When I set out to write this book, I was surprised to find that although many scholars have addressed the relationship of the American and French Revolutions, no one had ever treated them as a single, simultaneously unfolding narrative. I understand now why that is the case: Two revolutions and two lives as large as those of Washington and Lafayette are too big for any reasonably sized book or any sensible author. 

Nevertheless, as a journalist who in his career faced too many deadlines with too little information, I have found it wonderful to trade the "first draft of history" for the umpteenth, and to write a story in which the main reporting problem is a vast overabundance. The primary sources are beyond rich, and the historians of the period make for wonderfully inspiring guides through it.

My French and American Revolutions began on April 18, 1775. That day, just a few hours before Paul Revere began his famous ride, a "Grain War" broke out in the capital of Burgundy, a small riot over the price of bread that would lead in an almost straight line to the fall of the Bastille fourteen years later. 

That is only one of the remarkable coincidences--some of them more than coincidence--between the events of the two revolutions, from the virtually simultaneous coronation of Louis XVI and nomination of Washington as revolutionary commander-in-chief to the actually simultaneous work that French minister Thomas Jefferson was doing with Lafayette on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and with James Madison on the U. S. Bill of Rights.

The mother of all revolutionary coincidences actually took place several decades before that, in a small clearing of an unsettled forest west of the Appalachians, in the "Ohio territory," where an inexperienced and headstrong officer of the Virginia militia, the young George Washington, was responsible for setting off both the French Revolution and the American War of Independence.

He was a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel in charge of a small detachment sent out to fortify a British garrison at the meeting of the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers, "the Forks of the Ohio." When he got there, he found that it had already been occupied by a large and well armed French force. 

While awaiting instructions, he and his men, led by a band of friendly Indians and their chief, came upon a small encampment of French forces they thought had been sent out against them. Having caught the French by surprise in early morning, Washington's men fired first. All of the musket wounds had to have been inflicted in the first two volleys, because at that the French commander, Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Monsieur de Jumonville, who was shot as he called for quarter, got Washington to cease firing. 

Reading from a prepared statement, he said he was on a diplomatic mission to all British troops in the area, who were ordered to leave this territory immediately or face eviction by French armed forces. Jumonville had an English translator with him, but accounts differ as to who read the summons. If Jumonville was reading it in French, Washington would have had no idea what he was saying. 

The Indian chief with him, however, spoke very good French, so he was in no confusion when he walked over to the wounded commander, who was lying on the ground. "Tu n'est pas encore mort, mon père [Thou art not dead yet, my father]," he said. 

Then he buried his hatchet in Jumonville's skull. With that the Indians killed some of the wounded and scalped the dead, while their chief "took out [Jumonville's] brains and washed his hands in them." In the first battle of his military career, Washington presided over a massacre, and if his report of it was not technically a lie, which is debatable, it was a great deal less than the whole truth. 

Making the best of a horrible incident-and demonstrating the side of his character that had been toughened by his time in the frontier-Washington suggested that the French scalps be sent to Delaware and Iroquois villages as arguments for joining the American/English cause.

A few weeks later, a revenge force led by Jumonville's brother killed a third of Washington's troops and forced him to surrender his ineptly positioned, badly constructed, but well named "Fort Necessity." Beyond that, one of the articles of capitulation that Washington signed stipulated that he had "assassinated" a diplomat (a word that Washington's Dutch fencing instructor, who had been brought along to translate, apparently botched). 

Washington's signature on a document that one contemporary writer called "the most infamous a British subject ever put his hand to" gave the French the ability to fix on Britain the responsibility for firing the first shot in what became Europe's Seven Years' War, known in America as the French and Indian War. 

Voltaire's famous remark-"Such was the complication of political interests that a cannon shot fired in America could give the signal that set Europe in a blaze"-may be an exaggeration of more than the ordnance involved, but the Jumonville affair began an escalation that did in fact end in a general European war.

That was the Seven Years War--called the French and Indian War in American history--at the end of which both France and England were virtually bankrupt. Britain's need to raise taxes to pay for that war resulted in the Stamp Act, the "Intolerable Acts," the Boston Tea Party, and all that followed, just as the attempt to raise revenue in France would lead eventually, if by a more circuitous route, to the storming of the Bastille and the execution of Louis XVI.

My route to caring about all this was circuitous as well. In August 2002 my family and I moved to Paris. In answer to the question why, I have always said you need to ask my wife. But the fact is that she and I had always dreamed of living in Europe, and after September 11, having read all the terrible obituaries not only for the people in the World Trade Center but also for their dreams, life seemed shorter than it had before, and since our children were young enough then to tolerate such a move, we decided it was then or never.

That was before the debate between France and America over the war in Iraq had begun in earnest. When it did, some of our friends thought us virtually traitorous for living in France and asked us whenever we spoke how long it would be before we came back. 

At the time I was writing my book about Bach and Frederick the Great, most of the research for which was in Europe, so I frequently relied on my work excuse; but toward the end of that book I came across a letter that Lafayette had written to George Washington about having met Frederick the Great at the end of the king's life. 

What he said about Frederick wasn't particularly relevant to my research then, but there was something about the tone of that letter that told me Lafayette and Washington were closer than I knew, and when I was at the point of thinking about what my next book would be, I kept coming back to their relationship, in part because it bore so clearly on the diplomatic war between France and America, which by then was in full bloom.

There were jokes going back and forth over the Atlantic then, with more than a trace of bitterness, like the one about the French army rifle being auctioned on E-bay: "Never fired, only dropped once." Amusing, unless you thought about it for a second. Not amusing at all to a French soldier. 

Now, when I was reminded how much the French had forgotten about what America had done for them, I reminded my American friends that the French were responsible for the fact that we won the American Revolutionary War. By this time, I knew what my next book would be, though honestly I still didn't know what it was going to say. I really had no idea at the time just how resonant the subject was.

I want to resist the temptation to put my conclusions in a word, if only so that people will read the book, but suffice it to say that I have come to understand, through the relationship of Washington and Lafayette, a lot more about what it means to be American (and a lot more about what it means to be French!). 

For one thing, as I point out in my very first blog, Washington would have been appalled at Bush's alacrity in invading Iraq--as appalled as Napoleon would have been appreciative. The Napoleonic wars, however, filled as they were with revolutionary fervor and the certitude that French values were worth the bloody cost of export, resulted in millions of deaths and France back within its own borders. 

At least in part thanks to Washington's great restraint, Americans never learned that lesson, and it is tempting to wonder if this is why we were so willing to trade places with the French (and they with us) in Vietnam. I talk about some of the other ways in which we have enacted our respective revolutions differently in a four-part series of blogs titled, "Headscarves, Car Fires, and the Murder of Ilan Halimi."

Despite our differences, I also emerged from this book convinced that the French and Americans are much more alike than some of us would like to admit. Like France and America, Lafayette and Washington could not have been less alike on the surface-an ebullient rich aristocrat and a battle-toughened frontiersman-but in fact they had a world in common: Both subjects in a monarchy, they were destined for the life of courtiers. In order to change that, they had to change themselves. 

As I write in the book, when they started out, the vocabulary of revolution had yet to be invented: "liberty" meant an exemption from tax, "independence" meant to need no patron (in other words, to be an aristocrat), and equality was just a word, distinctions of rank too deeply embedded even to be much noted. 

The American and French Revolutions would change all that, and to watch Washington and Lafayette as they led their respective revolutions—making their way as individuals from courtier-subjects in a hierarchy of blood and privilege to patriot-citizens in a commonwealth of equals--is one way to see a radically new world being born, a world in which the value of a life is not extrinsic and bestowed but grounded in self-respect, something that can be earned by one's own effort and that might be lost but cannot be taken away. 

This is the world we have in common now, and that we take it so for granted does not diminish how defining a fact that is.

Biography of James R. Gaines

James R. Gaines is a longtime journalist, magazine editor, publishing executive, media consultant, and author.  His latest book, FOR LIBERTY AND GLORY: Washington, Lafayette, and Their Revolutions, will be released September 6, 2007, by W.W. Norton. His other books are also works of cultural history, including Wit's End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table; and Evening in the Palace of Reason, which explores the conflict between faith and reason through a fateful meeting between Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick the Great.

Before becoming an author of historical non-fiction, Gaines worked on the first draft of history as a journalist. A native of Dayton, Ohio, and graduate of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he decided against a career in music (as a pianist specializing in Bach) and began his writing career at Saturday Review and Newsweek. 

After writing Wit's End, he joined Time-Life at People magazine and was made the editor of the magazine in 1987. Gaines helped raise its journalistic ambitions while posting records in circulation and advertising. In 1989 Gaines was sent to Life, where he was made publisher as well as editor, the first time that one person held both the chief editorial and publishing jobs at a Time-Life magazine. 

His reinvention of Life as a weekly newsmagazine for the first Persian Gulf War won widespread acclaim and inspired management to appoint him to Time, the company's flagship, making him the first person ever to run three of the company's magazines. While he was there profit more than doubled, the magazine won numerous major journalistic awards, and Gaines led the way in extending the Time brand into both new magazines and online. 

In 1996 Gaines became corporate editor of Time Inc., reporting to Norman Pearlstine, a role in which he discovered it was time for a change.

Moving to Boulder, Colorado, Gaines was lured back into magazines by a former colleague, for whom he created and launched a luxury men's magazine called Travel & Leisure/Golf. 

He also took up flying, a deferred dream whose roots he traces to his boyhood in Dayton, home of the Wright Brothers. Proceeding from his student trainer to a Maule "tail-dragger" to a twin-engine Baron to a turboprop Cheyenne was "the hardest thing I ever did," he says. Flying himself around the world, he found out with some disappointment, was one of the easiest. 

But it did give him the idea of starting an international publishing consultancy, and in the ensuing years he has advised clients from London to Saudi Arabia on magazine startups, strategy, redesign, repositioning, and general management issues. 

Gaines's many interests are reflected in his memberships, which include the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Historical Association, the Anglo-American Press Association, the Overseas Press Club, and the International Federation of the Periodical Press.

In keeping with his international publishing interests, Gaines and his wife Karen decided in August 2002 to indulge a long-held dream and move to Paris, where they still live with their three young children. Gaines's older daughter Allison last year started a new public school in Brooklyn, New York, called the Urban Assembly School of Arts and Letters, and she is the mother of his two grandchildren, Miles and Hannah.
 
He was just finishing his book about Bach when the diplomatic war broke out between France and America over the looming invasion of Iraq. Looking for a new subject, he began to think about Washington and Lafayette, founding fathers of the tense Franco-American alliance. The rest, as they say, is history.