Adopted Son

by David A Clary

  Washington was proud of Lafayette, loved him, and wanted him to do the right thing. Always he assumed that he had. “Nor is it without the most sensible pleasure I learn,” he told former ambassador La Luzerne, “that our friend the Marquis de la Fayette, has in acting the arduous part which has fallen to his share, conducted himself with so much wisdom and apparently to such general satisfaction.” He told Lafayette, “How much, how sincerely am I rejoiced, my dear marquis, to find that things are assuming so favorable an aspect in France! Be assured that you always have my best and most ardent wishes for your success.”60

  The American president accepted the Bastille key as “the token of victory gained by Liberty over Despotism…In this great subject of triumph for the New World,” he continued, “and for humanity in general, it will never be forgotten how conspicuous a part you bore, and how much lustre you reflected on a country in which you made the first displays of character.” Washington knew that other European powers threatened to intervene in France and would try to involve the United States. It was his government’s policy “to keep in the situation in which nature has placed us,” he said, “to observe a strict neutrality.” America would remain “unentangled in the crooked politics of Europe.”61

  Washington’s adopted son staged his most theatrical gesture on the first anniversary of the Bastille’s fall. Talleyrand proposed a celebration, and Lafayette hijacked the idea to make himself the star, using the event to pressure the Assembly to cease tearing the country apart. He summoned delegations from National Guards all around France; workers converted the Champ de Mars, beside the Seine, into a gigantic stadium; and the city’s population swelled. On July 10, 1790, 14,000 guardsmen from the provinces, representing over a million colleagues, declared themselves the Assembly of the Federation and elected him president. The next day he led them to the National Assembly and told it to finish the Constitution. The armed force behind him was a quiet threat. He marched his army to the Tuileries and presented it to the king, who received the troops gratefully. On the twelfth, he rode his white horse into the stadium to greet the royal family at one end, the Assembly at the other, while 160,000 spectators rimmed the place. America was represented by John Paul Jones and Tom Paine. Talleyrand led prayers as Lafayette stood beside him at the base of a pyramid where the royal family sat. Talleyrand thought it was all a joke. “For pity’s sake,” he whispered to Lafayette, “don’t make me laugh!”

  The Fête de la Fédération (Festival of the Federation) went on through July 14. William Short told Morris, “The marquis de Lafayette seemed to have taken full possession of the ‘fédérés.’ When I left Paris he was adored by them—that moment may be regarded as the zenith of his influence—but he made no use of it, except to prevent ill.” He predicted that the time would come when the marquis would “repent not having seized that opportunity of giving such a complexion to the revolution, as every good citizen ought to desire.” Lafayette again had been offered command of all National Guards but turned it down. No one, he said, should command outside his own city or province. This was a great error, because the Guard was his trump card.62

  Thomas Paine, attributed to Bass Otis, after Thomas Thompson, from the William Sharp engraving after a painting by George Romney, ca. 1859. Lafayette used Paine and John Paul Jones as American stage props during the Festival of the Federation in 1790. (INDEPENDENCE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

  Replacing power with show turned out to be a trap. Lafayette’s dream of a constitutional monarchy was all but dead, and he was the last to realize it. In refusing to accept national military power he had given up his last chance to salvage the situation. The king threw away the popularity he had regained by retreating to the Tuileries, and Lafayette’s confinement to the Paris Guard created a political vacuum that was filled by the Jacobins. They flooded the country with lies about him and organized political clubs everywhere. They wanted to subvert all local governments, as well as the army and navy.

  Lafayette was the king’s chief defender, but Louis let him down when radicals stirred up mutinies in several army and navy units. Louis’ government, what there was of it, wanted the uprisings put down, and Lafayette urged the commandant at Metz to “strike a great blow” against the nearby Swiss Regiment. He did, hanging or torturing to death thirty-one soldiers and sending the rest to slave galleys. The king publicly congratulated the general for the massacre, and Lafayette’s role became known. A Jacobin leader asked out loud, “Is it still possible to doubt that the great general, the hero of the Old World and the New, the immortal restorer of liberty, is the leader of the counterrevolutionaries, and the instigator of all the plots against the fatherland?” Mirabeau warned the king, “Popular outbreaks are the ruin of Monsieur de La Fayette. He will one day fire on the people. By that act alone, he will deal himself a mortal wound.”63

  Lafayette thought the French Revolution was over with the festival, but it was just beginning, and he was trapped in the storm he had unleashed. The country was “disturbed with revolts among the regiments,” he complained to Washington in August. He said he was “constantly attaked on both sides by the aristocratic and the factious party” and did not know “to which of the two we owe these insurrections. Our safeguard against them lies with the National Guard…. and my influence with’em is as great as if I had accepted the chief command.” He ended on an ominous note, however. He had lost some of his “favour with the mob, and displeased the frantic lovers of licentiousness,” because he was “bent on establishing a legal subordination.”

  The émigrés enlisted the other powers of Europe on their side. The kings and emperors loathed and feared the revolution, which they called the “French disease,” a term formerly applied to syphilis. They blamed Lafayette for importing revolution from America, but they could not organize a plan of action. It was “not out of the heads of the aristocrats to make a counter revolution,” he told Washington. But he thought their plans would be “either abandonned or unsuccessfull.” He wanted to follow his adoptive father’s example even as his popularity faded. He hoped “our business” would “end with the year—at which time this so much blackened Cromwell, this ambitious dictator, your friend, shall…become a private citizen.” The people were becoming “a little tired with the Revolution and the Assembly,” he admitted sadly.64

  Lafayette did not know it, but his former ally Mirabeau had sold out to the queen and turned on him. Each thought himself the protector of the royal family, but because Marie-Antoinette feared Lafayette and trusted Mirabeau, the latter had the royal ear. He wanted to undermine Lafayette’s domination of the city to pave a way for the king’s escape. The result was another increase in violence. In January 1791, a great riot broke out in the suburb of La Chapelle. While Lafayette was putting it down, the Assembly more than doubled the duty on American whale oil. He was losing his grip.65

  So long as the National Guard commander was busy keeping order, he could not throw his weight around in the Assembly. In March Lafayette complained to Washington that it had slapped a duty on American tobacco. One by one, the trade favors he had won for the United States were being repealed. Whatever expectations he “had conceived of a speedy termination to our revolutionary troubles,” he complained, he was “tossed about in the ocean of factions and commotions of every kind.” It was his “fate to be on each side, with equal animosity attacked.” He begged for guidance. Washington was too far away, and as president he could not meddle in French affairs. The distance that separated them, he advised, “suspended” his opinion on what was going on in France. He was careful even in how he addressed his letter, for the first time writing “Monsieur de la Fayette.” The National Assembly had abolished titles of nobility, so to call him “my dear marquis” instead of “my dear sir” could endanger him.66

  Lafayette and the Guard spent most of the spring of 1791 putting down one uprising after another. Trying to please both sides, he angered both. He saw himself as the protector of the royal family, but they saw him as
their jailer. On Easter Monday, April 18, the king and his family decided to go to their estate at Saint-Cloud. Word got out, a crowd gathered, and they were blocked at the gates of the Tuileries. Lafayette showed up with the Guard and ordered the troops to clear the way. They refused, the king and his family went back inside, and the mob screamed that Lafayette had tried to help the king escape.

  Lafayette was an outcast even in the National Guard. He submitted his resignation but, as Morris drolly observed, “found afterwards various reasons for not doing it. This is like him.” Bailly talked him into withdrawing the resignation. The restored commandant required all officers and men to sign a new oath and purged those who would not. The ones he ousted went over to the radicals. In May 1791 the Assembly created a High Court to try crimes against the state, and in June Robespierre became the chief prosecutor. Lafayette and the king both appeared defenseless.67

  Lafayette more than ever wanted to escape from public life. He wished it was in his power to give Washington an assurance that the troubles were at an end, he said in May. “The rage of parties, even among the patriots, is gone as far as it is possible, short of blood shed.” All factions were against him, he said. When the Guard disobeyed him at the Tuileries and neither the Assembly nor the king would back him up, he “stood alone in defense of the law.” Before he could bring his fellow citizens “to a sense of legal subordination,” he “must have conducted them through the fear to loose the man they love,” meaning himself.68

  The commander of the Paris National Guard still thought he was the indispensable man a month later. He wanted to visit America, but France was “not in that state of tranquillity which may admit” of his absence. Foreign armies and émigrés were at the borders, disorder was in the streets, and he was needed to overhaul the army and navy. “The United States and France must be one people, and so begin the confederation of all nations who will assert their own rights,” he declared. The French Washington expected to lead a world revolution.69

  Lafayette had lost control over his own revolution, however, and the king betrayed him again. Prodded by Marie-Antoinette and aided by Mirabeau, he had been plotting his escape from France since the Easter incident. At midnight on June 20, 1791, the royal family set out for Metz, headed for the Austrian border. When their disappearance was discovered at dawn, Lafayette fanned the National Guard out in every direction. As he rode through the streets, crowds condemned him as a traitor. When he reached the National Assembly, he faced more denunciations from the Jacobins, who wanted his head.

  The king and family were stopped 150 miles northeast of the city on June 22. Three days later Lafayette and guardsmen led the royal carriage through howling mobs to the Tuileries Palace. He felt let down by the man he had tried to protect. “Sire,” he told Louis, “your majesty knows my loyalty to the crown; but I must tell you that if the crown separates itself from the people, I will remain at the side of the people.” He asked the king if he had any orders. Louis answered sadly, “It seems to me, that I am more subject to your orders than you are to mine.”70

  After the royal family was recaptured, the queen’s brother, Emperor Joseph of Austria, called upon all European monarchs to vindicate the king’s honor “and to limit the dangerous extremes of the French Revolution.” Robespierre used that as an excuse to seize power, and the Assembly called for 100,000 volunteers to guard the Austrian frontier. On July 14 the radical clubs assembled a great mob at the Champ de Mars to call for the overthrow of the king. Lafayette talked Bailly into once again declaring martial law, and led what was left of the Paris Guard to the scene. When he told the crowd to disperse, they outshouted him and began throwing stones. He ordered the troops to fire, and somewhere between thirteen and fifty rioters fell dead, with hundreds wounded. Mirabeau’s prediction had come to pass.71

  Lafayette followed that confrontation by trying to stomp out the radicals, driving many of them from the city. Only Robespierre and his crew remained. With some of their allies summarily hanged by the Guard, the Assemblymen resumed writing the Constitution, and the king approved it on September 13, 1791. Washington had warned Lafayette, “The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded. Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible.” He was worried about the younger man. He saw “the critical situation” in which Lafayette stood, and advised him that he would never have a greater occasion to show his “prudence, judgment, and magnanimity.”

  It appeared that peace was at hand. The Assembly went home on September 30, and the next day the first elected Parliament convened. Lafayette claimed victory, having established an American-style government, although the licentious Constitution was nothing of the sort. Emulating Washington, he resigned as commander of the Guard on October 8 and prepared to go to Chavaniac. The radicals returned to Paris.72

  The new Constitution was “good for nothing,” Morris grumbled to Washington. “The truth is that instead of seeking the public good by doing what was right, each sought his own advantage.” Every day, the Assembly committed “new follies, and if this unhappy country be not plunged anew into the horrors of despotism it is not their fault.” He declared that “America in the worst of times was much better because at least the criminal law was executed, not to mention the mildness of our manners.”73

  Lafayette saw the defects in the Constitution and in his own behavior. Without Washington to guide him, he had bungled. He also realized that Morris had been correct when he said that France was not America. He told William Short dejectedly, “Our American Revolution, had left my mind as it were in a state of maidenhead. It was not acquainted with the ways of man as it is now. I have fought the same battles for the same cause with the same spirit and success at the head of the right angels against the wrong ones. But the scene of the one action was in Heaven, the other in Hell.”74

  The French Washington went to his country estate, expecting his nation’s call to return to its service, just as had happened with his adoptive father. He did not have to wait long.

  FIFTEEN

  The Lament of Washington

  (JANUARY 1792–DECEMBER 1799)

  To arms, oh citizens!

  Form up in battalions!

  March on, march on!

  And soak our fields

  With their evil blood!

  —“LA MARSEILLAISE”

  Lafayette set out for Chavaniac, which had so far escaped looting. Without the National Guard around him, he was not safe in Paris, nor was Adrienne, whose father was an émigré. Adrienne’s mother and one of her sisters followed them. The first thing he did at his “place of retirement” was to write to Adélaïde, telling her that he was happy to have “no role to play but that of a plowman,” like his adoptive father at Mount Vernon. He began remodeling, hired an overseer, and imported breeding stock. He sold some land to finance it all, and Adrienne handled the details. She told his financial manager, Morizot, that they lived “in a world of profound peace. Monsieur de La Fayette revels in its delights as though he had never known a more active existence.” Only a war against the émigrés could tear him away from the place, she said.

  Before he left Paris, Lafayette had stamped one more American imprint on his native land. He had clothed the National Guard in red, white, and blue, the colors he had marched under in America. When the government called out volunteers, it ordered them to wear something blue. What was left of the royal army wore white. Red was the symbol of the French Revolution. Lafayette combined the colors into a new national flag—the red, white, and blue Tricolor, which still flies over France.1

  HIS CIRCLE IS COMPLETED

  With Lafayette gone from Paris, the Jacobins had the upper hand.

  The moderates were not strong enough to resist them and begged Lafayette to return to command the Paris Guard, but he refused. The Jacobins ignored the country’s famine and fiscal crisis and abandoned the Constitution. They concentrated on the things that politica
l fanatics thought important. They adopted beheading by the guillotine to replace hanging for executions, so common criminals could die like nobles. They changed the number and names of the months. Old titles of courtesy (sieur, madame) were outlawed, replaced by citoyen (citizen) and citoyenne (citizeness). Anybody who did not conform was an “enemy of the people.”2

  The émigrés thought they saw a chance to retake their country and assembled a small army in Austria, on the French border. Soon Austria and other German nations supported them. The Assembly had condemned to death any émigrés who did not return to France before the start of 1792, and rattled its sabers at Austria. It expected to put together three armies of 50,000 men each, volunteers and regulars, to face the enemy.

  The minister of war recommended three generals to command the new forces. Rochambeau would lead the Army of the North on the Belgian border; a Prussian veteran of the Seven Years’ War, Nicolas Baron von Luckner, the Army of the Rhine on the right; and Lafayette the Army of the Center, at Metz. The king objected to Lafayette. The minister told him that whatever his preferences, public opinion would force him to appoint Lafayette. Besides, giving him an army would keep him out of Paris. The conqueror of Cornwallis left Chavaniac at the end of December 1791.3