Did French President Macron demand "$150 trillion in interest" for funding U.S. independence, claiming it was a loan? No, that's not true: A viral screenshot with that headline showing an image from Macron's March 5, 2025 speech did not offer any sources to back that up and the speech did not make any mention of it. Neither Google nor Google News indexed an article or video with the headline in question.
An example of the screenshot appeared in a post on X (archived here) published on March 9, 2025 with a comment that read:
Macron figured it out. If the U.S. can change grants to loans, so can France.
This is what the image looked like:
(Image: screenshot downloaded from x.com on March 9, 2025 at 10:11:02)
The text in the screenshot read:
France says U.S. independence funding was a loan, and is now demanding $150 trillion in interest.
Lead Stories searched for the phrase "France says U.S. independence funding was a loan, and is now demanding $150 trillion in interest." on Google and no articles or videos with that headline were returned (archived here), just more social media posts repeating the claim.
A similar search of Google News (archived here) brought up no news articles with that headline either.
Lead Stories reviewed video of the March 5 speech (archived here) and the words "debt", "loan" or "trillion" were not spoken (either in French or in the translation).
According to the Office of the Historian of the U.S. State Department (archived here):
In 1795, the United States was finally able to settle its debts with the French Government with the help of James Swan, an American banker who privately assumed French debts at a slightly higher interest rate. Swan then resold these debts at a profit on domestic U.S. markets. The United States no longer owed money to foreign governments, although it continued to owe money to private investors both in the United States and in Europe.
