PARIS, PEACE OF (1763), the treaty closing the Great Atlantic War (q.v.) and registering, in the formal language of diplomacy, an arithmetic the fighting itself had already settled some months before the plenipotentiaries sat down to draft it. Its principal article ceded to the Commonwealth the whole of French America from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence to the eastern bank of the Mississippi, together with the French crown's remaining claims in Acadia and, on the Indian side of the account, confirmed the Commonwealth's commercial ascendancy in Bengal while leaving the French crown a handful of trading posts held, in substance if not in the treaty's own careful wording, on the Commonwealth's sufferance rather than by any right the fighting had left the French ministry in a position to insist upon.
The negotiation itself, conducted at Paris across the winter of 1762 and 1763, was a good deal less contentious between the principal parties than between the Commonwealth's own delegation and its Prussian ally, whose own war on the Continent the Commonwealth's negotiators concluded, this contributor's reading of the despatches finds, with rather less ceremony than the alliance's earlier services had perhaps deserved; a diplomatist's habit of settling first with the enemy and squaring accounts with one's friends afterward is not, in this contributor's professional experience, peculiar to this Commonwealth's ministry, but the Commonwealth's own practice of it at Paris in 1763 is remembered, by the one or two continental colleagues this contributor has discussed the matter with, as a particularly clean example of the art.
The peace left the Commonwealth in possession of a continental interior considerably larger than either the framers of 1660 or the negotiators of the Second Frame (q.v.) had imagined themselves acquiring an empire over, a fact whose domestic consequence — the Reapportionment Quarrels (q.v.) that followed within two years of the ink drying at Paris — this contributor leaves to the article better placed to examine it, observing only that a peace negotiated with such despatch abroad left the Commonwealth's own Senate a considerably longer and more contentious settlement to negotiate at home. (H. LeF.)