On May 25, 1788, Lafayette seized an opportunity to take a public stand against the kind of executive overreach that Montesquieu deemed anathema to liberty. Just as Lafayette was putting the finishing touches on another letter to Washington, a petition drafted by the nobility of Brittany arrived at the Rue de Bourbon. The Breton nobles, to which Lafayette belonged by virtue of his maternal inheritance from the La Rivière family, insisted on preserving their region’s historical exemption from certain directives issued by the crown and hoped that Lafayette might add his signature to their declaration. In a postscript to Washington, Lafayette reported, “I very plainly Have Given My Assent.”
The twelve noblemen who delivered the document to Versailles on July 12, 1788, promptly found themselves locked up in the Bastille. Lafayette, who was one of some three hundred signatories, suffered a lesser punishment: he was officially “disgraced” by being deprived of a military command he had been scheduled to undertake later that summer. It may well have been the perfect penalty for Lafayette—public enough to burnish his reputation as a defender of freedom but far less onerous than prison. Jefferson acknowledged as much in a letter to James Madison. By way of assuring Madison that Americans need not worry for Lafayette’s safety, Jefferson explained that the punishment meted out to Lafayette by the crown was intended “more to save appearances for their own authority than anything else; for at the very time they pretended that they had put him into disgrace, they were constantly conferring and communicating with him.”
Still, Lafayette was proud to have stood with the nobles of Brittany. “I associate myself with every opposition to arbitrary acts, present or future, which threaten or may threaten the rights of the nation,” he wrote to them. But some of Lafayette’s allies interpreted the Breton document rather differently—as a retrograde defense of noble prerogatives intended to halt the nation’s progress toward a more democratic government. The Marquis de Condorcet worried that Lafayette’s decision to align with the Breton nobles signaled a weakening of his reformist resolve. Writing to the Italian friend of America, Philip Mazzei, Condorcet jokingly suggested that Mazzei “try to exorcise the devil of aristocracy” from Lafayette’s home, advising Mazzei to “take along in your pocket a little vial of Potomac water and a sprinkler made from the wood of a Continental Army rifle and make your prayers in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Reason, which are but a single divinity in three persons.”
Condorcet’s jest pointed to a dilemma that would hound Lafayette throughout the French Revolution: while partisans on the right deemed him too radical, partisans on the left found him too conservative. Lafayette loved the United States and believed that—unlike France—the young nation was a blank slate on which an ideal government could be drawn from scratch. Summing up his view in a letter to Jefferson, Lafayette wrote that the Americans who collaborated on the Constitution enjoyed “the advantage to work a new ground, uninfluenced by all the circumstances which in Europe necessitate calculations very different.” In France, however, privileges and grievances had deep roots in centuries of history that could not be easily dismissed. Lafayette believed that any reforms would have to respect this history. The French abolitionist Jacques-Pierre Brissot discussed Lafayette’s stance with Washington during a 1788 visit to Mount Vernon. According to Brissot’s published account, Washington spoke of Lafayette with paternal concern, describing the marquis’s situation with “a joy, mixed with uneasiness.” Washington, Brissot reported, strained to reconcile apparent contradictions in Lafayette’s thinking. On one hand, Washington “recognized the ardor of Frenchmen in going to extremes.” But on the other hand, “their deep veneration for antique governments and monarchs … appeared strange to him.”
Lafayette saw no conflict. Not only did he deem it possible to create a French constitution that would meld ancient traditions with modern values, but he was one of several men who were determined to help draft an introduction to such a document. On January 12, 1789, Jefferson wrote to Madison from Paris that “everybody here is trying their hand at forming declarations of rights.” Knowing that Madison was working on “something of that kind” for the United States, Jefferson was forwarding two examples of French efforts. One was Lafayette’s. Acknowledging its hybrid nature, Jefferson explained that, “it contains the essential principles of ours accommodated as much as could be to the actual state of things here.” These “accommodations” are evident from the first sentence of an early version of Lafayette’s document, preserved in Jefferson’s papers, which modifies universal claims to equality with specific exceptions that allow for French realities: “Nature has made men equal, and distinctions among them necessitated by the monarchy are founded upon and must be measured by the general good.” The second sentence, too, reveals Lafayette’s connections to the values of the sword nobility, naming “honor” one of man’s inalienable rights, along with life, liberty, and property. A subsequent passage states that “the command of the army is in the hands of the King alone.”
Despite these differences, the fundamental tenets of Lafayette’s text had much in common with America’s founding documents. After all, they’d emerged from the same traditions and been inspired by the same templates. Condorcet pointed to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason in early 1776, as “the first declaration of rights that truly merits the name,” and Mason, in turn, had built on a strain of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European political theory that identified the citizens of a state as the only legitimate source of sovereignty. The Frenchmen drafting declarations of rights in 1789 were openly borrowing from—and, in their view, improving upon—the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States; not only did they know these documents in translation but they also had the privilege of consulting with Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris (a coauthor of the Constitution who was then in Paris on business), and other Americans. Lafayette, who considered the Federalist Morris too much of an aristocrat, collaborated mostly with Jefferson. As it happened, the men would have less time to focus on the declaration than they might have hoped, for the calendar year of 1789 held many distractions in store.
Everyone agreed that France was in crisis, but there was little consensus on how to solve the nation’s unrelenting problems. In the months leading up to the convocation of the Estates-General, improvisation reigned supreme as the crown rotated through a series of policies and personnel in the hope of finding the right combination. By the time Brienne stepped down as minister of finance, on August 25, 1788, he had exhausted all of his ideas for salvaging the nation’s solvency, leaving France in more or less the same dire straits in which he had found it. In a last-ditch effort to restore the nation’s faith in its government, the king replaced Brienne with the one financial figure in whom the people had not lost trust: Jacques Necker, the author of the 1781 Comte rendu au roi. But the appointment of the popular Necker only sharpened the battle lines at Versailles, where absolutists and reformers offered competing advice to an indecisive king.
Meanwhile in Paris, Lafayette, Condorcet, and their constitutionally minded colleagues joined together to form a faction of their own. Staunchly opposed to the “party of the Court”—the men and women in the circle of Marie Antoinette and Artois who clung tenaciously to every last shred of absolute power—Lafayette and his circle claimed the name “patriots” and welcomed anyone who shared their views. Many of these figures had come to know each other in the 1780s, when they met at the societies and social assemblies that paved the way for the political clubs that emerged during the revolution: Freemasonic lodges, Mesmer’s Society of Harmony, Brissot’s Society of the Friends of the Blacks, and gatherings hosted by forward-thinking salonnières, including Adrienne’s aunt Madame de Tessé. Like the men and women who gathered at such places, the patriots represented every estate and a wide range of viewpoints, from the “aristocratic monarchists” who sought greater powers for the nobility to the “left-wing patriots,” like Condorcet, who had already declared himself
“republican.” Lafayette, the ultimate centrist, occupied a space in the middle.
At the core of this loosely affiliated group stood Adrien Duport, a wealthy member of the robe nobility whose home in the Marais district of Paris became the primary gathering place for a core contingent that became known as the “Society of Thirty” (although its membership ultimately grew to fifty-five). By November 1788, the society was meeting there three times a week for several hours at a time. Lafayette was regularly in attendance, as were the Vicomte de Noailles and other members of his set; having watched their power at court wane since the death of Louis XV, the Noailleses viewed a change in the nation’s governing structure as a way to recapture their lost grandeur. When districts throughout France and its colonies began electing representatives to the Estates-General in March 1789, a rudimentary version of a modern-day political campaign got under way, and the Society of Thirty marshaled all of its resources to woo public support of a constitutional monarchy.
As the Estates-General drew nearer, processes were disputed as much as outcomes. Although Louis XVI had named a date in May for the convocation, he had left open the question of how exactly the body should function. On this question, tradition and equity were at odds. In 1614, when the Estates-General had last convened, every district in France had been represented by three men, each of whom had been elected by the members of a single estate: one represented the district’s clergy, another its nobility, and a third its commoners. They assembled, debated, and voted by estate, with each estate granted a single vote in the final tally. Such a system made no claims to proportional representation, since the Third Estate could always be outvoted by a coalition of its numerically smaller, but electorally more potent, social superiors. Would the same system be followed in 1789? The king decided not to decide. Each district and each estate would be free to issue its own instructions to its own deputies—some would be told to vote by estate, others by the principle of one man, one vote. Chaos was all but ensured.
Compounding the nation’s woes, all the forces of nature conspired to bring France to its knees. In the twelve months preceding the Estates-General, a summer hailstorm followed hard upon a spring drought, devastating the autumn wheat harvest. Jefferson recalled that “the slender stock of bread-stuff had for some time threatened famine,” and the cost had risen “to an enormous price.” Subsistence quantities were distributed free of charge to the neediest, while those who could pay were relegated to strict rations. So widespread was the impact that Jefferson remembered receiving “cards of invitation to dine in the richest houses” in which “the guest was notified to bring his own bread.” He also remembered the winter of 1788–89 as a season “of such severe cold, as was without example in the memory of man, or in the written records of history.” If Jefferson’s numbers are accurate, the temperature dipped as low as eighteen below zero Fahrenheit. Jefferson described a freeze so bitter that “all out-door labor was suspended, and the poor, without the wages of labor, were of course without either bread or fuel.” Bonfires, constructed by the crown, burned at every major intersection in Paris, attracting scores of “people gathered in crowds to avoid perishing with cold.” Hunger was continuing to plague the nation when some twelve hundred elected deputies began making their way to Paris and Versailles in the month of April for the convocation of the Estates-General.
With voting procedures still undecided, Jefferson was uneasy. “I am in great pain for the Marquis de Lafayette,” Jefferson wrote to Washington. “His principles, you know, are clearly with the people; but having been elected for the Noblesse of Auvergne, they have laid him under express instructions to vote for the decision by orders and not persons. This would ruin him with the Tiers Etat [Third Estate], and it is not possible he could continue long to give satisfaction to the Noblesse.” Jefferson shared similar thoughts in a letter to the marquis himself. As a foreign ambassador, Jefferson might have been crossing a line by interfering with the affairs of a host nation, yet he was genuinely concerned, both for France and for Lafayette. On May 6, Jefferson wrote to Lafayette, “As it becomes more and more possible that the Noblesse will go wrong, I become uneasy for you. Your principles are decidedly with the Tiers Etat, and your instructions against them.” Jefferson feared that Lafayette’s actions
may give an appearance of trimming between the two parties, which may lose you both. You will, in the end, go over wholly to the Tiers Etat, because it will be impossible for you to live in a constant sacrifice of your own sentiments.… But you would be received by the Tiers Etat at any future day, coldly, and without confidence. This appears to me the moment to take at once that honest and manly stand with them which your own principles dictate.
Appealing to Lafayette’s desire for popularity, Jefferson advised him that joining the Third Estate now would “win their hearts forever, be approved by the world, which marks and honors the man of the people, and will be an eternal consolation to yourself.” The nobility, he added, “will always prefer men who do their dirty work for them. You are not made for that. They will, therefore, soon drop you, and the people, in that case, will perhaps not take you up.” Finally, Jefferson put a finer point on the matter when he asked Lafayette to “suppose a scission should take place. The Priests and Nobles will secede, the nation will remain in place, and, with the King, will do its own business. If violence should be attempted where will you be?”
It was no idle question—violence had already been seen on the streets of Paris. Although the popular imagination tends to think of the storming of the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789, as the outbreak of the French Revolution, the first deadly rioting actually began on April 28 at the home of Jean-Baptiste Réveillon—a wallpaper manufacturer. Réveillon lived with his family in an uncommonly grand house near his workshops and warehouses in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine—the traditional tradesmen’s district on the eastern outskirts of Paris, where his business practices made him unpopular among his neighbors. Blithely ignoring time-honored traditions and regulations that assigned different steps of any production process to tradesmen from different guilds, Réveillon produced wallpapers of unparalleled quality by bringing every step of the process in-house. He made a fortune, and his employees—too well trained to be easily replaced—enjoyed a degree of job security that was almost unheard of, even among guild members.
When Réveillon uttered a few ill-chosen words at a meeting of his district’s electoral assembly on April 23, 1789, he unwittingly set off a powder keg. Speaking to a select group of men who, like himself, were able to afford the six-livre poll tax required to vote for representatives to the Estates-General, Réveillon complained of the rising costs of doing business, referring to a bygone time when workers were paid only fifteen sous a day. Now it cost nearly that much—fourteen and a half sous—just to buy a loaf of bread. As Réveillon’s comments spread throughout the faubourg in the following days, they were garbled into an invidious caricature. Soon, word on the street had it that Réveillon was advocating starvation wages—fifteen sous a day.
One of the most complete accounts of the so-called Réveillon riots comes from the letters of the Marquis de Ferrières, a conservative deputy representing the nobility of Saumur who dutifully wrote home nearly every night of his stay in the capital. As Ferrières reported, “Blood flowed in the Faubourg St-Antoine in Paris.” The trouble began when “five or six thousand workers … assembled at ten o’clock in the morning, armed with clubs, and descended like furies on the house of a man named Réveillon.” Once arrived, “they climbed the walls, broke down the doors, shouting, howling, that they wanted to murder Réveillon, his wife, his children. They destroyed everything they found, burned the papers, the drawings, and even the bills in the cash register, ravaged the gardens, chopped down the trees.” Réveillon and his family escaped over the garden wall, and as Ferrières put it, “The Garde Française fired several rounds, but this only stirred up the mob even more. They climbed up onto houses and threw stones at the troops. The
Garde Française advanced with cannons killing many. The rioting lasted until four in the morning and there were as many as seven or eight hundred dead.” Ferrières’s numbers were exaggerated and his choice of words unsympathetic, but his story is essentially correct. The matter ended badly for a handful of rioters, who were summarily executed on April 29, and for some thirty other participants, who were arrested in the days that followed. The riots were an unmistakable warning of more violence to come.
Lafayette left no record of his response to the unrest in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, but he was surely troubled by the disorder. In addition to the cost in human lives and personal property, popular uprisings had the potential to derail the nation from the reformed future that Lafayette envisioned. He remained fully committed to a course of action that he termed “moderation,” but he had begun to understand the political and pragmatic difficulties that such a path entailed. Having spent most of March in the Auvergne campaigning for election to the Estates-General in the face of well-organized opposition from the party of Artois and Marie Antoinette, Lafayette found himself playing a new and unfamiliar part that required cobbling together fragile coalitions and agreeing to terms that, under other circumstances, he might well have repudiated. Although Lafayette emerged victorious, he was not entirely happy with the deals he cut. He regretted the hodgepodge of instructions he accepted, referring to them, in a letter to his friend and ally the Auvergnat Charles César de Fay de La Tour-Maubourg, as “a composite of great principles and petty details, of popular ideas and feudal ideas.” Summing up the intractable problem at the heart of a document that had one foot in the past and one in the future, Lafayette lamented that “there are two hundred years between one provision and another.” The position of a moderate was a delicate one, and the slightest disturbance might destroy it completely.
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