Adopted Son

by David A Clary

  As long as Napoleon remained triumphant, Lafayette kept his head down. His aunt Charlotte died at the age of eighty-two in 1811, and he inherited Chavaniac and other properties from her, becoming even richer. That was followed by the bloodbath between French troops and the guérilleros (guerilla fighters) and their British allies in Spain, and then by Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow in 1812. Resistance to French domination erupted all over Europe. The empire was shrinking, but Napoleon still believed his victory was inevitable. “The whole world has become readjusted,” he claimed, “with the single exception of Lafayette. He has not retreated an inch. He may seem quiet and peaceful enough, but mark my words, he is quite capable of starting all over again.”13

  In 1814, as the allies closed in on Paris, Lafayette was there, and he broke into tears when the enemy invaded the city. Napoleon’s rump legislature opened secret negotiations, and the agile Talleyrand declared him deposed as emperor, proclaiming the restoration of the monarchy. The boy-king Louis XVII had disappeared during the Terror, but his uncle the comte de Provence survived in England. Hideously fat and obnoxious, he entered Paris as Louis XVIII on the heels of the allied armies. Napoleon retreated to Fontainebleu, where he abdicated on April 6, going to exile on Elba, an island off the southern coast.

  Lafayette had only one satisfaction—the new Louis would be a constitutional monarch, something he had aimed at since 1789. But the Constitutional Charter granted the king’s “divine right” to be “supreme head of state.” There were a few concessions to liberal sentiments, but essentially absolutism had been restored. Europe was at peace, but in France the usual range of factions were at each other’s throats. They were joined by émigrés who returned to demand back their lands, which were in the hands of peasants. The former marquis attended the king’s first audience, then left for La Grange.

  Lafayette told Jefferson that he had been glad to see Napoleon head off to Elba, but he was sympathetic to the deposed emperor because they shared a love for military glory. Otherwise, the man was a despot, and Lafayette wished he had been overthrown by popular revolt instead of foreign armies. He wanted no part of the Bourbon Restoration. Jefferson blamed all the bad news on those who had destroyed the limited monarchy Lafayette had tried to establish in 1789. They had pressed for self-government too fast, he said, and ended up with “the unprincipled and bloody tyranny of Robespierre, and the equally unprincipled and manic tyranny of Bonaparte.” The American had changed his outlook. Liberty, he said, was a mixed blessing for people not ready for it, and France would not be ready for another generation.14

  The Bourbon government refused to pay Bonaparte his pension and confiscated his properties. Without income, he could not maintain his guard on Elba. Rumors of plots to assassinate him were in the air. Lafayette decided that the Bourbons were hoping to drive the former emperor into taking some desperate action that would destroy him. They got their wish.

  On March 1, 1815, Napoleon landed at Cannes and began a triumphal march to Paris, his army reassembling in his wake. Louis XVIII fled to the nearest British army. Thus began the Hundred Days, the emperor’s second reign. Early in May, he took a page from Lafayette’s book, staging a big pageant on the Champ de Mars, where he swore to uphold the Constitutional Charter. In balloting held to implement that document, Lafayette was elected to the Chamber of Deputies from Brie, and his son, George, from Auvergne.

  The British and Prussian armies had assembled in Belgium, preparing to march on Paris, and on June 12, 1815, Napoleon trooped out to meet them. Two days after the crows settled on the corpses of his soldiers at Waterloo, on the twentieth he was back in the city, where his whole government had turned against him. Lafayette, backed by Bonaparte’s former chief of police, Joseph Fouché, demanded that he step down. He was too exhausted to fight back, and abdicated on the twenty-second, naming his son Emperor Napoleon II. Lafayette tried to negotiate passage to America for the outgoing emperor, but Fouché sabotaged the talks behind his back. Fouché wanted a permanent end to the Bonaparte problem as much as the British did.

  Napoleon ended up on St. Helena, a cold, windswept rock in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821. In his last will and testament, he declared that the two allied invasions of France in 1814 and 1815 had been “due to the treason” of Lafayette, Talleyrand, and others. He never knew that it was his old friend Fouché who had engineered his downfall, using Lafayette as a front. Neither did Lafayette.15

  The Chamber of Deputies named Napoleon II as emperor, appointed a five-man Directory to run the country, and sent Lafayette at the head of a delegation to stop the allied armies marching on Paris. He failed. The conquerors dictated a punitive peace and left behind an army of occupation, which remained until 1818. The Bourbons, back in the saddle, began the White Terror, slaughtering Jacobins, Bonapartistes, and Liberals until the occupying armies put a stop to it. Lafayette was secure in his properties because he had friends among the British.

  In 1816 Lafayette performed another service for the United States, which was looking for a foreign expert to head up the army’s Corps of Engineers. President Madison asked Lafayette for a recommendation, and he proposed General Simon Bernard. He had been a military engineer under Napoleon and kept his commission during the first Restoration. He served as an aide to Napoleon during the Hundred Days, so the king fired him. On Lafayette’s recommendation he was allowed to emigrate to America, where he started the republic’s “Third System” of coastal fortifications, in the process giving birth to pork-barrel politics (the trading of public-works appropriations in Congress).16

  Lafayette became a leader of the “liberal” or “independent” wing of the Chamber of Deputies. In 1817 he and others founded a semisecret society—those were popping up again, political clubs drawn from Masonic lodges—to pay fines for liberal journalists. It became the Liberal Party. He agitated for American ideas such as a free press, individual liberties, and the right of all taxpayers to vote—a direct challenge to Bourbon repression. The Lafayette house in Paris became a meeting place for revolutionaries, and in 1820 he organized a mass march through the streets to protest the government’s harsh measures. That earned him a formal condemnation, but he was too popular to put down. He never wavered in his republican principles. As Madame de Staël had said, “Since the departure of M. de la Fayette for America 40 years ago, it is impossible to cite either an action or a word from him which has not been [pointed] in the same direction.” He remained stubborn and afraid of no one.17

  As the government became more repressive, Lafayette became more outspoken. He loved the applause that followed his speeches, preaching his religion of popular sovereignty and constitutional government. If that took a revolution to bring about, he was all for it. It had worked for his adoptive father. In the early 1820s he helped organize the Charbonniers, a French version of the Carbonari (charcoal makers), nationalist plotters in Italy. They were accused of conspiring to overthrow King Louis, so the secret police arrested thousands and shut down the press. Fearing to arrest Lafayette, it rigged the election of 1823, and he lost his seat in the Chamber of Deputies. Once again he had failed to import American liberty to his homeland.18

  Lafayette had meanwhile fallen into a strange, intense relationship with Fanny Wright, a Scots-born American writer, promoter of republican virtues, and enemy of slavery. She met him in 1821, when she was twenty-six years old, and latched on to him, calling herself his adopted daughter and asking him to adopt her legally. His real daughters put a stop to that. They were together whenever she was in France, and during his visit to America in 1824 she attached herself to him again. He helped finance her project for a freed-slave plantation in western Tennessee, similar to his old dream. It failed in 1828, and she returned to France, partly separated herself from him, and married another Frenchman. Lafayette gave the bride away.19

  When the fiftieth anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence approached, Congress and President Monroe invited Lafayette to visit th
e United States as “the Nation’s Guest.” He was happy to go, and took George and some servants with him. The Bourbon government got the idea that it was all part of a plot to conquer the French Caribbean colonies and install Lafayette as governor, so troops broke up crowds who cheered him on his way to Le Havre.

  Once Lafayette reached America in August 1824, what was planned as a short visit to major cities turned into a thirteen-month, 6,000-mile procession through all the states. The hysterical receptions were much alike. He entered a town escorted by militia, through victory arches decorated with boughs and bunting; endured speeches by local dignitaries and greetings from Revolutionary veterans and the Society of the Cincinnati; received poems and flowers from children; and made the rounds of dinners, Masonic banquets, schools, and anybody else who wanted to hear him. The nation went insane for the “last major general of the Revolution.”

  He left behind hundreds of places named Lafayette, Fayette, or La Grange. He also sparked a new interest in the Revolution, inspiring worshipful biographies of the struggle’s leaders. He became a unifying, non-partisan influence during the fierce election struggle between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, both of whom he met.20

  Lafayette called at the White House when Monroe was still president, and again after Adams took over. Besides the last major general, only Jefferson and Adams remained of the major leaders of the Revolution. He found Jefferson “feeble and much aged,” but his mind was still sharp. A witness at Monticello called them two ghosts from the great past, materializing one last time to inspire the new generation. After he spent an afternoon with Adams, according to family tradition the old man said when he left, “That was not the Lafayette I knew.” Outside the door, Lafayette said, “That was not the John Adams I knew.”

  Time had caught up with all of them. The skinny boy who had become Washington’s adopted son—a relationship the speeches mentioned routinely—had gained weight, struggled to walk with his cane, and carried a lumpy body topped by a pudding face crowned by the toupee. When he left the cornerstone ceremony for the Bunker Hill Monument to fill a bag with the battlefield’s dirt for his own grave, somebody had to help him.21

  The Nation’s Guest received a grand reception when he visited Yorktown Battlefield, where he reviewed troops from Fort Monroe, who had been marched to Yorktown and encamped for the occasion. When that was over, the soldiers force-marched to beat him to Hampton Roads, where he reviewed them again in Bernard’s great fortification. Lafayette pronounced himself “delighted” at the men’s appearance in both places. He did not recognize that they were the same troops.22

  The distinguished visitor also reviewed militia during his tour, what there was of it. It had never amounted to much in wartime, and in peace had nearly disappeared. In its place were fancy clubs of high-society dandies in the cities, who dressed themselves up in glorious uniforms to host balls and consume oceans of punches that they named for their units. When Lafayette visited the Silk-Stocking Regiment in New York, it renamed itself the 7th New York Regiment of National Guards, honoring his Paris National Guard of 1789. New York volunteer regiments in the Civil War adopted the term, and it became the fashion during efforts to revive militias in the 1870s. Legislation reorganizing the country’s defense made it official in 1903.23

  Lafayette left America in September 1825. When he got home, he took up where he had left off, spreading the lesson he had learned from Washington—that national independence opened the way for all other human rights. He involved himself in virtually every revolutionary and independence movement from the 1770s through the 1830s. Besides the United States and France, they included Spain, Latin America, and Greece during the 1820s and France (again), Belgium, and Poland in the 1830s. He also intervened for national movements in Ireland, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. He fought the slave trade and became the world’s foremost abolitionist. Always he argued that natural rights applied to all humans, and they included national self-determination.24

  Lafayette after his tour of America, by Thomas Sully, from life, 1825–26. The artist was flattering, because most other portrayals by this time show Lafayette to be carrying a lumpy body topped by a pudding face, crowned with the toupee he had worn since the 1780s. Sully did justice to the elegant clothing—Lafayette was a lifelong clotheshorse. (INDEPENDENCE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

  Lafayette’s own country remained his greatest frustration. Louis XVIII had died while Lafayette was in America, and was succeeded by Charles X, a vengeful tyrant. Charles cracked down on all civil liberties but met resistance—the courts refused to enforce his decrees suppressing the press. As the next years passed, he viewed Lafayette as the cause of all his troubles, but he was afraid to attack him directly. When his enemy was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1827, he dissolved it and rigged new elections, but Lafayette returned anyway. He tried further repression, banning all forms of entertainment, even the opera, if they had “revolutionary” themes. Gioacchino Rossini’s opera William Tell, about a legendary Swiss rebel, closed before it opened.

  Lafayette became increasingly outspoken, his speeches against despotism circulating despite the repression. He toured the country early in 1830 to address a series of Masonic banquets. Attendance was supposed to be limited to members of the lodges, but they attracted huge crowds of liberal opponents of the government, who heard Lafayette condemn Charles and everything he stood for. The king decided that Lafayette had engineered it all, because the same cities had refused to turn out for a recent tour by the dauphin.25

  When the Chamber of Deputies assembled that winter, Charles opened it with a rebuke of the Liberals, in particular Lafayette. In return, the Chamber rebuked the king, and he dissolved it again. A new one assembled in July 1830, and the pattern repeated itself. This time the whole of Paris rose in outrage, screaming, “To the barricades!” Charles sent troops to put down the rebellion, but they were beaten back from the barricaded streets during the “Three Glorious Days of the Revolution.” Lafayette organized a Commission to act as government and browbeat the Deputies into supporting the revolutionaries in the streets. The “man of the hour,” as he was called—along with “the distinguished relic of 1789”—pulled the Bourbon flag down from the Hôtel de Ville and hoisted the Tricolor. The National Guard miraculously reassembled itself, and the Commission made him its commander. Putting on his old Guard uniform, he told Charles, “The Bourbons are finished!”

  On July 29, 1830, the Commission, backed by the crowds, offered to make Lafayette dictator of the country, but he turned that down. Instead, he pushed the Deputies to write a republican constitution, but ran into resistance from conservatives. They wanted Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans, who had hereditary claims to the throne, to be king. Lafayette had favored a constitutional monarchy before, so he did again. He produced a draft Constitution, modeled on the American one, and grandly greeted the new “citizen king” as “the king we need.” His Liberal friends were outraged, but he thought he had done the best he could for constitutional government. Charles abdicated, the Chamber of Deputies elected Louis-Philippe the new monarch, and work started to complete the new Constitutional Charter.

  Once again, Lafayette had had a chance to take bold action and backed off. True to his principles, he would not become dictator, even by popular demand. If he led a republican movement with the disorganized Liberals, he would start a civil war and possibly invite foreign intervention. He had done what he thought Washington would have done.26

  And it failed, because the “citizen king” soon showed his colors. He made Lafayette the commander of the National Guard of the Realm, a symbolic role but one that justified a trip to the tailors for a custom uniform. Louis-Philippe took the post away from him, however, when Lafayette spoke up in the Chamber calling for more liberal reforms, including the abolition of slavery. He also turned the body into a forum for revolutions and independence movements in other countries, and talked the Deputies into voting in favor of them. That brought outraged demands f
rom other monarchs to put a lid on the troublemaker. Disowned by the king in the spring of 1831, Lafayette returned to La Grange. He was back in the Chamber in the fall but could not stop suppression of labor strikes and other authoritarian measures.

  A cholera epidemic hit the country in 1832, and Louis-Philippe used it as an excuse to make himself his own prime minister and minister of the interior (chief of police). When a popular Liberal orator died of cholera, his funeral attracted thousands of mourners, who heard Lafayette give the main speech, condemning the oppression. The crowd roared, “To arms! To the barricades!” Within hours the rebels had taken control of central Paris, but a heavy rainstorm and an attack by police troops soon put an end to the uprising. The public duel between Lafayette and the equally stubborn king continued.27

  Another woman had entered Lafayette’s life in 1831. She was Christine Belgiojoso, twenty-two years old when he met her, a raven-haired beauty from Italy, with a startling alabaster complexion and great dark eyes. She was an outspoken revolutionary who had fled her native land. It was widely assumed that they were lovers. Like Fanny Wright, she called Lafayette her father, and when they were at La Grange his daughters made no secret of their disapproval. He doted on her, however. He climbed the five flights of stairs to her apartment every day after he left the Chamber of Deputies, and cooked the meals they ate together. It was his last female companionship outside his family.28

  Early in 1834, at the age of seventy-six, the onetime boy general of the American Revolution was tired, his bones aching. He made his last speech to the Chamber on January 3, rebuking his country for not realizing the promise of American republicanism. It was a cold, nasty winter, and in February he collapsed at a funeral. He recovered in a few weeks, but another soaking in May put him to bed for the last time. His family assembled in the Paris house while crowds kept a vigil outside, day and night.