Ultima Ratio Verum Factum: A Prolegomenon to the History of Franco-American Military Relations

A study of cultural relations between France and The United States from a military perspective, based on its relevance to the democratic peace proposition and different forms of nationalism. During the colonial period, opposing ethno-cultural identities of the English and the French led to antagonisms that would spill over into armed conflict. These antagonisms were rooted in a centuries-old friction that regularly traversed the Channel and were later fought out on a wider global scale. The American War for Independence altered this dynamic. France assisted the American rebels against Britain for reasons of traditional power politics, but also inadvertently gave legitimacy to a new form of republican government, in a sense legitimizing the Declaration of Independence. When both sides transitioned to civic nationalism based on the emerging Enlightenment, major armed conflict between the two republics ceased, except for one occasion when the commitment of France to democracy was weak, the Quasi-War (1798–1801), and another during Vichy, when it collapsed. The Enlightenment brought the two nations together in another way. The turn of the “Age of Reason” to science, particularly its application to social phenomena, including war, led to the adoption by the Americans of French military science, central to the curriculum at West Point from its very founding and continuing well into the twentieth century.