Our French Allies with Norman Desmarais

What did the French hope to gain by siding with the Americans in the Revolution?  We talk with Norman Desmarais, Professor emeritus  from Providence College, about his book America's First Ally:  France in the Revolutionary War, and we hear other stories of this fraught alliance.  Norm Desmarais has also translated the Gazette Francois, a newspaper the French forces published in Newport, and has written a six-volume Guide to the Revolutionary War, and Battlegrounds of Freedom, a guide to Revolutionary-war battlefields.