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Marquis de Lafayette

Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, was born on September 6, 1757, and died May 20, 1834. His was no ordinary life. Not many people become national heroes, and those who become national heroes in more than one country are rare indeed. But Lafayette is remembered not only in his native France, where he played a major role in the Revolution and in French politics after the fall of Napoleon, but in this country as well.

No fewer than fifteen states have counties named for him, and towns named Lafayette, Fayette, and Fayetteville fairly dot the American landscape. New Hampshire has Mt. Lafayette. The USS Lafayette (the third American naval vessel so named) was one of the first nuclear ballistic-missile submarines. The park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House is named for him. He is one of only six foreigners to have been made an honorary American citizen by act of Congress. His full-length portrait by Samuel F. B. Morse, commissioned on his triumphant return to the United States in 1824, hangs in New York’s City Hall.

Lafayette was born of an ancient French family in the Château de Chavaniac in the Auvergne, a rugged, mountainous part of central France. His father was killed at the Battle of Minden—a major French defeat in the Seven Years War—when Lafayette was not yet two, and he was orphaned when his mother died in 1770. He joined the French army as a cadet the next year, and when he was 16 he married a daughter of the duc d’Ayen, of the vastly distinguished de Noailles family (his father-in-law would inherit the title duc de Noailles).

Lafayette was serving as a captain in the French army when the American Revolution began. Despite his aristocratic background, he welcomed wholeheartedly the principles for which it was fought. He wrote in his memoirs that “my heart was enrolled in it,” but the French establishment discouraged him from participating in it. Indeed, Louis XVI forbade him to do so.

Regardless, he contacted Silas Deane, an American agent in Paris, and secured a commission as a major general in the Continental Army. Despite an arrest warrant, he managed to leave France with eleven other European military officers, including Baron de Kalb, as companions, and he arrived in the United States on June 13, 1777. In July the Continental Congress confirmed his appointment as a major general. The next day he met George Washington, with whom he became very close and after whom he would name a son.

Wounded at the Battle of Brandywine, in September 1777, Lafayette was given command of a division at Washington’s request in December. The following spring he fought at the Battle of Barren Hill (now called Lafayette Hill), where he skillfully managed a retreat across the Schuylkill River, and a month later at the Battle of Monmouth. After war broke out between Great Britain and France, he returned to France for consultations, but he was back in this country after a little more than a year and remained until the end of the war. He commanded the Continental Army in Virginia in the later stages of the war and took part in the siege of Yorktown.

He was promoted to major general in the French Army on his return to France in 1782, and in 1787 he took his seat in the Assembly of Notables, which had been convened to deal with the gathering government financial crisis. Deeply imbued with the spirit of eighteenth-century liberalism, he sought toleration for Protestants and demanded not only the convocation for the first time since 1614 of the Estates General, a body somewhat analogous to Britain’s Parliament, but also the creation of national and provincial assemblies.

Elected to the Estates General when it met at the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, he soon after joined its successor, the National Assembly (more or less the equivalent of the House of Commons). There he presented the first draft of a Declaration of the Rights of Man. He had help on the draft from Thomas Jefferson—then American minister to France—and borrowed extensively from the American Declaration of Independence as well.

Elected vice president of the Assembly, the next day he led a delegation to congratulate the city of Paris on the fall of the Bastille. Presented with keys to the prison, he sent one to George Washington. It can still be seen at Washington’s home, Mount Vernon. Chosen commander of the Paris militia, the Garde Nationale, Lafayette gave its soldiers the red-white-and-blue cockade that is the origin of the French national colors. The following year he spoke in favor of abolishing titles of nobility, and he never again used his own.

But with the French Revolution beginning to spin out of control, Lafayette—a man of moderation, devoted to the idea of popular sovereignty—turned against it and left France in August 1792, planning to go to the United States. After France declared him an enemy of the state, he was arrested by Austrian authorities, and he spent the next five years in custody, until he was turned over to the U.S. Consul in Hamburg.

He returned to France in 1799 but refused the autocratic Napoleon’s offers of honors and office, retiring to one of his wife’s estates and living as a gentleman farmer until 1815. He reentered public life in France in 1818, advocating measures to advance the power of the people and representative government. As the restored Bourbons grew increasingly reactionary, he accepted an invitation to visit the United States as “the guest of the nation.”

Over the course of 15 months in 1824 and 1825, he visited all 24 of the states that then formed the Union, receiving tumultuous welcomes everywhere. Congress voted him the sum of $200,000 and gave him land equal in size to a township (36 square miles). At Jefferson’s invitation he attended the inaugural banquet of the University of Virginia, and Jefferson called him “the doyen . . . of the soldiers of liberty of the world.” The 2nd Battalion, 11th New York Artillery adopted the name “National Guard” in honor of the Garde Nationale de Paris that Lafayette had commanded at the start of the French Revolution.

Returning to France, he received another tumultuous welcome, despite attempts by the government to prevent one. Now an old man (he turned 70 in 1827), he performed one more service for his country and the cause of liberty. When Paris rose against the oppressive Charles X in 1830, Lafayette became, once again, commander of the national guard, and he was instrumental in the election of Louis Philippe as king of the French. But in 1832 he denounced Louis Philippe for not having kept his liberal promises.

In his last speech, in January 1834, Lafayette advanced again the principles of a lifetime. “True republicanism,” he told the Chamber of Deputies, “is the sovereignty of the people. . . . There are natural and inalienable rights that an entire nation has no right to violate.”

Although he spent a total of less than five years in America (in 1776-79, 1780-81, 1784, and 1824-25), he was more admired there than perhaps any other foreign visitor in American history. The Encyclopędia Britannica (1911) said of Lafayette, "Few men have owed more of their success and usefulness to their family rank than La Fayette, and still fewer have abused it less. He never achieved distinction in the field, and his political career proved him to be incapable of ruling a great national movement; but he had strong convictions which always impelled him to study the interests of humanity, and a pertinacity in maintaining them, which, in all the strange vicissitudes of his eventful life, secured him a very unusual measure of public respect. No citizen of a foreign country has ever had so many and such warm admirers in America, nor does any statesman in France appear to have ever possessed uninterruptedly for so many years such a large measure of popular influence and respect. He had what Jefferson called a 'canine appetite' for popularity and fame, but in him the appetite only seemed to make him more anxious to merit the fame which he enjoyed. He was brave to rashness; and he never shrank from danger or responsibility if he saw the way open to spare life or suffering, to protect the dead, to sustain the law and preserve order."

No wonder that when the United States came to the aid of the faltering Allies in World War I, an American officer, Colonel C. E. Stanton, would say, in an address given at the grave of “the hero of two worlds” in Paris, on July 4, 1917, “Lafayette, we are here.”

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