The Marquis

by Laura Auricchio

  It was sound advice, but Lafayette was unable to heed it himself. Throughout the months of May and June, he struggled to maintain discipline in a poorly equipped and increasingly disorderly army that was engaged in sporadic combat; meanwhile, he fielded frequent updates on the political situation in Paris. He recalled in his memoirs that he was troubled by what he learned: “The clubs usurped all powers, insulted the tribunals and the constitutional authorities, dominated the administration, the legislative body, directed politics and the war.” Lafayette was particularly concerned about the “excesses of Jacobinism.” So powerful did the Jacobins appear “that no one dared” stand up to them, Lafayette averred. And with so much authority concentrated in the hands of extragovernmental groups, he feared for “the liberty of the nation, its means of defense, the safety and property of its citizens.”

  On June 16, Lafayette wrote a lengthy letter to the Legislative Assembly denouncing political clubs as antithetical to the constitution and a danger to French freedom. Although he railed against factionalism of all varieties, the Jacobins were his primary target. “Organized like a separate empire … blindly controlled by a few ambitious leaders,” the Jacobins were, as he put it, a “sect,” a “distinct corporation in the middle of the French people, whose powers they usurp by subjugating their representatives.” Read into the record two days later and republished in newspapers of every political stripe, the letter generated heated debate. While Lafayette’s supporters insisted that he was protecting the constitution as he had always done, his detractors saw something much more dangerous: a thinly veiled threat issued by a general with an army at his disposal. At the Jacobin Club on June 18, Robespierre opened the discussion with a simple directive: “Strike down Lafayette and the nation is saved.”

  When thousands of armed men stormed the Tuileries Palace on June 20, cornering Louis XVI but leaving peaceably after the monarch donned a red “liberty cap” and raised a glass with the insurgents, Lafayette could not resist the siren call. Informing no one of his departure, he set out for Paris, where he hoped to rescue the king, the nation, and the constitution. Unbidden and unwanted, Lafayette appeared at the bar of the Legislative Assembly on June 28. Against a background of disapproving murmurs, he read a prepared statement declaring that the violence of June 20 had “excited indignation and alarm among all good citizens and especially among the army.” Many of his troops, he announced, were “asking themselves whether it is truly the cause of liberty that they are defending.” In their name, and in the name of “all the French who love their country, their liberty, their peace,” he insisted that “it is time to protect the Constitution from attacks, … to assure the liberty of the National Assembly,” and to guarantee the protection of the king. He demanded “that the instigators of the violence committed on 20 June at the Tuileries be pursued and punished as traitors [criminels de lèse-nation].” Finally, he took direct aim at the Jacobins. Insisting that he was speaking for “all the honest men of the realm,” he declared it imperative “to destroy a sect that smothers sovereignty, tyrannizes the citizenry, and whose public debates leave no doubt of the atrocity of its leaders’ plots.”

  It was Lafayette’s last stand. His speech enraged the Jacobins, hardening their belief that he was threatening to turn his soldiers against them. In fact, his mere presence gave rise to accusations of dereliction of duty. A general cannot abandon his post at whim, and Lafayette had neither sought nor received permission to leave his army. But so firmly was he convinced of the righteousness of his cause that he seemed not to imagine how his actions might be perceived. If he wished to find out, all he had to do was read a fifteen-page pamphlet published shortly after his proclamation. It bore the title Crimes of Lafayette in France. Unable to accept the truth that his dream for a constitutional monarchy had turned into a national nightmare, he had grown blind to the circumstances around him.

  Although he never enacted it, Lafayette did harbor one more plan that he believed might at last rescue the country. He would accompany Louis XVI to the Legislative Assembly, where the king would announce his intention to pass some time at the Château de Compiègne. The Paris Guard would serve as an escort along the route. Once arrived, the king would be protected by the National Guard of Compiègne and by two regiments of chasseurs. Protected in this way, Louis might then “issue a proclamation forbidding his brothers and the other émigrés to advance any farther, while declaring himself prepared to march personally against foreign enemies … and pronouncing his support of the constitution in terms that will leave no doubt as to his true sentiments.” If only the king had followed his advice, Lafayette mused years later, “it is likely that Louis XVI could have reentered Paris to the acclamations of all the people.” However, the king politely declined the offer, with the queen reportedly explaining that “we would be better off locking ourselves away in a tower.” As Lafayette archly noted in his memoirs, a tower—the keep of the Temple fortress in Paris’s Marais district—became her next and last home.

  What was to be done about Lafayette? The question lingered through July and into August as the Legislative Assembly repeatedly circled back to the matter. Among other pieces of evidence, letters between Lafayette and General Luckner, the German-born marshal of France, who was serving as commander of the French Army of the Rhine, were read into the record, their words and phrases parsed and their meanings debated. Were the generals conspiring to enact Lafayette’s plan to save the king? Had Lafayette hoped to persuade Luckner to join him in a march on Paris, where, together, their armies might oust the “factions” that, in Lafayette’s view, were exerting an extraconstitutional “tyranny over the National Assembly and the king?” Or, in broaching political matters with Luckner, was Lafayette merely expressing personal views to which he, like any citizen, was entitled? After weeks of debate, Marc David Lasource, a Protestant minister who described himself as a former “partisan and admirer” of Lafayette’s, proposed on July 21 that the assembly formally accuse Lafayette of conspiracy. Speeches for and against Lafayette were heard throughout the day, with the abolitionist Brissot providing one of the loudest voices against his erstwhile friend, but the session adjourned without a vote. On August 8, the assembly took up the question once more; again debate raged for hours. Finally, just before adjourning at five o’clock that evening, the deputies rejected the accusation against Lafayette by a roll call vote of 406 to 224. According to the Archives parlementaires, the news was greeted by “boos from the spectators’ galleries, brisk applause from the right and center.”

  On the morning of August 10, an unstoppable force stormed the Tuileries Palace. Describing the episode, the historian David P. Jordan wrote that “this was not another demonstration, not another spontaneous mass movement. It was a major military operation.” Tens of thousands of fédérés—National Guardsmen from the provinces—had been gathering in Paris for weeks; many had arrived for the annual celebration of July 14, and more were streaming through the capital with plans to join the army at the northern fronts. With an attack from Austria and its allies expected at any moment, the people of Paris were growing increasingly alarmed, and the Legislative Assembly’s quagmire of indecision did nothing to assuage their fears. Over the course of the summer, the city’s sectional governments stepped in, filling the leadership void. As the sections produced petition after petition declaring the monarchy overthrown, they also forged closer and closer bonds with the well-armed fédérés. The ringing of the tocsin in the early hours of August 10 announced their union: the sections had formed an insurrectionary commune and seized control of Paris while the fédérés readied for an offensive against the royal palace. By midmorning, the king and queen had taken refuge in the assembly and a bloody battle was raging at the palace. By midafternoon, some nine hundred bodies littered the Tuileries Palace, its courtyard, and the surrounding streets; two-thirds belonged to the Swiss Guards, whose orders to retreat arrived too late.

  By nightfall, everything had changed. Although France was no
t declared a republic until September, the monarchy had definitively fallen. Declared prisoners of the insurrectionary commune, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were transferred to the Temple prison on August 13. Both would be tried and executed for crimes against the nation. Citizen Louis Capet, as the former king was officially known under the new order, climbed the steps of the guillotine on January 21, 1793; his widow followed on October 16. The Legislative Assembly, too, lived only a short time longer; its moderates and monarchists frightened away, the assembly effectively ceded power to the commune and to a hastily assembled Provisional Executive Council, which ruled jointly until a newly elected body—the National Convention—could be seated the following month.

  Lafayette’s fate was left in the hands of an unforgiving coalition consisting of the Jacobin remnants of the National Assembly, the people of Paris who, Gouverneur Morris believed, would have “torn [Lafayette] to pieces,” given the chance, and a newcomer to national politics named Georges Danton, the editor of Révolutions de Paris and a longtime foe of Lafayette’s. Danton, a lion of a man whose booming rhetoric and renowned lust for life made him a perfect foil to the supremely controlled and calculating Robespierre, was a hero of the Paris sections, and his popularity among the people had led to his appointment as minister of justice. On August 17, the Provisional Executive Council issued an order relieving Lafayette of his command and demanding that he return to Paris to answer for his actions. On August 19, the full assembly passed a decree officially accusing Lafayette of “plotting against liberty and of treason against the nation.” On August 21, that accusation ranked thirteenth in the list of fourteen decrees Danton presented to the assembly as those he had certified with the seal of the nation since taking office. By signing off on a denunciation of Lafayette, Danton pleased both the sections and the Jacobins. It had been one of his first orders of business.

  Lafayette was at camp in Sedan, in northern France when he learned the news. Emboldened by the knowledge that his motives had always been pure, he was at first inclined to hasten to Paris and confront his accusers. But after a few moments of sober reflection, he understood that entering Paris alone would mean facing certain death. Believing that he still had the support of the army, Lafayette ordered his troops to swear their allegiance to “the nation, the law, and the king.” The men remained silent. It was over.

  PART FOUR

  BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

  CHAPTER 18

  EXILE

  On August 19, 1792, Lafayette rode out of camp at Sedan accompanied by fifteen officers, their servants, and the customary general’s escort. Having come to understand, as he put it in his memoirs, that “there was nothing left to do except to seek asylum in a neutral nation in order to save his proscribed head from the executioner, in the hope that he might one day serve liberty and France again,” Lafayette set out for his nation’s northeastern border. Stopping briefly at Bouillon, about a dozen miles from Sedan, he ordered his army to take up protective positions in case of an Austrian incursion, made temporary arrangements for the chain of command, and dismissed his escorts for their own safety.

  Before continuing on the final stage of his journey, Lafayette posted a farewell letter to the municipality of Sedan, explaining his decision to emigrate. Although his letter was addressed to the city’s commissioners, it expressed thoughts Lafayette might have wished to share with all of France. “If the last drop of my blood could serve the commune of Sedan,” he assured his readers, the commune “would have a right to this sacrifice, and it would be less costly to me than what I am doing.” But, he continued, “since my presence among you will serve … only to compromise you, I must spare the city of Sedan the troubles of which I would be the cause.” The best thing he could do for the city would be to leave it—to “distance from it a head that all the enemies of liberty have proscribed, and that will never bow to any despotism.”

  Around nine o’clock on that cool and drizzly night, Lafayette and forty-three other Frenchmen approached the gates of the fortified town of Rochefort, in the Austrian Netherlands (present-day Belgium). Like many thousands of men who had passed this way since the outbreak of revolution, they were officers, soldiers, and servants who had abandoned their posts in the French army. Unlike many émigrés, however, they had no intention of joining the coalition forces arrayed against their native land. Lafayette’s companions were men who had participated in his struggle to create and protect a constitutional monarchy. Louis Romeuf, the aide-de-camp who had been abused by a Parisian crowd when the king’s flight was discovered, was among their number, as was Alexandre de Lameth, a former member of the Triumvirate.

  Lafayette and his friends saw themselves as patriots who remained faithful to a constitution that had been travestied and loyal to a monarchy that had been overthrown. As they testified in a signed statement submitted to the authorities at Rochefort, they were honorable citizens who found themselves “unable to withstand any longer the violations of the constitution established by the national will.” The Frenchmen were equally adamant that they not “be considered military enemies.” Having “renounced” their posts, they presented themselves as noncombatants who deserved to be treated like all other “foreigners who request safe passage” to neutral territory. Had Lafayette not been among their number, they might well have been allowed to pass. As it was, the men were placed under guard and their weapons confiscated. Outraged at being denied the universal right of transit, Lafayette and his companions railed against their detention, but their objections fell on deaf ears. The marquis was a valuable prize.

  Austria crowed about the capture, talking up Lafayette’s role in the revolution to the point of gross exaggeration. Responding to Lafayette’s request for release, the governor of the Austrian Netherlands, Herzog Albert von Sachsen-Teschen, baldly rebuked a man whose name had become inextricably linked with the anti-monarchist cause in the minds of the French king’s revanchist foreign allies:

  You were the instigator behind the Revolution that turned France upside down.… It is you who placed irons on your king, deprived him of all his rights and his legitimate powers and kept him in captivity.… It is you who have been the principal instrument of all the disgraces that befell this unhappy monarch.

  In light of these crimes, Sachsen-Teschen continued, Lafayette would remain in captivity “until such a time as your master, after having recovered his liberty and his sovereignty, will be able to decide your fate according to his justice or his clemency.”

  On August 21, Lafayette put pen to paper in an attempt to explain to Adrienne—and perhaps to himself—how he had arrived at such a predicament. The revolution replayed in his mind as he mulled over the apparent contradictions between his principles and his actions. But the puzzle was so intricate that Lafayette tied himself into a logical knot, musing “that my heart would have been republican if my reason had not given me this nuance of royalism.” If Lafayette’s heart and mind were divided, his very essence was entirely American, or so he felt. In fact, he envisioned his current location as a stopping point on the way to the United States. He planned to continue on to England as soon as he was released, and he hoped that Adrienne would meet him there so that they could travel together to America. There, he assured her, “we will find the liberty that no longer exists in France, and my tenderness will seek to compensate you for all the joys that you have lost.” This was probably not conceived as an empty promise to a disappointed wife. Lafayette—ever as earnest as he was hopeful—fully expected his adopted nation to welcome him with open arms.

  To hasten that wished-for embrace, Lafayette was soon drafting a letter to the nearest available American representative, William Short, who was then serving as the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands in The Hague. Accustomed to seeing his commands carried out, Lafayette expected Short to act promptly. Directing him to the capital of the Austrian Netherlands, Lafayette wrote, “You will greatly oblige me, my dear Sir, by setting out for Brussels as soon as this reaches you, and insist o
n seeing me. I am an American citizen, an American officer, no more in the French service. That is your right, and I do not doubt of your urgent and immediate arrival.” Determined to advance his cause by all possible means, Lafayette also sought Short’s assistance in publicizing his plight. He had learned hard lessons about the power of the press, and now he asked Short to arrange the publication of the signed declaration drafted in Rochefort. Lafayette’s statement appeared in the Leyden Gazette, but Short, a circumspect Virginian, did not hasten to Brussels.

  In fact, none of the Americans in Europe leapt to Lafayette’s rescue. Rounds of letters circulated among Short, Morris, and Thomas Pinckney, the U.S. ambassador to England, leading the three men to arrive at a unanimous conclusion: neither they nor the nation they represented had the authority to intervene in the matter of Lafayette’s detention. Assessing the problem on September 12, Morris wrote to Short that, even “supposing that Monsieur de La Fayette were a natural born Subject of America, and taken under the Circumstances in which he was plac’d, I do not exactly see how the United States could claim him.” Would it be possible, asked Morris, for the United States to “interfere in an Affair of this Sort without making themselves Parties in the Quarrel?” Morris expressed himself more bluntly to Pinckney the next day: “The less we meddle in the great Quarrel which agitates Europe the better will it be for us,” he wrote. Pinckney concurred. The men also agreed on another point: that Lafayette, for all of his dedication to their nation’s cause, was not, in point of fact, an American citizen. As Morris put it, “Monsieur de La Fayette is a Frenchman, and it is as a Frenchman that he is taken and is to be treated.” Or, as Pinckey wrote, “A claim of the rights of an American Citizen to a person in the Marquiss’s circumstances appears to me to be claiming nothing.”