Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette
Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, Marquis de La Fayette[a] (6 September 1757 – 20 May 1834), known in the United States as Lafayette (/ˌlɑːfiːˈɛt, ˌlæf-/,[2] French: [lafajɛt]), was a French nobleman and military officer who volunteered to join the Continental Army, led by General George Washington, in the American Revolutionary War. Lafayette was ultimately permitted to command Continental Army troops in the decisive siege of Yorktown in 1781, the Revolutionary War's final major battle that secured American independence. After returning to France, Lafayette became a key figure in the French Revolution of 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830 and continues to be celebrated as a hero in both France and the United States.
Gilbert du Motier
6 September 1757
Château de Chavaniac, Auvergne Province, Kingdom of France
20 May 1834 (aged 76)
Paris, Kingdom of France
Picpus Cemetery in Paris
Liberals (1815–1824)
Doctrinaires (1824–1834)
4, including Georges Washington
The Hero of the Two Worlds (Le Héros des Deux Mondes)[1]
Kingdom of France (1771–1777, 1781–1791, 1814/15–1830)
United States (1777–1781)
Kingdom of France (1791–1792)
French First Republic (1792) Kingdom of France (1830)
1771–1792
1830
- Major general (U.S.)
- Lieutenant Général (France)
Lafayette was born into a wealthy land-owning family in Chavaniac in the province of Auvergne in south-central France. He followed the family's martial tradition and was commissioned an officer at age 13. He became convinced that the American revolutionary cause was noble, and he traveled to the New World seeking glory in it. He was made a major-general at age 19, but he was initially not given American troops to command. He fought with the Continental Army at the Battle of Brandywine near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he was wounded but managed to organize an orderly retreat, and he served with distinction in the Battle of Rhode Island. In the middle of the war, he returned home to France to lobby for an increase in French support for the American revolution. He returned to America in 1780, and was given senior positions in the Continental Army. In 1781, troops under his command in Virginia blocked a British army led by Lord Cornwallis until other American and French forces could position themselves for the decisive siege of Yorktown.
Lafayette returned to France and was appointed to the Assembly of Notables in 1787, convened in response to the fiscal crisis. He was elected a member of the Estates General of 1789, where representatives met from the three traditional orders of French society: the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. After the National Constituent Assembly was formed, he helped to write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen with Thomas Jefferson's assistance. This document was inspired by the United States Declaration of Independence, which was authored primarily by Jefferson, and invoked natural law to establish basic principles of the democratic nation-state. He also advocated for the abolition of slavery, in keeping with the philosophy of natural rights. After the storming of the Bastille, he was appointed commander-in-chief of France's National Guard and tried to steer a middle course through the years of revolution. In August 1792, radical factions ordered his arrest, and he fled to the Austrian Netherlands. He was captured by Austrian troops and spent more than five years in prison.
Lafayette returned to France after Napoleon Bonaparte secured his release in 1797, though he refused to participate in Napoleon's government. After the Bourbon Restoration of 1814, he became a liberal member of the Chamber of Deputies, a position which he held for most of the remainder of his life. In 1824, President James Monroe invited him to the United States as the nation's guest, where he visited all 24 states in the union and met a rapturous reception. During France's July Revolution of 1830, he declined an offer to become the French dictator. Instead, he supported Louis-Philippe as king, but turned against him when the monarch became autocratic. He died on 20 May 1834 and is buried in Picpus Cemetery in Paris, under soil from Bunker Hill. He is sometimes known as "The Hero of the Two Worlds" for his accomplishments in the service of both France and the United States.
Retreat from politics
Bonaparte restored Lafayette's citizenship on 1 March 1800 and he was able to recover some of his properties. After Marengo, the First Consul offered him the post of French minister to the United States, but Lafayette declined, saying he was too attached to America to act in relation to it as a foreign envoy. In 1802, he was part of the tiny minority that voted no in the referendum that made Bonaparte consul for life.[161] A seat in the Senate and the Legion of Honor were repeatedly offered by Bonaparte, but Lafayette again declined— though stating that he would gladly have accepted the honours from a democratic government.[162]
In 1804, Bonaparte was crowned the Emperor Napoleon after a plebiscite in which Lafayette did not participate. The retired general remained relatively quiet, although he made Bastille Day addresses.[163] After the Louisiana Purchase, President Jefferson asked him if he would be interested in the governorship, but Lafayette declined, citing personal problems and his desire to work for liberty in France.[88][164]
During a trip to Auvergne in 1807, Adrienne became ill, suffering from complications stemming from her time in prison. She became delirious but recovered enough on Christmas Eve to gather the family around her bed and to say to Lafayette: "Je suis toute à vous" ("I am all yours").[165] She died the next day.[166] In the years after her death, Lafayette mostly remained quietly at La Grange, as Napoleon's power in Europe waxed and then waned. Many influential people and members of the public visited him, especially Americans. He wrote many letters, especially to Jefferson, and exchanged gifts as he had once done with Washington.[167]
Beliefs
Lafayette was a firm believer in a constitutional monarchy. He believed that traditional and revolutionary ideals could be melded together by having a democratic National Assembly work with a monarch, as France always had. His close relationships to American Founding Fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson gave him an opportunity to witness the implementation of a democratic system. His views on potential government structures for France were directly influenced by the American form of government, which was in turn influenced by the British form of government. For example, Lafayette believed in a bicameral legislature, as the United States had. The Jacobins detested the idea of a monarchy in France, which led the National Assembly to vote against it. This idea contributed to his fall from favor, especially when Maximilien Robespierre took power.[198]
Lafayette was the author of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 and a staunch opponent of slavery.[199] His work never specifically mentioned slavery, but he made his position clear on the controversial topic through letters addressed to friends and colleagues such as Washington and Jefferson. He proposed that slaves not be owned but rather work as free tenants on the land of plantation owners, and he bought three slave plantations in Cayenne in 1785 and 1786 to put his ideas into practice, ordering that none of the 70 slaves on the plantations to be bought or sold. He never freed his slaves, and when the French authorities confiscated his properties in 1795, the 63 remaining slaves on the three plantations were sold by colonial officials in Cayenne.[200] He spent his lifetime as an abolitionist, proposing that slaves be emancipated slowly as he recognized the crucial role that slavery played in many economies. Lafayette hoped that his ideas would be adopted by Washington to free slaves in the United States and spread from there. Washington eventually began implementing those practices on his own plantation in Mount Vernon, but he continued to own slaves until the day he died.[201] In a letter to Matthew Clarkson, the mayor of Philadelphia, Lafayette wrote, "I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of Slavery."[202]
The 1899 Lafayette silver dollar, designed by Charles E. Barber, honors Lafayette and George Washington
175th anniversary of Lafayette's arrival in America in 1777, 1952 issue
200th anniversary of the birth of Lafayette, 1957 issue
Throughout his life, Lafayette was an exponent of the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, especially on human rights and civic nationalism, and his views were taken very seriously by intellectuals and others on both sides of the Atlantic.[203] His image in the United States was derived from his "disinterestedness" in fighting without pay for the freedom of a country that was not his own.[204] Samuel Adams praised him for "foregoing the pleasures of Enjoyment of domestick Life and exposing himself to the Hardship and Dangers" of war when he fought "in the glorious cause of freedom".[204] This view was shared by many contemporaries, establishing an image of Lafayette seeking to advance the freedom of all mankind rather than the interests of just one nation.[204] During the French Revolution, Americans viewed him as an advocate for American ideals, seeking to transport them from New World to Old. This was reinforced by his position as surrogate son and disciple of George Washington, who was deemed the Father of His Country and the embodiment of American ideals.[205] Novelist James Fenimore Cooper befriended Lafayette during his time in Paris in the 1820s. He admired his patrician liberalism and eulogized him as a man who "dedicated youth, person, and fortune to the principles of liberty."[206]
Lafayette became an American icon in part because he was not associated with any particular region of the country; he was of foreign birth, did not live in America, and had fought in New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and the South, making him a unifying figure.[207] His role in the French Revolution enhanced this popularity, as Americans saw him steering a middle course. Americans were naturally sympathetic to a republican cause, but also remembered Louis XVI as an early friend of the United States. When Lafayette fell from power in 1792, Americans tended to blame factionalism for the ouster of a man who was above such things in their eyes.[208]
In 1824, Lafayette returned to the United States at a time when Americans were questioning the success of the republic in view of the disastrous economic Panic of 1819 and the sectional conflict resulting in the Missouri Compromise.[209] Lafayette's hosts considered him a judge of how successful independence had become.[210] According to cultural historian Lloyd Kramer, Lafayette "provided foreign confirmations of the self-image that shaped America's national identity in the early nineteenth century and that has remained a dominant theme in the national ideology ever since: the belief that America's Founding Fathers, institutions, and freedom created the most democratic, egalitarian, and prosperous society in the world".[211]
Historian Gilbert Chinard wrote in 1936: "Lafayette became a legendary figure and a symbol so early in his life, and successive generations have so willingly accepted the myth, that any attempt to deprive the young hero of his republican halo will probably be considered as little short of iconoclastic and sacrilegious."[212] That legend has been used politically; the name and image of Lafayette were repeatedly invoked in 1917 to gain popular support for America's entry into World War I, culminating with Charles E. Stanton's famous statement "Lafayette, we are here". This occurred at some cost to Lafayette's image in America; veterans returned from the front singing "We've paid our debt to Lafayette, who the hell do we owe now?"[213] According to Anne C. Loveland, "Lafayette no longer served as a national hero-symbol" by the end of the war.[214] In 2002, however, Congress voted to grant him honorary citizenship.[215]
Lafayette's reputation in France is more problematic. Thomas Gaines notes that the response to Lafayette's death was far more muted in France than in America, and suggested that this may have been because Lafayette was the last surviving hero of America's only revolution, whereas the changes in the French government had been far more chaotic.[216] Lafayette's roles created a more nuanced picture of him in French historiography, especially in the French Revolution. 19th-century historian Jules Michelet describes him as a "mediocre idol", lifted by the mob far beyond what his talents deserved.[217] Jean Tulard, Jean-François Fayard, and Alfred Fierro note Napoleon's deathbed comment about Lafayette in their Histoire et dictionnaire de la Révolution française; he stated that "the king would still be sitting on his throne" if Napoleon had Lafayette's place during the French Revolution.[218] They deemed Lafayette "an empty-headed political dwarf" and "one of the people most responsible for the destruction of the French monarchy".[219] Gaines disagreed and noted that liberal and Marxist historians have also dissented from that view.[219] Lloyd Kramer related 57 percent of the French deemed Lafayette the figure from the Revolution whom they most admired, in a survey taken just before the Revolution's bicentennial in 1989. Lafayette "clearly had more French supporters in the early 1990s than he could muster in the early 1790s".[217]
Marc Leepson concluded his study of Lafayette's life: