The Marquis

by Laura Auricchio

  INTRODUCTION

  On a rainy April afternoon in 2009, I found myself scrambling to keep up with a French curator who was striding purposefully across a cobblestoned courtyard at the Château de Versailles. Coming to a sudden stop at an unmarked door, he rifled through a ring of oversized keys, turned the latch, and switched on a light to reveal a small, sparsely furnished room coated with a fine film of dust. This was clearly not one of the château’s most popular locations, but it contained the treasure I had come to see: a white marble bust of Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834). Carved in 1790 by the renowned sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, the bust portrays Lafayette as an officer and a gentleman: his uniform signals his cherished role as commander of the French National Guard, his powdered coiffure is expertly arranged, and his firm jaw and oblique gaze suggest absorption in matters of grave importance.

  As I admired this noble countenance of stone, a wry smile crept across the curator’s face. Suddenly, the silence was broken. “Why,” asked the curator, “should we have a bust of Lafayette?”

  The question surprised me. After all, I said, Lafayette is the French hero of the American Revolution—the Hero of Two Worlds, the Apostle of Liberty. I had learned about him in school and knew that he was worthy of admiration. Lafayette was just nineteen years old and one of the richest men in France when he relinquished the comforts of his station to serve the cause of freedom half a world away. “The Marquis,” as Americans called him, led our troops into battle, froze with them at Valley Forge, and clothed and fed them at his own expense. News of Lafayette’s daring adventures thrilled all of France, and that excitement encouraged the French king, Louis XVI—an absolute monarch—to support a revolution. Knowing that Lafayette helped us win independence, generations of Americans have expressed our nation’s gratitude by naming countless towns, counties, streets, parks, and schools in his honor. Lafayette is so esteemed in the United States that his statue stands across from the White House, in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square. A bust is just one more token of well-deserved appreciation.

  Jean-Antoine Houdon. Lafayette in the Uniform of the National Guard. 1790. Marble. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. (illustration credit itr.1)

  After listening politely, the curator shook his head and pointed to a plaque installed a few feet away. It was a memorial commemorating the deaths of thousands of French soldiers and sailors who, sent across the Atlantic by their king, had lost their lives fighting for American freedom. He repeated the question, a bit louder this time: “Why should we have a bust of Lafayette?” These men were killed in the American Revolution, he said, but they have no statues. Louis XVI bankrupted France for the cause of American liberty and received his thanks from the guillotine. Besides, it was not Lafayette but the Comte de Rochambeau who led the French forces in America. How and why did we come to revere—of all the sons of France who came to America’s aid—the Marquis de Lafayette?

  I began to see his point. During the winter of 1776, Lafayette’s interest in the American cause was not unique. In fact, it could hardly be called unusual. The fashionable salons of Paris were abuzz that season with talk of “les insurgents,” as the envoys sent by Congress were fondly known, and a card game called “Le Boston” was sweeping through high society. The best French homes feted George Washington in absentia, and Benjamin Franklin delighted all of Paris, where he cut a conspicuous figure in a marten-fur cap—an accessory that toyed with French perceptions of rustic Americans.

  If pleasure-loving Parisians enjoyed the novelty of these New World republicans, many military men saw the Americans’ cause as an opportunity for revenge. The army had been nursing its wounds since 1763, when the French and Indian War (known in France as the Seven Years’ War) had ended with France ceding its Canadian colonies to Great Britain. By helping to wrest thirteen valuable colonies from British control, a humiliated French officers’ corps hoped to redeem itself. So pervasive was enthusiasm for the American fight that the economist and author André Morellet—an astute social observer who often accompanied Franklin on his rounds—quipped in 1777 that “there is more support for American independence in Paris than in the entire province of New York.”

  Yet there was something uncommon about Lafayette’s commitment to America. His devotion was deeper than his countrymen’s, his drive more intense. While other Frenchmen sailed for the New World seeking riches or retribution, Lafayette sought nothing short of a new life. Earnest, enthusiastic—as optimistic as Voltaire’s naïf Candide—Lafayette was out of place in the glittering Parisian world of wit and cynicism that the urbane Franklin so effortlessly mastered.

  Lafayette had married into one of the best-connected families of the French court, but he hailed from the Auvergne region of south-central France, and the uncontrived manners of that rural area marked him as a stranger in the refined circles of his in-laws. At Versailles, even Lafayette’s rugged appearance counted against him. The young marquis was large for his time: five feet, nine inches tall and endowed with a broad frame that one contemporary described as “decidedly inclined to embonpoint.” In other words, he tended to be stout. As Lafayette grew older, his bold features would be called distinguished, but as a youth he was not widely perceived as handsome. He had a long, oval face with a prominent aquiline nose, gray-blue eyes that peered out from a pale complexion, and a shock of unfashionably red hair atop a high, sloping forehead. Friends and admirers saw Lafayette’s open and frank expression as a window to his soul, but this transparent credulity placed him at a disadvantage in the dissimulating games of intrigue that passed for sociability at Versailles.

  Lafayette felt more comfortable in the saddle than perched on a gilded stool, and he remained uneasy in a society that cultivated an ideal of disaffected nonchalance; feigned detachment was foreign to his character. Reared on tales of his ancestors’ military exploits, Lafayette yearned to prove himself worthy of such a legacy. Enthusiasm may have been unfashionable, but Lafayette made no attempt to hide his zeal. The “love of glory,” Lafayette recalled in his memoirs, inspired him to excel at school, where he vied for academic prizes bestowed in public ceremonies. The urge to escape “a life without glory,” he explained to his wife in 1777, compelled him to sail for America. “Glory,” he assured George Washington in 1778, was his only ambition. To be clear, the glory Lafayette sought was quite divorced from notions of splendor. In 1762, a French dictionary defined “glory” as a “reputation” garnered through “virtue, merit, great qualities, good actions and beautiful works”; synonyms included “honor, esteem, praise.” Once earned, glory was its own reward. Many men of Lafayette’s generation hoped for glory, but Lafayette was single-mindedly devoted to its pursuit.

  In America, Lafayette found glory and more. Here, for the first time since leaving the Auvergne, he was surrounded by people who saw his sincerity as a virtue, not a flaw. The public welcomed him immediately—Lafayette was the only marquis in the American army, and his title all but guaranteed his renown. The same nation that rejected Old World traditions of hereditary privilege rejoiced to find a highborn nobleman on its side, as if his interest in the American cause proved its universal appeal. And if Lafayette’s rank opened doors, his personality won hearts. As news of Lafayette’s unaffected charm made its way through the colonies, even the most hardened anti-French feelings began to dissolve. Then as now, Americans prided themselves on plain dealing, and those who met Lafayette were pleasantly surprised to discover that this exceptional Frenchman shared their sensibility.

  Surely Lafayette deserves to be remembered. Why, then, had the French curator seemed perplexed by the bust?

  Part of the answer is that Lafayette succeeded so completely in cultivating an American identity that, even in France, he remains a distinctly American hero. In 1781, after the British surrendered to allied forces at Yorktown, most of the French officers in America returned to France and to the pursuits they had left behind. But Lafayette, who had left his homeland as an outcast, ha
d no career to reprise. Serving as America’s foremost French advocate became his primary occupation, and the spirit of the new nation assumed a position at the very core of his being. Lafayette, who called Washington his adoptive father, turned his Left Bank town house into a home away from home for visiting Americans. The Adamses, the Jeffersons, and the ubiquitous Franklin were frequent guests at Monday suppers, where English was the language of choice and where Lafayette’s children—including his son, named George Washington, and a daughter known as Virginie—sang songs in English. Mementos of the United States abounded: a gold-engraved copy of the Declaration of Independence hung on a wall of honor, plants from the New World decorated the terrace, and books on American history filled the shelves. For a time, a young man of Iroquois descent lived with Lafayette’s family as “a favourite Servant.” As the explorer John Ledyard wrote of Lafayette in 1787, “he has planted a tree in America, and sits under its shade at Versailles.”

  But the curator may not have been objecting to Lafayette’s Americanization; more likely he was hinting at a darker chapter of Lafayette’s story. Although Lafayette was an indefatigable champion of righteous causes, he did not always meet with success. During the French Revolution, he failed spectacularly. In America, we remember his triumphs; in France, few outside of his native Auvergne see him as a hero. So little does France love Lafayette that the monumental Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, published by a leading team of French historians in 1988, states flatly that “the man has drawn few eulogies.”

  At the outset of the French Revolution, in 1789, Lafayette’s moment of glory seemed to be at hand. On July 15, the morning after the storming of the Bastille prison, popular acclaim placed Lafayette at the helm of the newly established National Guard. The following month, Lafayette became the first person to submit a proposal for a “Declaration of the Rights of Man”—a set of principles that would serve as the foundation of a new constitution—to France’s newly formed legislature. On July 14, 1790, Paris commemorated the first anniversary of the Bastille’s fall with a grand public festival featuring Lafayette as its undisputed star. Newspapers and broadsides compared Lafayette to Washington, and prints depicted him as a vanquisher of despotism, wielding a sword of justice.

  The French Nation Helped by Mr de la Fayette Stops the Despotism and Abuses of the Feudal King Who Oppresses His People. 1791. (illustration credit itr.2)

  Yet Lafayette’s French triumphs were troubled from the start. As commander of the National Guard, Lafayette was charged with the impossible task of keeping the peace in a city racked by violence. Time and again Lafayette looked on helplessly as brutal justice was meted out in the streets, and he grew to loathe the politicians who, in his view, incited the crowds to further their own interests. Although he had assisted at the birth of the United States, Lafayette rejected the notion that France could sustain an American-style republic. He believed that France’s monarchical traditions were too ancient and revered to be cast aside, and he deemed the French people too uneducated and uninterested, perhaps even temperamentally unsuited, to shoulder the burden of self-governance. Lafayette never embraced radical politics, and he made enemies of those who did. As he saw it, a constitutional monarchy was the only form of government that could guarantee liberty in France, and he defended this view to the end. In the revolution’s early days, many forward-thinking men and women shared the same hope. But as the nation grew increasingly polarized, most of his allies abandoned the dream, while Lafayette stood fast on a middle ground that was rapidly eroding.

  Lafayette was proud to call himself a moderate in an era of extremes. Explaining his philosophy later in life, he insisted that “true moderation consists, not as many people seem to think, in always seeking the middle between any two points … but in trying to recognize the point of truth and holding to it.” Rarely has a man held to moderate principles with such tenacity. By 1791, partisans on both the left and the right (these political terms emerged precisely during this period) came to see him as a traitor to their respective causes. Supporters of the monarchy denounced him as a rabble-rouser. Centrist rivals falsely accused him of carrying on an affair with the despised queen Marie Antoinette—and commissioned a memorable series of pornographic pamphlets and prints to drive the point home. Republicans lambasted him for perceived attacks on freedom of the press. As circumstances grew ever more desperate, Lafayette made increasingly grievous mistakes. One by one, the crown, the people, and, finally, the army turned against him. Had he not fled the country in 1792, Lafayette would surely have been executed. Still he clung to his principles. By the end, they were very nearly all he had left.

  Lafayette and Marie Antoinette. c. 1790. (illustration credit itr.3)

  Lafayette was only thirty-four years old when he went into exile, and although he lived to be seventy-six and remained active in French politics until his final days, he never stopped thinking, writing, and talking about the historic events of his young adulthood. Those events defined his life, and for that reason, they form the core of this book. Writing in 1815 to the author Benjamin Constant—a friend and political ally—Lafayette took a moment to reflect on a remarkable lifetime that had been filled with bold dreams, tremendous achievements, and tragic failures. “I have been reproached all my life,” he wrote, “for giving in too much to my hopeful disposition; I will respond that it is the only way to do something out of the ordinary. One would, indeed, never try anything extraordinary if one despaired of success.”

  Why should we have a bust of Lafayette? Not because he was infallible or superhuman or endowed with gifts that the rest of us lack. We should have a bust of Lafayette precisely because he was all too human. He lived in treacherous times and made imperfect choices. He failed at more ventures than most of us will ever attempt and succeeded at efforts that stymied countless men, but he never abandoned the belief that he could change the world, and he never despaired of success. Of all his accomplishments, these might be the most extraordinary.

  PART ONE

  FROM PROVINCE TO PARIS

  CHAPTER 1

  FAMILY PRIDE

  Lafayette was born on September 6, 1757, at the Château de Chavaniac—an eighteen-room fortress of a home located some three hundred miles south of Paris. Built of dark, rough-hewn stones and capped with terra-cotta roof tiles, Chavaniac projects like a rocky outcropping from the volcanic hills and jagged gorges that cut through the landscape of the Auvergne. Although the château had been ravaged by fire in 1701 and reconstructed in the decades before Lafayette’s birth, the rebuilding made no concessions to the classical elegance that had begun altering the face of Paris in the 1500s. Instead, Chavaniac retained the squat, utilitarian character of the house erected on the site in the Middle Ages. In architecture, as in most things, change came slowly to this part of France.

  Lafayette’s birthplace. Château de Chavaniac in the Auvergne region of France, as depicted by Clara Greenleaf Perry, c. 1920. Lithograph. Collection of the Boston Athenaeum. (illustration credit 1.1)

  Today, the Auvergne beckons travelers seeking unspoiled nature and hearty fare. Visitors lodge in centuries-old stone shelters, hike craggy terrain, and dine on pungent cheeses, rich sausages, and green lentils deemed among the best in the world. But in Lafayette’s time, few outsiders appreciated the region’s untamed charm. Passing through the area in 1789, the English agronomist Arthur Young (who found little to admire in France as a whole) reserved special disdain for the town of Clermont-Ferrand, the capital of the Auvergne. As Young described it,

  Clermont … forms one of the worst built, dirtiest, and most stinking places I have met with. There are many streets that can, for blackness, dirt and ill scents, only be represented by narrow channels cut in a night dunghill. The contention of nauseous savours, with which the air is impregnated, when brisk mountain gales do not ventilate these excrementitious lanes, made me envy the nerves of the good people, who, for what I know, may be happy in them.

  Dearly though Lafayett
e may have loved the Auvergne, it was not a fashionable place to call home.

  By the standards of the high nobility, Lafayette’s ancestry was equally disserviceable. Although the senior branch of the family could trace its roots to the turn of the millennium and had produced dignitaries including Madame de La Fayette, the acclaimed author of the classic early novel La Princesse de Clèves (1678), Lafayette himself descended from the junior branch—a less distinguished lot. As Lafayette put it, his direct ancestors had “left the province only to make war and played no role at all at court.” Making matters worse, several generations of his forefathers had been on the losing end of primogeniture—the custom of passing all of a man’s resources to his eldest son. The capital that had trickled down through Lafayette’s father’s family was relatively slight, and a large portion of it had been amassed through a tradition of marrying well. Although Lafayette exaggerated his misfortune by writing in his memoirs that he had been “born poor,” he had certainly been born far less rich than he would eventually become. If not for a series of almost freakishly premature deaths, he might have inherited nothing at all.

  Jacques-Roch du Motier—the older brother of Lafayette’s father, Roch-Gilbert—was the first of his generation to die, expiring at the age of eighteen in 1734 when he was shot in the back at close range by an Austrian prisoner in Italy during the War of the Polish Succession. Perhaps the nearly preternatural credulity that marked Lafayette’s character was a trait common to the family as a whole: Jacques-Roch had placed the Austrian behind him on a saddle without confiscating the captive’s pistol. Just a few years later, Jacques-Roch’s father, Édouard, met his end through hapless misadventure after a brief career at the Château de Versailles. According to the diaries of the Duc de Luynes, a consummate courtier and an invaluable recorder of palace life under King Louis XV, Édouard was a newly titled marquis working his way up the ranks in the King’s Bodyguard—and, evidently, making a poor impression; Luynes describes him as “a man of high birth, or so they say.” On October 8, 1736, Édouard was granted the honor of riding on horseback beside the monarch’s carriage during the return from the hunt, a ritualized ceremony that occurred several times a week and usually went off without a hitch. But after bagging their quarry at the hunting grounds of Les Alluets-le-Roi, some ten miles northwest of Versailles, the royal party was nearing the ironwork gate near the Trianon pavilion, on the edge of the palace gardens, when Édouard’s mount took a spill that brought down horse and rider. As Luynes put it, Édouard “broke his head” and was carried, unconscious, to the château, where, upon awakening, he lingered in agony to await the inevitable; about a year after the fall, Louis XV still felt obliged to ask a surgeon if the poor man’s suffering could be eased, but it was to no avail.