Images, too, reinforced the helplessness of the victims and the brutality of the National Guard. The article in Révolutions de Paris was accompanied by a print depicting the Champ de Mars with half a dozen bodies lying on the field. At the right, infantrymen break ranks to fire at close range on a crowd of unarmed people who are trying to run away, while, in the background, a guardsman on horseback chases down a man on foot. Casting the scene as a moment of sacrilege, the caption reads “Men, Women, and Children were massacred on the altar of the nation on the Field of the Federation.” Other prints attacked Lafayette explicitly. One image, for instance, shows a microcephalic Lafayette seated atop his enormous white steed with a gang of turkeys leashed to its tail. Referring to the people gathered around the altar in the distance, Lafayette asks his feathered army whether “it will take courage to kill them.”
In the two months that followed, Lafayette reached a rapprochement with the only political faction that was still willing to support him: the Feuillants, a group that contained about seventy of the National Assembly’s last remaining moderates. In the wake of the Champ de Mars debacle, these men, with the Triumvirate at their center, broke with the Jacobins to form the short-lived club that retained a commitment to constitutional monarchy. Having worked at cross-purposes for more than a year, Lafayette understood that his only hope of political survival lay in collaborating with Alexandre and Théodore de Lameth, Duport, and Barnave toward remodeling the constitution in light of recent developments. In the end, the revised constitution accepted by Louis XVI on September 13, 1791, carried some of the group’s marks, but the constitutional monarchy was already in its death throes; debating its details amounted to little more than selecting a coffin.
Unfortunate Day of July 17, 1791. (illustration credit 17.3)
Bouillé’s memoirs describe a mass exodus in the second half of 1791, in which “the roads of France were covered with men, women and children, afraid of being buried under the ruins of the crumbling monarchy.” Bouillé had in mind especially the aristocratic émigrés—well-heeled supporters of the monarchy who started trickling out of France in 1789 and began pouring across the borders after the flight to Varennes. Austria, Germany, Belgium, Italy, England, and the United States were popular destinations for these men and women, who counted among their number more than half of all the officers in the French army, some six thousand men, mostly from the nobility. But another group was also taking to the highways that autumn: the newly unencumbered deputies to the National Assembly, who had voted to dissolve their body as of September 30, 1791, giving way to a new crop of representatives that would be known collectively as the Legislative Assembly. Having thus relinquished the reins of power, hundreds of former deputies spent the month of October making their way out of the capital to resume their private lives abroad or in distant provinces.
The Day of July 17, 1791. (illustration credit 17.4)
Lafayette, too, was on the road. On Saturday, October 8, he wrote a formal letter of good-bye to the National Guard, tendered his resignation to the municipality, and began the long journey back to Chavaniac. His appointment as commander of the National Guard had come to an end with the conclusion of the outgoing assembly, and he suggested in his farewell letter that his work had been accomplished. As Lafayette put it, “The constitution has been completed … and, after having been sworn to by all the citizens, in every corner of the empire, it has just been legally adopted by the entire people and solemnly recognized by the first legislative assembly of its representatives.” Yet he understood that the nation’s hard-won freedoms still rested on a precarious base, and he warned the National Guard against believing “that every sort of despotism has been destroyed, and that liberty … has been sufficiently established.” Echoing a rallying cry he had heard on the other side of the ocean, he implored his men to “live free or die.” The men of the National Guard demonstrated their gratitude by voting to present their departing commander with an épée forged from the iron bars of the Bastille.
Although Lafayette was writing to the men who served under him, his letter also addressed generations yet to come. The revolution-weary marquis was painfully aware that his reputation had been damaged: in the minds of a broad swath of the Parisian population, the massacre at the Champ de Mars had destroyed his credibility as the people’s protector and the nation’s liberator. Seeing no way to redeem his authority in Paris, he was returning to the Auvergne, but hoping to salvage his name for posterity, he summarized his conduct and motives. Lafayette reminded readers that even amid “hostile plots, ambitious intrigues, and licentious unrest,” the National Guard had remained firm in its devotion to liberty and love of the nation. And while he lamented that “without doubt, we ourselves made mistakes needing repair,” he alluded to his reputation as a hero of two worlds, writing that “liberty and equality, once established in both hemispheres, will never turn back.”
Heading south from Paris, Lafayette traveled more than four hundred miles in eleven days. As he neared his ancestral lands, local guardsmen and other citizens expressed their appreciation by serving as escorts as he passed through their towns. At last he reached Chavaniac on October 19—the anniversary, he noted in a letter, of the American day of triumph at Yorktown.
For the first time in his adult life, Lafayette intended to settle in the Auvergne. Declining a post in the departmental administration, he stated that he wished to return to “private life” and to devote himself “to the work of a simple citizen.” The American press drew out the connotation that Lafayette surely intended: that in turning to his land, he was emulating Washington. According to the February 1792 issue of the American Museum; or, Universal Magazine, published in Philadelphia, Lafayette was “taking the Cincinnatus of America for his model” by retiring to the Auvergne,
where he means, by his own example, to promote a higher cultivation of the soil, and to teach the people a more comfortable scheme of rural life.… Here he proposes to sit under his own vine, in the freedom which he has so largely contributed to establish, and from which he will not depart, unless to defend it from the violence of hostile attack.
As the American author suggested, Lafayette was not interested in farming for its own sake. Instead, like Arthur Young and other English reformers of the era, he saw agricultural improvement as a vehicle for the amelioration of rural poverty and, consequently, a guarantor of civil tranquility. Looking back on the period a decade later, Lafayette mused in a memo, probably written in 1801, that “this manner of serving my neighbors would have been very useful in the interest of peace.” To transform Chavaniac into a model farm that might “give the region an example of the best agriculture, and to raise there the most necessary types of animals,” he invited an English farmer, John Dyson of Suffolk, to join the household at Chavaniac. Dyson lived with Lafayette’s family for about a year, surveying the lands and making recommendations for the selection and care of crops and livestock that would be best suited to the climate and soil. No longer able to advance the cause of humanity through politics, Lafayette hoped that agriculture might give him a second chance.
The architect Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer also joined the family at Chavaniac that season; he left his Paris home for the Auvergne on October 12 and did not return for 380 days. Vaudoyer, a fellow Freemason and a winner of the prestigious Rome Prize, had been in Lafayette’s employ for some time, making sketches of Lafayette’s many houses scattered about the provinces, assessing their conditions, and reviewing their titles as the marquis attempted to take stock of his assets. Now, seeing few new buildings going up in the tumultuous capital and being increasingly dismayed by the choices made by the revolutionary government, Vaudoyer was content to spend some time in the Auvergne. Vaudoyer served as Lafayette’s architect, foreman, bookkeeper, and interior designer, responsible for everything from refurbishing doors, floors, and paneling to replacing staircases and creating a new mezzanine in one of the towers. Vaudoyer was also tasked with keeping tabs on the prog
ress of the painted decorations that Lafayette commissioned for the château. As he had in his Paris town house, Lafayette wished to fill his domestic rooms with visual reminders of his political achievements. By July 4, 1792, nine works by the topographic painter Jean-Pierre Houël had arrived, including interior and exterior views of the taking of the Bastille, two scenes of the king’s entrance into Paris (one showing the events of July 17, 1789, the other of October 6, 1789), and other significant episodes that Lafayette wished to remember.
Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houël, The Storming of the Bastille, 1789, watercolor. Lafayette owned a version of this painting. (illustration credit 17.5)
Like many a modern-day renovation, the work at Chavaniac generated complaints from the neighbors. Evidently, some villagers were displeased by Lafayette’s decision to take down his weather vanes, which they had grown accustomed to consulting as they planned their fieldwork. Perhaps, Vaudoyer suggested, a new weather vane could be erected atop the curate’s house or on the church steeple? Or else, to avoid any interference with the cross, maybe a weather vane could be perched on a “liberty tree” planted nearby as a sign of the revolution’s regenerating effect on the French nation.
In singling out the cross and the liberty tree, Vaudoyer had—intentionally or not—touched on a problem that vexed Lafayette. At Chavaniac, Lafayette was distressed to encounter a local perception that the revolution was fundamentally anti-Catholic. Writing on December 14, 1791, Lafayette suggested that “all would be well here without the ecclesiastical and aristocratic maneuvers to put the people off the revolution under the pretext that it will send them to hell.” Lafayette still saw himself as a proud son of the Auvergne, but his years in the wider world had changed him so fully that he had difficulty understanding why the peasants and villagers might be skeptical about the new order. A particular sticking point was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy— a controversial law approved by the National Assembly on July 12, 1790, and denounced by the pope on March 10, 1791. In essence, the law subordinated the Catholic Church to the state in France. Wary of interference from Rome—a favorite destination for royalist exiles—the assembly required all priests to swear an oath to the national constitution; insisted that priests, curates, and bishops be elected by their flocks rather than appointed by church hierarchy; abolished a host of religious titles and privileges; and set new regulations governing the salaries, duties, and residency requirements of members of the clergy.
Many devout Catholics—especially those in the provinces—saw the Civil Constitution of the Clergy as a usurpation of church authority, but Lafayette thought it best not to address their concerns. Offering advice to a departmental administrator charged with explaining the benefits of the new regime to the peasantry, Lafayette recommended avoiding the matter altogether; “you will never convert a fanatic by tackling him head-on,” he explained. The newly established freedom of religion, Lafayette suggested, should be the only religious topic discussed with the local populace. In this way, “the advantages of liberty and equality, the happy consequences resulting from the rights of man in general, and of the French citizen in particular, must stir their hearts, elevate their spirits, and inspire in them horror for the former order of things, and hope for the revolution.”
Committed though he was to winning hearts and minds in the Auvergne, Lafayette had not entirely given up on a future in the capital. In November, he stood for election to replace Bailly, who had stepped down as mayor of Paris. But as the Marquis de Ferrières explained to his wife, Lafayette was still viewed with suspicion by both the Left and the Right. “Here,” wrote Ferrières on November 1, “all the parties agitate. They say that M. de La Fayette is plotting in the Midi, that he fans the flames of insurrection in Paris, that he wants to make himself necessary, and force the people to call him back.” Lafayette made a poor showing against the winner, Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve, who was installed as mayor on November 13.
Lafayette’s retirement would, nonetheless, be a brief one. Thousands of French army officers who had made their way out of the country were regrouping along the nation’s borders in the fall of 1791. Led by the brothers of Louis XVI, and supported by neighboring governments, they were determined to restore the absolute monarchy by force. Calls for war sounded throughout France as partisans on various sides seemed to believe that a military conflict would redound to their benefit. Some believed that the war against the royalists in exile would finally unite the nation against a common enemy, while Louis XVI hoped that the émigrés would make quick work of whatever remained of France’s armed forces and restore his depleted powers. And yet on December 14, 1791, a beleaguered Louis XVI felt obliged to appear before the Legislative Assembly and announce that he had issued a stern warning to the elector of Trier—a principality under the jurisdiction of the Austrian Leopold II, Marie Antoinette’s brother, who had succeeded to the imperial throne of the Holy Roman emperor in 1790. As Louis told the deputies, he had demanded that the elector of Trier put an end to the “amassing of armed French troops” in his territory or face an armed response. The assembly applauded heartily.
Before the day was out, the Comte de Narbonne, the newly appointed minister of war, had established three armies of 50,000 troops each. Narbonne had been named to his post on November 6 after considerable political wrangling; he was not especially favored either by the king or by the assembly, but he was seen as a pawn of neither, which apparently made him acceptable to both. Rumored to be an illegitimate son of Louis XV—Gouverneur Morris had even heard whispers that Narbonne was the product of an incestuous liaison between Louis XV and his devoted daughter Madame Adélaïde—Narbonne was an ally of the Feuillants and a firm believer in constitutional monarchy. Two of the generals he selected to lead the new armies were unsullied heroes: Rochambeau, champion of the Battle of Yorktown, and Nicolas Luckner, who had made his name in the Seven Years’ War and to whom the “Song of the Army of the Rhine”—known today as “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem—was dedicated when it was written, in 1792. The third was Lafayette—a choice that pleased almost no one. Lafayette set out to join his troops at Metz on Christmas Day 1791.
By April 20, 1792, when France declared war on the Austrian states, Lafayette had been drilling his men in northeastern France for several months, in a vain attempt to instill discipline in an army that was riddled with conflict and weakened by desertion. But for Lafayette’s enemies in Paris, out of sight was not out of mind: even from a distance of two hundred miles, a man with 50,000 troops at his disposal was a force to be reckoned with. That spring, the Jacobin party had been abuzz with false rumors that Lafayette was planning to march his troops into Paris to prevent the city from glorifying the forty surviving soldiers of the Châteauvieux Regiment. These men had been sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor after their mutiny at Nancy had been forcefully put down, with Lafayette’s full approval. Having been released from the galleys at Brest after serving just two years, the soldiers became popular heroes, welcomed in the Legislative Assembly’s meeting hall and scheduled to be honored by a grand celebration. Jacques-Louis David was charged with choreographing a “Festival of Liberty”—the first of many revolutionary festivals he would organize—to be held on April 15. On that date, the soldiers joined with the people of Paris in a triumphal procession through the streets. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, painted on stone tablets, was borne by marchers at the head of the procession. A train of young girls carried the broken chains that had once bound the soldiers. And a detachment of the National Guard brought up the rear, walking behind a carriage, modeled after ancient Roman precedents, bearing a seated statue of the goddess of liberty.
The Festival of Liberty surely celebrated the Châteauvieux Regiment, but it was also a rebuke to Lafayette—a response in kind to the procession he’d led on September 22, 1790, honoring the soldiers who fell suppressing the mutiny. Lafayette abhorred the event, but he seemed relieved that it was carried out peacefully. In an April 1
8 letter to Adrienne, who remained at Chavaniac, Lafayette wrote that “the national guard of Paris acquitted itself perfectly in the Châteauvieux affair which, in the end, became nothing more than a disgusting farce” that, in his opinion, reflected badly on the Jacobins. Yet Lafayette’s enemies remained convinced that he was plotting against the city. Jacobin newspapers condemned him as a double-dealer, and on April 18 and 19, shouting filled the Hôtel de Ville, as Lafayette’s supporters tried to prevent his detractors from removing the city’s busts of Lafayette and Bailly from public view.
April 15, 1792: Festival of Liberty honoring the release of forty Châteauvieux soldiers from the galleys of Brest, published in Révolutions de Paris, no. 145 (April 14–21, 1792). The depiction of the National Guard, which brought up the rear, as a lone man riding a scrawny donkey suggests the editors’ low opinion of Lafayette’s supporters. (illustration credit 17.6)
Lafayette remained characteristically undaunted. On May 1, he issued a rousing proclamation to the Army of the Center, as his troops were known, urging his men to ignore the partisanship that was roiling national politics. Terming them, variously, soldiers of the nation, soldiers of liberty, and soldiers of the constitution, he implored them to be brave, patient, and indefatigable, to keep their focus on the deadly battles that lay ahead. Let the factions fight among themselves if they would, he counseled. “As to us, armed with weapons blessed by liberty and by the declaration of rights, let us march on the enemy!”
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