Marquis de Lafayette

Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, was born on September 6, 1757, at the family chateau in Chavaniac, a village in the Auvergne region of south central France ^[1]. The family belonged to the old provincial nobility and had a long record of military service. His father, a colonel of grenadiers, was killed by a British cannonball at the Battle of Minden in 1759, when the boy was not yet two years old ^[2].

Raised at Chavaniac by his grandmother and aunts, Lafayette moved to Paris at age eleven to live with his mother and continue his education at the College du Plessis. Loss followed him: his mother died in 1770, and his grandfather died soon after, leaving the twelve year old orphan one of the wealthiest heirs in France ^[1]. The fortune gave him independence that few young nobles enjoyed, and it later financed much of his American adventure.

His path into the army was conventional for his class. He joined the King's Musketeers at thirteen and in 1774, at sixteen, married Adrienne de Noailles, daughter of one of the most powerful court families in France ^[3]. The match brought him connections at Versailles, though contemporaries noted that the awkward provincial teenager never felt at ease in courtly society. He found his real vocation elsewhere, in the news arriving from Britain's rebellious American colonies.

Anyone asking who was Marquis de Lafayette usually begins with the decision he made at nineteen. In 1776, while serving with the French army at Metz, he heard officers discussing the American rebellion and resolved to join it. The French government, still officially at peace with Britain, forbade him to go. Lafayette purchased a ship, La Victoire, with his own money, evaded royal orders, and sailed for America in April 1777 ^[2].

He landed near Georgetown, South Carolina, in June 1777 and made his way north to Philadelphia. The Continental Congress, wary of foreign adventurers seeking rank, was won over when he offered to serve without pay. On July 31, 1777, Congress commissioned him a major general in the Continental Army, an extraordinary appointment for a man not yet twenty ^[4].

George Washington took an immediate liking to the young Frenchman, and their bond became one of the most famous friendships of the revolutionary era. Lafayette was wounded in the leg at the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777 yet stayed on the field to help organize the retreat ^[2]. He wintered with the army at Valley Forge, led troops capably at Barren Hill and Monmouth in 1778, and proved that his commission was more than a diplomatic courtesy.

Among the most consequential of Marquis de Lafayette achievements was his work as an unofficial ambassador. He returned to France in 1779 and lobbied hard at Versailles for men, money, and ships for the American cause. His advocacy contributed to the decision to send an expeditionary force under the Comte de Rochambeau in 1780 ^[3]. Back in America, Washington gave him command of the Continental forces in Virginia in 1781, where he shadowed and harried the army of Lord Cornwallis through the spring and summer ^[4].

Lafayette's maneuvering helped pin Cornwallis at Yorktown, where the combined American and French armies, supported by the French fleet, forced the British surrender on October 19, 1781. The victory effectively decided the war, and Lafayette returned to France a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic ^[2].

His second great contribution came at home. Elected to the Estates General in 1789, he presented a draft Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the National Assembly on July 11, 1789, a text prepared in consultation with his friend Thomas Jefferson, then the American minister in Paris ^[5]. Days later, after the fall of the Bastille, he was named commander of the new National Guard of Paris. Lafayette is also credited with proposing the tricolor cockade, combining the red and blue of Paris with the royal white, the ancestor of the modern French flag ^[1].

Commanding the Paris National Guard placed Lafayette at the center of the French Revolution's most volatile years. He tried to hold a middle course: a constitutional monarchy with guaranteed rights, modeled loosely on what he had seen in America. In October 1789 he escorted the royal family from Versailles to Paris after a crowd of demonstrators stormed the palace, an intervention that likely saved the queen's life ^[3].

The middle ground kept shrinking. In July 1791, after King Louis XVI's failed flight to Varennes, guardsmen under Lafayette's command fired on a republican crowd on the Champ de Mars, killing dozens of demonstrators. The episode destroyed much of his popularity with the Parisian left, while royalists had never forgiven him for backing the Revolution at all ^[5].

When France went to war with Austria in 1792, Lafayette commanded one of the front line armies. That August, after the monarchy fell and radical Jacobins gained power, he was declared a traitor. He fled across the border, hoping to reach neutral territory, but Austrian forces captured him. He spent five years in Prussian and Austrian prisons, much of it in the fortress of Olmutz, where his wife Adrienne and their daughters voluntarily joined him in captivity in 1795. Napoleon Bonaparte secured his release in 1797 under the Treaty of Campo Formio negotiations ^[2].

Lafayette's marriage to Adrienne de Noailles, arranged when he was sixteen and she fourteen, grew into a genuine partnership. Adrienne managed his affairs during his American campaigns, endured imprisonment during the Terror (her mother, grandmother, and sister were guillotined in 1794), and chose to share his cell at Olmutz ^[3]. The couple had four children. Their son was named Georges Washington de Lafayette in honor of the American commander, and a daughter was named Virginie at Jefferson's suggestion.

Adrienne's death in 1807, at age forty eight, was the heaviest personal blow of his later life. Lafayette wore a locket with her portrait and reportedly spent time each year in the room where she died ^[3]. He never remarried.

His convictions extended beyond politics into personal causes. Lafayette was an early and persistent opponent of slavery. In 1785 he bought plantations in the French colony of Cayenne, in present day French Guiana, intending to demonstrate that enslaved laborers could be educated and freed gradually, and he pressed Washington, without success, to adopt emancipation schemes in Virginia ^[6]. He was also active in founding the Society of the Friends of the Blacks era debates on abolition in France.

Lafayette returned to France in 1799 but refused to serve Napoleon, whose concentration of power he distrusted. He retired to La Grange, a chateau east of Paris, and spent the imperial years as a gentleman farmer, corresponding with friends across the Atlantic, Jefferson among them ^[5]. After Napoleon's fall he reentered politics as a liberal deputy under the restored Bourbon monarchy, a persistent and often isolated voice for constitutional rights.

In 1824 President James Monroe invited him to visit the United States as the nation's guest for its approaching fiftieth anniversary. The tour of 1824 and 1825 became a thirteen month triumphal procession through all twenty four states. Crowds met him at every stop, towns and counties took his name, and Congress voted him 200,000 dollars and a township of land in gratitude for his services ^[4]. The visit fixed his place in American memory more firmly than any other foreign figure of the founding era.

He had one more revolution in him. During the July Revolution of 1830, the aging general again commanded the National Guard and threw his prestige behind Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, presenting him to the Paris crowd as the guarantee of a constitutional throne. Disappointment followed quickly as the new monarchy drifted away from the liberties Lafayette expected. He died in Paris on May 20, 1834, at seventy six, and was buried beside Adrienne in Picpus Cemetery under soil brought from Bunker Hill in Boston ^[1].

Few reputations travel as well as Lafayette's. In the United States he remains the emblem of French support for independence: an estimated dozens of towns, counties, streets, squares, and colleges carry his name, from Lafayette, Louisiana, to Lafayette Square facing the White House ^[4]. In 2002 the United States Congress made him an honorary citizen, one of only a handful of people ever granted the distinction ^[6]. When American troops arrived in France in 1917, an officer at his tomb famously announced 'Lafayette, we are here', repaying, in the rhetoric of the day, the old debt.

His French legacy is more contested. Admirers point to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the tricolor, and a half century of consistent advocacy for constitutional government through three revolutions. Critics, from his own time onward, have judged him better at symbolism than at wielding power, a man repeatedly outmaneuvered at decisive moments in 1791, 1792, and 1830 ^[5].

Any full Marquis de Lafayette biography must weigh both verdicts, yet the basic Marquis de Lafayette facts are not in dispute: a teenage volunteer who helped win American independence, a legislator who helped write liberty into French law, and a rare figure honored as a founder by two nations. Historians continue to study him as the clearest human link between the American and French Revolutions, and his American tour, his prison years, and his friendship with Washington remain staples of books, monuments, and even Broadway, where he appears as a fan favorite character in the musical Hamilton ^[6].