars — "Lafayette, we are here," an American officer declared on arriving in 1917 — and the D-Day landings of 1944 began the liberation of France from Nazi occupation. The two have quarreled often since, but the alliance that started the United States has outlasted every dispute.