Adopted Son

by David A Clary

  Lafayette and the others folded the old military order into the new regime. The regulations of the royal army were still mostly in effect, and many regimental officers remained in place. But the Jacobins were hostile to anything left from the old days and wanted to replace the army with the “Nation at Arms.” Lafayette had handed them the means to that with the National Guard, and it became the nucleus of a new People’s Army.4

  The volunteers were unruly, and the regulars remained mutinous. Generals were accused of betraying the soldiers by putting them where they might be shot at. When General Théobald Dillon confronted an Austrian contingent at Tournai early in the spring, his advance met some artillery fire, and the whole French force stampeded in panic. After they caught their breath, the soldiers hunted Dillon down, butchered him, and hanged his remains from a lamppost in Lille. Rochambeau narrowly escaped similar treatment.5

  Lafayette formed his infantry brigades with one regiment of regulars and two battalions of volunteers, to combine the steadiness of the former with the enthusiasm of the latter. Instead, the regulars lost their steadiness, while the volunteers were explosive. The veteran of Washington’s army introduced to the French army clouds of skirmishers to mask the main body of the army in attack, a larger version of his American tactics. He built on Knox’s field artillery system, which grew into massed artillery as the revolutionary army became the Napoleonic one. Along with the rapid assembly of divisions through the corps d’armée (army corps), these measures allowed the French army to dominate Europe until 1815.6

  The disaster at Tournai, followed by a similar one at Mons, reflected what Lafayette could see in his own troops. The volunteers were riddled with agitators, hostile to any hierarchy. They were disobedient to their generals, who in turn feared that they might suffer Dillon’s grisly fate at the smallest setback. Led by Rochambeau, many commanders resigned. Those who remained, including Lafayette, decided that military survival required reestablishing order in the army and in Paris. By May, he was ready to march on the capital with his most reliable troops. He sent a message to the Austrian ambassador proposing a truce, so he could deal with the Paris militants, but he failed to act.7

  Lafayette wrote Washington when he arrived at Metz in January 1792, and outlined his situation. He found only about half the army he had been promised. He was short of officers, the regulars were sullen, and the volunteers were undisciplined. He thought he was the only French general popular enough to impose discipline on this unruly mob. As for why he had taken the command, it was to defend French liberty and the new Constitution from foreign invaders and counterrevolutionaries, and because the people asked him to. He promised to keep Washington fully informed, “for I alwaïs consider myself, my dear general, as one of your lieutenants on a detached command.”8

  Lafayette and the remaining moderates were not ruthless enough to compete with the Jacobins, who were better propagandists. There was a common joke that winter that if Lafayette gave bread to the poor, the radicals would accuse him of trying to bribe the masses. When the second volume of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man appeared, with a dedication to Lafayette on the opening page, it set the stage for his downfall, despite the differences between their beliefs.9

  Lafayette warned Washington in March not to accept any false accounts about events in Europe, particularly news from England. There was no doubt that liberty and equality would be preserved in France, but on the other hand, “you well know that I will not if they fall survive them.” Still he thought war unlikely. “The danger for us lies with our state of anarchy owing to the ignorance of the people.”10

  Washington sympathized with the younger man’s being pulled away from his home, but “[i]n the revolution of a great nation we must not be surprized at the vicissitudes to which individuals are liable,” and the demands on Lafayette equaled the weight of his public importance. The American was too far away to understand what was happening, so uncertainty bothered him. He was anxious for Lafayette’s personal safety, and he had “yet no grounds for removing that anxiety.”

  Still, Washington had “the consolation of believing that, if you should fall it will be in defence of that cause which your heart tells you is just. And to the care of that Providence, whose interposition and protection we have so often experienced, do I chearfully commit you and your nation,” hoping that all the turmoil would work out for the best. Washington had never been outwardly religious, and allusions to Providence had only recently entered his letters to Lafayette, who was a nonbeliever. It was a sign of aging. Not wanting to end on that note, he added that the Frenchman’s friends in the United States were interested in his welfare, and asked about him “with an anxiety that bespeaks a warm affection.” Lafayette was still popular in America, if not so much in France.11

  The younger general never received that letter, because his world turned upside down before it reached him. On April 20, 1792, the Assembly declared war on Austria and sent the center and left armies into Belgium. They were up against 150,000 German regulars, and at the first shot both undisciplined French armies disintegrated. “War was therefore undertaken with all possible disadvantage,” Jefferson’s agent in France reported. A Prussian-Austrian army under Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick marched toward Paris. The Assembly called up all the National Guards and more volunteers; 600,000 flocked to the country’s banner. That gave the enemy pause.12

  This armed mob handed the Jacobins enough muscle to overwhelm all opposition. At its heart were several battalions of provincial National Guardsmen, selected for their revolutionary fanaticism and stationed in Paris. The Assembly declared an emergency, suspended all civil liberties, made itself the government in perpetuity, and began ordering arrests. It demanded that the king disband his personal guard, 6,000 strong, stationed around the Tuileries. He agreed, shedding the last protection he owned. Trading a strong card for a weak one, the king exercised his power of veto against some Assembly measures. When the radicals demanded that he retract the vetoes, he showed rare backbone and refused. Lafayette applauded him, promising that “all the friends of liberty and all good Frenchmen” would rally around the throne to defend it against “rebel plots and factions.” Lafayette would be with them, upholding his oath to defend the nation, the law, and the king.13

  Lafayette complained to Washington about Gouverneur Morris being appointed ambassador to France. He was a friend, he said, but his allegedly aristocratic and counterrevolutionary principles made him unfit to be the representative of “the only nation whose politics have a likeness with ours, since they are founded on the plan of a representative democracy.” Yet he admitted that all cabinet posts had gone to Jacobins, and France was anything but a representative democracy.14

  Lafayette sent an open letter to the Assembly, a tirade against the Jacobins. He naively assumed that the majority of the Assembly was against them, so it should rise and toss the rascals out. Knowing the royal family was under threat from mobs, he tried to call out the National Guard. It did not respond. When an armed horde invaded the Tuileries Palace and forced the king to put on the red cap of revolution, he offered to help the royal family escape. Marie-Antoinette spurned him.

  Lafayette at the bar of the Assembly. His empty harangue, not backed by force, set the stage for his downfall in 1792. (LILLY LIBRARY, INDIANA UNIVERSITY)

  On June 28 Lafayette stormed into the Assembly and harangued the members, demanding that they shut down the Jacobin Club and restore order. At first many thought that he was there to announce a coup, but without any force to back him up, he just looked silly. When members asked why he had left his command without authority, he had no answer, and returned to his shattered army in Alsace. A regular artillery officer in Paris at the time disapproved of Lafayette’s unauthorized presence and empty threats. It was perhaps necessary, he told his brother, “but it was very dangerous for the public liberty.” He was considering how he might have handled the situation better. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte.15

  Paris became an ar
med camp, or two of them. Hordes of volunteers, radical fanatics all, flooded the city. On the other side were the National Guard of Paris and the king’s remaining defenders, the 600 men of the Swiss Guard. After three years in which politicians had threatened violence to get their way, the most violent of the bunch, the Jacobins, had won out. On August 10, 1792, volunteers attacked the Tuileries to seize the king, slaughtering the guards and 200 servants. Fighting continued in the streets for days, but the Paris Guard was outnumbered or deserted, and a general massacre of dissidents got under way. The Legislative Assembly, as it had restyled itself, declared the royal family traitors and sent them to prison. Further resolutions condemned Lafayette, also as a traitor, and sentenced him to death.16

  “What a folly!” cried an American. He thought it absurd to claim that Lafayette, a champion of liberty, was a traitor to his country. The Assembly, thoroughly dominated by the Jacobins, offered a reward to anyone who brought in Lafayette or put him to death. “Thus, his circle is completed,” Morris told Jefferson. “He…is crushed by the wheel he put in motion. He lasted longer than I expected.”17

  Lafayette summoned his officers and swore them to a new oath upholding the Constitution and the king. He toyed with the idea of marching on Paris, but once again he failed to act. He decided to run for it, and on August 21 he told Adrienne what he was doing. He would go to England, he said, and wanted his whole family to join him. “Let us resettle in America, where we will find the liberty that no longer exists in France.”18

  “I was dismissed and accused, that is to say an outlaw,” Lafayette explained later. His “defense would have been bloody, but it would have been useless and the enemy was in position to profit from it.” He wanted to attack in order to be killed, he claimed, but he saw no military advantage in that, so he stopped himself. “I wanted to go die in Paris. But I feared that such an example of popular ingratitude would only discourage future promoters of liberty. So I left.”19

  Lafayette led several dozen of his officers and others, who felt themselves threatened by the same forces that had condemned him, across the Belgian border into the Austrian Netherlands. The Austrians released some of them, transferred others to a military prison, and handed three to the Prussians. They were Lafayette, his aide Jean-Xavier Bureaux de Pusy, and a general, César, comte de La Tour-Maubourg. La Colombe, who had been with him since South Carolina, got away and went to New York. The king of Prussia ordered that the three Frenchmen be kept indefinitely in prison and sent them to Nivelles. Lafayette appealed to the Austrian emperor’s uncle, who told him he was detained not as a prisoner of war, a citizen, or an émigré but because he had fomented the revolution that overturned France, put his king in irons and deprived him of all rights and legitimate powers, and was “the principal instrument of all the disgraces that overwhelmed that unfortunate monarch.” It was fitting that Lafayette be confined until Louis was restored to power. The legitimate king of France would then determine the criminal’s fate.20

  The French Washington, who wanted to be loved by everyone, had become the most hated man in Europe. He who took revolution to France was its declared enemy. On the same grounds, he was an enemy to its real opponents, the crowned heads of Europe.

  That revolution had turned into a national bloodbath, as the first guillotine went to work in Paris at about the time Lafayette crossed the border. Mobs rounded up suspects and butchered them by the thousands in the September Massacres. Looting, vandalism, and mass murder spread across the country. Every nation in Europe broke relations or declared war. The conflict would last for twenty-three years, but it got it off to a bad start for the allies. On September 20, 1792, at Valmy, a French army of 36,000 (mostly regulars) took on 34,000 men under Brunswick. The Prussians had outrun their supply lines, the weather was wretched, and the battle was mostly an artillery duel. The French gunners outmatched the enemy, and Brunswick retired over the border. The revolution was secure.21

  I HAVE ASSOCIATED YOU WITH STORMY DESTINIES

  On August 26, Lafayette appealed to the American ambassador at The Hague, William Short. He was no longer French, he said, but an American citizen and an American officer. He asked for help. Short was sympathetic but did not know what to do, and asked Morris in Paris and Ambassador Thomas Pinckney in London. The prisoner’s treatment was known to be brutal from the outset. Pressured by Madame de Staël to do something, Morris approached the Austrian chancellor, warning that the United States would feel “great concern” if Lafayette “should be in want.”

  Lafayette’s American citizenship had had great value to him earlier in the French Revolution. The American people were bound to rise in outrage over his savage treatment. On the other hand, America was an ally of France, and to the French government he was a deserter. In the end, Morris, Pinckney, and Short agreed that there was not much they could do. Morris sent his own money to a Dutch banker to make sure that the prisoner at least would not starve. The ambassadors asked Washington for instructions.22

  Adrienne appealed to everyone of influence, begging for help for her husband. On September 10, 1792, an army headed by a Jacobin official invaded Chavaniac and sacked the place. She had a governess take ten-year-old Virginie to a safe place, but the mob had already spied Anastasie, age fifteen. George, twelve, was in hiding with his tutor, Félix Frestel. Adrienne, Anastasie, and Lafayette’s aunt Charlotte were arrested and hauled to Le Puy for trial. There Adrienne defied the court and, along with Anastasie and Charlotte, was returned to Chavaniac on the grounds that there was no case against her. The Assembly declared her husband an émigré and confiscated the family property.23

  Adrienne ordered Frestel to find a way to smuggle George out of the country. As Lafayette’s son and heir, he was bound for execution if the Jacobins got their hands on him. Her husband had been moved to Wesel, near the Dutch border, where he was tossed into a small stone cell alone. The foul air, rancid food, and filth told on him, and his health declined. The prison doctor demanded that he be moved to better quarters, but the king refused—unless Lafayette revealed French military secrets. He did not.

  On Morris’ advice, Adrienne appealed directly to the king of Prussia. “I have always hoped, Sire, that Your Majesty would feel respect for virtue, irrespective of opinions, and would in this set a glorious example to all of Europe,” she told him, and begged for the “happiness of giving to Your Majesty the joy of restoring me to life” by freeing her husband. She might as well have talked to a stone. Morris lent her 100,000 livres to pay her debts and feed her family.24

  In October, Adrienne sent a tearful plea to the president of the United States. “In this abyss of grief,” she cried, she hoped for “every thing from the goodness of a people with whom he has set an example of that liberty of which he is now the victim.” She asked Washington to send an envoy to reclaim Lafayette, “in the name of the Republic of the U.S.” Once her husband was safe at Washington’s side, she could bear the pain of separation “with more courage.”25

  News of Lafayette’s captivity reached America along with that of mass executions taking place in France—the Terror, which took the head of the king early in 1793 and later that of the queen. Americans had first reacted favorably to the French Revolution, but as the bodies piled up, admiration turned to puzzlement, then to disgust. France seemed to be eating itself. Lafayette, however, remained popular, and by early 1793 he was the object of a national cult. A fashion for offering toasts to him spread across the country, and hundreds of them were published in newspapers. “The Marquis de La Fayette!” went a typical one. “May the gloom of a despot’s prison be soon exchanged for the embraces of his father Washington, in the land of freedom!” People wanted him returned to the United States. One foreigner said that “to cherish and commiserate Fayette seems to be a sort of religious duty in this country.”26

  Americans sang songs and recited poems with titles such as “Sonnet to General Lafayette” and “Fayette in Prison, or Misfortunes of the Great—A Modern Tragedy.” Wa
shington, as president, could not act officially out of his private feelings. After discussing the problem with his two chief advisers, Secretary of State Jefferson and Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton, late in January 1793 he hit upon a solution. Washington sent his own funds to an American commercial agent in Holland, telling him to spend the money to benefit Lafayette and his family. That kept the United States government out of it. He also sent a carefully worded letter to Adrienne, saying that the money was the least he owed Lafayette for his services. He “could add much,” he concluded, “but it is best perhaps that I should say little on this subject. Your goodness will supply my deficiency.”27

  Then Washington received Adrienne’s letter of the previous October. “Enclosed is a letter from poor Madam La Fayette!” he told Jefferson. “How desirable it would be, if something could be done to relieve that family from their present unhappy situation.” He, Jefferson, and Hamilton continued to debate what official position the government could take. The president suggested that Jefferson instruct Morris “to neglect no favourable opportunity of expressing informally the sentiments and wishes of this country respecting the M. de la Fayette.” He also asked him to draft a letter to Adrienne, offering “all the consolation I can with propriety give her consistent with my public character and the national policy.”28

  On March 15, 1793, the secretary of state gave the American ambassadors in Europe the official position of the United States: “The interest which the president himself, and our citizens in general take in the welfare of this gentleman, is great and sincere, and will entirely justify all prudent efforts to serve him.” Jefferson asked them to take every opportunity to work for Lafayette’s freedom, through informal means if possible. They should find out who held Lafayette and how badly they wanted to keep him. If formal measures proved necessary, the diplomats were authorized to state the American government’s “lively interest in his welfare.” His liberation should be presented as a “mark of consideration and friendship for the United States, and as a new motive for esteem and a reciprocation of kind offices towards the power to whom they shall be indebted for this act.”29