FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN. — Writer, inventor, diplomat. Born in Boston on 17 January 1706, died in Philadelphia on 17 April 1790. He spent his early youth in the austere Puritan climate of New England. Self-taught and avid for reading, influenced by the authors through whom he was educated (Collins, Shaftesbury, Locke, etc.), he soon turned to deism, to an earthly and utilitarian morality, which he practiced for the rest of his life and cleverly preached and disseminated in his writings.
He was apprenticed to his brother James’s printing house, learning the craft that he then practiced for many years and by which he attained his prosperity. Moving to Philadelphia in 1723, a city more open to new currents of thought,
he gained fame both as an educator and benefactor, founding newspapers, cultural associations, a public library, and publishing for over 20 years Poor Richard’s Almanack, in which he collected aphorisms and maxims inspired by prudent common sense; and as a scientist, with his studies on electricity and the invention of the lightning rod (1752). A Freemason, a convinced advocate of a utilitarian religion of bourgeois virtues, inspired by the philanthropic and humanitarian currents of his time and by the easy optimism of the age, he placed full trust in the power of reason and education to improve the lot of man on earth.
He devoted himself to politics especially in the second half of the century, undertaking various missions as a representative of the American colonies in England (1757–62 and 1764–75). During the conflict between them and the mother country, averse to violence, he initially favored a policy of conciliation; but from 1768 onward he firmly sided with the patriots and was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence (1776). Invited to France by the new Confederation, he was triumphantly received there. Already popular thanks to the wide diffusion of his writings, he won the sympathies of French society, which saw in him the symbol and personification of the new man that the Enlightenment sought and exalted. He negotiated commercial treaties of friendship with Louis XVI (1778), Sweden (1783), and Prussia (1785). In 1783 he signed the Treaty of Paris, which ended the war with England. Returning to his homeland, he took part in the work for the new constitution (1787), performing a conciliatory role within an assembly divided by clashing tendencies.
Works: The Writings of B. F., 10 vols., ed. A. H. Smyth (New York 1905–1907).