Whenever a French president visits Washington and White House speechwriters need to come up with something nice to say about France, Lafayette is cited as the man who came to America’s aid in its war of independence. Whether this produces the intended emotional echo in the visitor’s mind is a different matter: While in the United States his statues are liberally scattered up and down the East Coast, in his home country Lafayette is almost forgotten. The Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1988) notes tersely that “the man has drawn few eulogies,” and only Americans visit his grave at Paris’s Pipcus Cemetery. In this absorbing biography, Laura Auricchio sets out to explain why.
In 1776, the American Revolution was the hot topic in the salons of Paris: When Arthur Lee and Benjamin Franklin arrived in the French capital “like republicans from the time of Cato and Fabius,” the comte de Ségur reflected on the inherent paradox in a situation where “the monarchs were inclined to embrace the cause of a people in revolt against their King” and “independence was spoken of in the camps, philosophy at the balls, morality in the boudoirs.” Louis XVI himself was aware of the irony, but at Versailles, the hatred of Britain after France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War was such that courtiers wore maps of England on their backsides.
Among those inspired by the American cause was the young Marquis de Lafayette. He was born in 1757 at the Château de Chavaniac in rural Auvergne, and though his family was only minor military nobility, a large, unforeseen inheritance and an advantageous marriage had landed him at Versailles. Among the court vipers and sycophants, where a breach of etiquette could banish you forever, he was hopelessly out of his depth. The comte de La Marck, one of Marie Antoinette’s favorites, stated that Lafayette “danced without grace [and] sat badly on his horse” and that his performance in the quadrille was such that “the queen could not stop herself from laughing.” For Lafayette, an idealistic young man raised on the exploits of his ancestors—his father had been killed by a cannonball in the Battle of Minden in 1759—this suffocating atmosphere of cynicism and petty intrigue was not his idea of honor and lasting fame.
For French officers, America provided the opportunity for payback for the loss of France’s Canadian colonies in the North American theater of the Seven Years’ War. But while many of his colleagues were soldiers of fortune, Lafayette, well schooled in the ideas of the Enlightenment and the writers of republican Rome, was a true believer. Out of his own pocket he equipped a ship for the cause. Asking no money for his service, but demanding a high rank, he became a major general at the age of 19. Though George Washington was less than enthusiastic about the foreign troops that necessity had forced upon him, Lafayette’s dedication, charm, and sincerity won him over. Thus, writes Auricchio, in America
Lafayette was surrounded by people who saw his sincerity as a virtue, not a flaw. . . . The same nation that rejected Old World traditions of hereditary privilege rejoiced to find a highborn nobleman on its side, as if his interest in the American cause proved its universal appeal.
For such a young commander, mistakes were inevitable; but Auricchio details how Washington carefully prepared him, gradually adding to his responsibilities. Having functioned as a crucial link in smoothing relations between American and French forces, Lafayette played a key role at Yorktown, where his men overran one of the last British positions. On his triumphant return to Paris, he dedicated his Rue de Bourbon townhouse to the American Revolution, with a copy of the Declaration of Independence in golden letters occupying the place of honor. As Auricchio notes, in these tasteful neoclassical surroundings, even Abigail Adams, with her New England disapproval of excess, could not but enjoy herself.
Against this background, it would be natural to assume that Lafayette would be ideally suited to play a leading role in the French Revolution. But though both the American and French revolutions based themselves on the Enlightenment concept of universal natural rights, the French version proved a far more radical and violent affair—and thus a toxic environment for someone like Lafayette, who had a natural abhorrence of mobs and demagogues. “Rarely has a man held to moderate principles with such tenacity,” thereby incurring the wrath of both the right and the left, Auricchio writes.
Though at heart a republican, Lafayette argued from the very start that because of France’s history and the backwardness of its citizens, the American model would not work in his country. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, he wrote that the American Founders “enjoyed the advantage to work a new ground, uninfluenced by all the circumstances, which in Europe necessitates calculations very different.” He and other moderates favored a constitutional monarchy somewhat along the lines of the British one.
Being named commander of the Paris National Guard after the storming of the Bastille made him, briefly, the most powerful man in the country; but as protector of the people, he was severely limited in the exercise of that power. When bread riots broke out in October 1789 and an angry crowd of women marched on Versailles, Lafayette was forced along by his own troops, yet managed to defuse the situation and avoid a bloodbath. The royal family, having obtained Lafayette’s guarantee of their safety, was brought back to Paris and installed in the Tuileries Palace under Lafayette’s authority. “That night he proved he deserved the reputation as Washington’s protégé,” writes Auricchio.
However, Lafayette’s notion of a constitutional monarchy required a willingness on the part of the weak and indecisive Louis XVI to cede power, and that didn’t happen. As a result, Lafayette’s base rapidly shrank: Royalists saw him as a Cromwell, radicals like the venomous propagandist Marat denounced him as an enemy of the people. Other ambitious centrists chimed in, among them Mirabeau and the duke of Orléans—the king’s populist cousin known as Philippe Égalité, whose hirelings produced a steady stream of pornographic pamphlets and prints with Lafayette, in the starring role, cavorting with Marie Antoinette.
Lafayette’s position was further undermined when, in June 1791, the king tried to escape with his family from Paris to the royalist town of Montmédy. Along the way, while eating pigs’ feet at an inn, Louis was recognized by a postmaster from his likeness on the currency, and the family was brought back to Paris. As the man in charge of the royals, Lafayette was held responsible. He was also blamed for a subsequent incident in which panicky troops fired into a crowd on the Champs de Mars: “A patriots’ St. Bartholomew’s Day,” in the heated rhetoric of Georges Danton—a view, says Auricchio, perpetuated by Albert Mathiez, the hardcore socialist historian and Robespierre admirer whose Annales de la revolution francaise (1910) was to shape much of the modern French view of the period.
The following year, while training troops for France’s newly declared war on Austria, Lafayette urged his soldiers to ignore the divisions tearing France apart and concentrate on the task at hand. When a mob invaded the Tuileries, Lafayette hurried back to Paris, where he called for the instigators to be punished and the king to be protected. He denounced the Jacobins as a “sect” which had to be destroyed. But when the National Guard and provincial volunteers stormed the Tuileries, leaving 900 dead and the royal family transferred to the Temple Prison, the game was over: Robespierre and company were about to take charge. Stripped of his command and ordered back to Paris to appear before the Provisional Executive Council, Lafayette fled the country, only to be thrown in jail by the Austrians. Had he not fled, he would not have survived.
After an international campaign, Lafayette was released and allowed by Napoleon to settle on his estate, on the condition that he stay out of public life. With his usual enthusiasm, Lafayette transformed La Grange into a French version of Mount Vernon, introducing agricultural innovations and importing a range of domestic and wild animals from America, including a woodpecker—all testament to his love affair with America. In the Bourbon restoration, he won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, but he never regained his former prominence.
While admiring Lafayette’s spirit, Auricchio believes his chief flaws were optimism and naïveté, clinging to ideas long after it was plain they wouldn’t work. Though hardly a tragic figure—he was too energetic and irrepressible for that—Lafayette “failed spectacularly” in the French portion of his career. Among the murderous denizens of the French Revolution, moderation and humanity didn’t cut it. But Laura Auricchio doubts that anyone could have done better than Lafayette. It was France’s tragedy that Louis was such a clueless king.
Henrik Bering is a journalist and critic.
