page_title: Anglo-French War (1778–1783)
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Anglo-French War (1778–1783) / Origins
context_page_description: The Anglo-French War was a military conflict fought between France and Great Britain, sometimes with their respective allies, between 1778 and 1783. As a consequence, Great Britain was forced to divert resources used to fight the war in North America to theatres in Europe, India and the West Indies, and to rely on what turned out to be the chimera of Loyalist support in its North American operations. From 1778 to 1783, with or without their allies, France and Britain fought over dominance in the English Channel, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the West Indies.
  Within days of the news of Burgoyne's surrender reaching France, King Louis XVI decided to enter into negotiations with the Americans that resulted in a formal Franco-American alliance and the French entry into the war, moving the conflict onto a global stage. Spain did not enter into the war until 1779, when it entered the war as an ally of France pursuant to the secret Treaty of Aranjuez.
context_section_description: Ever since the Seven Years' War, France's Foreign Ministers, beginning with Choiseul, had followed the general idea that the independence of Britain's North American colonies would be good for France and bad for Britain, and furthermore that French attempts to recover parts of New France would be detrimental to that cause.  When war broke out in 1775, the Comte de Vergennes, then the Foreign Minister, outlined a series of proposals that led to secret French and also Spanish support of the rebel movement, and preparations for the war, including expansion of their navies. To further the aim of French participation in the war, Vergennes closely monitored news from North America and London, and worked to remove impediments to Spanish participation in the war.  Vergennes went so far as to propose war to King Louis XVI in August 1776, but news of Howe's capture of New York City delayed that plan.
  By 1777, the Thirteen Colonies' rebellion was entering its third year. John Burgoyne's surrender at the Battle of Saratoga had signalled that the struggle against the American colonies was likely to prove longer and more costly than expected. British defeat had raised the prospect of French intervention and of a European war.  North's government, fearful of war with France, sought reconciliation with the American colonies and was willing to grant a fair measure of autonomy to this end, but what would be enough in 1775 would no longer suffice by 1778. North had no intention of offering independence, but in the wake of Saratoga and with the prospect of a French alliance, the Americans were unlikely to agree with lesser terms.
  Although equally interested in maintaining its influence among the German states, France had a double problem. As a supporter of the rebellious British colonies in North America, it was in France's interest to avoid  a continental engagement. France could do more damage to the British in North America than in Europe. The diplomatic realignment in 1756 had overthrown 200 years of French foreign policy that united the French Crown and the French populace against the House of Habsburg, arguably bringing to France massive territorial gains in repeated wars with Habsburg Austria and Habsburg Spain. A reversal of this policy in 1756 tied French foreign policy in Europe to Vienna. Despite this restructuring, there existed in the French Court at Versailles, and in France generally, a strong anti-Austrian sentiment. The diplomatic revolution of 1756, sealed in 1770 with the personal union (the diplomatic term for marriage) of Louis, the Dauphin of Viennois, and the Austrian Archduchess Marie Antoinette, was considered both a political and matrimonial  mésalliance in the eyes of many Frenchmen. It flew in the face of 200 years of French foreign policy, in which the central axiom "had been hostility to the House of Habsburg". The French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, maintained deep-seated hostility to the Austrians that pre-dated the alliance of 1756. He had not approved of the shift of France's traditional bonds, and considered the Austrians untrustworthy. He managed to extricate France from immediate military obligations to Austria by 1778.
caption: Vergennes, foreign minister of France, worried that a war over the Bavarian succession would upset his plans against Britain
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