alternatehistory.com

Sometimes my Quora feed drops good alternative history scenarios. This is one:

https://www.quora.com/What-if-France-joined-Great-Britain-in-the-American-Revolution

The first response, which is the one worth reading, quickly corrected the questioner that 18th century Bourbon France was not going to help the British out with anything, but turned it into a discussion of French neutrality and this question really is interesting.

Now there were two ways the French supported the Patriots. The French shipped war materials to America at great expense, and these were essential since one of the few things the British got right in the 1760s and 1770s was to try to keep the American colonists from accumulating stuff like gunpowder (that is why arsenals such as the one in Concord, MA, such a big deal). Actually its hard to see how the Patriots could have maintained armies in the field without this assistance, and helping your enemy's rebels is a pretty common strategy, the Catholic French also supported the Protestant Dutch rebels pretty extensively in the 16th century.

The second way was recognizing the independence of the United States, which as expected was followed by a British declaration of war on France. Now yet another Anglo-French War had been widely anticipated since the last one ended and the possibility was a serious influence on both British and French strategy. The French maintained an unpopular alliance with Austria in part to get a clear shot at Britain the next time, while being mindful of needing to shore up their finances and other parts of the empire kept the British from simply appeasing the colonists. But as the Quora response indicates, there were advocates in both Versailles and Madrid of avoiding open war with Britain so adopting this course of action would have been possible.

So what would have been the consequences of no Franco-American alliance? Would we even have gotten the OTL Declaration of Independence in this scenario?
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