The Marquis

by Laura Auricchio

  The specters of these men accompanied Lafayette for the rest of his life, and they were with him as he sat at a custom-made desk in an alcove of the library—within shouting distance of the farmyard—writing and rewriting his memoirs, one segment of which (a passage of nearly one hundred pages) consists of a letter to the deceased Van Ryssel. This missive to a man who could never read it was completed in 1807—the year Adrienne, who had been plagued by illness since her time in Olmutz, died at the Paris home of her aunt Madame de Tessé. Wrestling with grief while trying to make sense of a tangled life, Lafayette used the letter to Van Ryssel as a forum for examining his vexed relationship to Napoleon. Acknowledging that he had once had faith that Bonaparte might carry on the values of the revolution, Lafayette conceded that he was mistaken. Bonaparte, he had come to understand, was an enemy of freedom. Addressing Van Ryssel directly, Lafayette dedicated the document to “your memory” and posed a poignant question: “Why should I not imagine the text before your eyes when it is the sacred memory of a few friends, more than the opinion of the living universe, to which I wish to report my actions and my thoughts.”

  Like Washington, Lafayette allowed himself to be lured out of retirement for only one reason: to serve the nation. When Napoleon began to falter in 1814, Lafayette reentered French politics as a staunch opponent of restoring the Bourbon monarchy. Personally and politically, a great deal of bad blood flowed between Lafayette and the returning royals. King Louis XVIII, who took up residence in the Tuileries Palace on May 3, 1814, was no stranger to the aging marquis; formerly Comte de Provence, he was the elder of Louis XVI’s brothers and the man Lafayette had famously snubbed in 1776. Nor was the subsequent king, Charles X, crowned in 1824, a fresh face; he was Louis XVI’s younger brother, formerly Comte d’Artois. As Charles X, he kept Lafayette under close scrutiny, lest he conspire to overthrow the monarchy—and it wasn’t a case of paranoia; Lafayette was involved with a host of anti-Bourbon conspiracies. None of them came close to succeeding, but all of them kept the government understandably on edge.

  Isidore Laurent Deroy, La Grange East View, lithograph, c. 1825, after a painting by Alvan Fisher. (illustration credit 19.1)

  Library at La Grange, designed by Antoine Vaudoyer, c. 1800. (illustration credit 19.2)

  Thanks to the Charter of 1814, however, which established a constitutional monarchy in France, Lafayette was able to participate openly in national politics for the first time in more than two decades by putting himself forward for elected office, supporting opposition journalists, and agitating on behalf of liberal causes. Although he did not immediately win a seat in the Chamber of Deputies (as France’s lower legislative house was known), he spent the first years of the Bourbon restoration playing the role of civic gadfly. As he put it in an 1816 letter, Lafayette saw Louis XVIII as little more than a pawn of the allied forces that defeated Napoleon, “the protégé, the humble follower, not the leader” of the European monarchies, who wished only to turn back the clock to France’s old regime. And Lafayette, who had devoted his life to ending the abuses of absolutism, was determined to do what he could to prevent any such backsliding.

  On October 30, 1818, the sixty-one-year-old Lafayette was voted into public office for the first time since the Estates-Gereral. Having failed to win election to the Chamber of Deputies as a representative of the department of the Seine-et-Marne, his home region, he instead went to the legislature as a representative of the department of the Sarthe, located some 150 miles west-southwest of La Grange. In the Sarthe, which imposed no residency requirements on its representatives, Lafayette was fortunate enough to enjoy the support of the liberal journalist Charles Guyot, who, in an 1819 pamphlet, praised his fellow inhabitants of the Sarthe for their choice. “The great, good La Fayette,” wrote Guyot, “was not appreciated by his own department; and you supported him for the position that his great virtues deserved—and the only [position] worthy of his immortal name!”

  In the weeks leading up to his swearing in on December 10, 1818, Lafayette was once again the talk of Paris. The Chamber of Deputies became the hottest ticket in town, as well-heeled individuals vied for a chance to witness the return of Lafayette—a return that immediately revived the battles over Lafayette’s image that had lain dormant during Napoleon’s reign. An ally of Lafayette’s, the romantic author and leading liberal theorist Benjamin Constant, who would join Lafayette as a representative of the Sarthe in 1819, employed the power of his pen to burnish Lafayette’s tarnished credentials as a defender of liberty and to put the best possible spin on the attention Lafayette was generating. Writing in the liberal organ La Minerve française, Constant reported that the “curiosity” that animated the audience in the Chamber of Deputies as Lafayette rose to swear his oath could be “easily explained: so many memories of different sorts and all honorable are attached to that name!” In contrast, the ultraroyalist journal Le conservateur mocked Lafayette’s reappearance by resurrecting the critical conceit that conflated the veneration of Lafayette with that of his horse after the 1790 Festival of Federation and expressing astonishment that “a famous white horse, a horse that shared with its master the idolatrous love of the good people of Paris … has not terminated his valorous career: he still lives.” Harking back to the wordplay that peppered the political journalism of the old regime, the Conservateur concluded by asserting that “the marquis, the master of this horse, is still riding the same hobbyhorse.”

  Although the newspapers differed wildly in their assessments of Lafayette, they were in complete agreement on one point: the reputation of the general (a title that Lafayette preferred to the aristocratic “marquis”) had been formed, for better or for worse, by his actions during the French Revolution. Still, Lafayette continued to take up new causes in the Chamber of Deputies and was often joined in his efforts by his son and fellow deputy, George Washington Lafayette. Singly and together the Lafayettes, père et fils, advocated such domestic policies as the establishment of free public education and the lowering of voting requirements, and addressed such contentious international issues as the revolutions and insurgencies in Greece, Italy, and Poland (which they supported) and the slave trade (which they opposed). Almost always, their speeches and letters were laced with references to the years before 1791, when Lafayette’s French reputation had seemed unassailable.

  Of course, there was still one place where Lafayette’s reputation remained uncontested, and Lafayette had not given up on returning to the nation he considered his spiritual homeland. On November 25, 1823, Lafayette wrote to the American president James Monroe expressing his desire to rejoin “the friends with whom I can once more enjoy the sweetest memories, and visit the happy shores of an adopted land which has so filled my first and most presumptuous hopes.” He was, he told Monroe, too occupied with his work in the Chamber of Deputies to contemplate an immediate voyage. Yet, he concluded, “I often dream of the day when I will be able, without remorse, to enjoy the happiness of finding myself once again on American ground.” Considering the time required for transatlantic mail, Monroe’s reply came swiftly. On February 7, 1824, Monroe informed Lafayette that “Congress had passed a resolution … to express to you the sincere attachment of the entire nation, and its ardent desire to receive you again.” And on July 13, 1824, having lost his seat in the Chamber of Deputies, Lafayette sailed from Le Havre to begin his final tour of the United States, which was to be the grandest celebration the young nation had ever seen.

  On August 16, 1824, Lafayette disembarked the packet ship Cadmus in lower New York Bay. Unlike Lafayette’s first arrival in New York, in 1784, which had gone virtually unnoticed for some time, his second visit was hotly anticipated. Over the course of thirteen months, Lafayette, his son, and his secretary, Auguste Levasseur, stopped in each of the twenty-four states of the union. Municipalities from Vermont to Virginia hailed Lafayette with events ranging from intimate meals in the homes of local dignitaries to balloon ascents witnessed by thousands, and everywhere they we
nt the men were treated to dinners at local taverns, tours of historic battlefields, and reviews of militias and regiments. They marched in parades and attended services at churches of every denomination, often encountering septuagenarian and octogenarian veterans of the War of Independence who wept openly for joy or schoolchildren who serenaded “the nation’s guest” with songs written specially for the occasion.

  By 1824, many members of America’s founding generation had long since passed away—Gouverneur Morris in 1816, Washington in 1799, and Franklin nine years before Washington. Most of the living founders were too frail to revel in the limelight as Lafayette did on this journey; Jefferson and Adams, who were famously fated to die on the same day, July 4, 1826, were eighty-one and eighty-nine years old, respectively. At sixty-seven—roughly the same age as President Monroe, the last president to have participated in the nation’s birth—Lafayette was comparatively young and remarkably robust. He was a celebrity. And yet he was more than that. He was a living embodiment of the nation’s founding principles, and his enduring vitality augured well for the future of his adopted land.

  Every town and county laid out its best for Lafayette, but surely no celebration could have outshone the gala festivities held in New York City on the night of September 14, 1824. Lafayette called it “the most brilliant and magnificent scene ever witnessed in the United States.” The event was held at Castle Garden, a decommissioned fort on a man-made island that was linked to lower Manhattan by a bridge and had recently been converted into America’s largest commercial pleasure ground. Some six thousand partygoers attended by two hundred servants paid three dollars apiece to join in the revelry. They danced and drank beneath a canopy decorated with the flags of the world and illuminated by a giant chandelier supporting thirteen smaller ones—one for each of the original states. Evoking the grandeur of antiquity, a triumphal arch, nearly ninety feet wide, decorated with sprigs of laurel and surmounted by a bust of George Washington, marked the entrance to the island pavilion. When the guest of honor arrived at ten p.m., he found inside a large transparency, lit from behind, that brought to life the château at La Grange—a structure that, in time, became almost synonymous with Lafayette, as its image was reproduced on objects of all kind, created around the world for sale in the American market, for many years to come. People who attended saved their tickets, their dresses, their gloves—anything that might remind them of the occasion. And those objects have since made their own way throughout the United States, where they have been collected by museums, libraries, and historical societies and exhibited to celebrate patriotic occasions of every variety.

  Why did the celebrations in honor of Lafayette loom so large in people’s minds? In part, the phenomenon reflected a genuine outpouring of affection and appreciation for a man who had come to our nation’s aid at a moment of need and whose dramatic life story had unfolded in the pages of American newspapers, books, magazines, and prints for the better part of fifty years. Words of gratitude and admiration for the French hero of the American Revolution filled the songs and poems written in his honor. One typical set of lyrics was meant to be sung to the tune of “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. Renamed “Hail! Lafayette!” it implored listeners to “think how then the illustrious stranger, / spurn’d rank and ease.… His counsel, sword, and wealth supplying … amidst the famish’d—naked—dying!” (Few of those singing the American version would have been aware that the song was originally dedicated to Marshal Nicolas Luckner, the commander of the French Army of the Rhine with whom Lafayette was accused of conspiring against France in 1792 and who was sent to the guillotine in 1794.)

  Blue-and-white transfer-printed plate depicting Lafayette’s home at La Grange. Nineteenth-century American. (illustration credit 19.3)

  But something more than gratitude was involved, for Lafayette arrived at a time when Americans were beginning to think about their nation’s fiftieth anniversary. In many ways, Lafayette’s triumphal tour kicked off the jubilation. In celebrating Lafayette, Americans were celebrating their own past and honoring all of the country’s early leaders. Nowhere was the collective nature of the tribute more evident than in the entertainments offered on Monday, June 20, 1825, at the Boston Theater in Massachusetts—an imposing, neoclassical edifice located at the intersection of Federal and Franklin Streets in what is now the heart of Boston’s Financial District. A broadside advertising that evening’s show announced not only that Lafayette would be in attendance, where he would watch Charles II, “a comedy in two acts,” but also that the auditorium would be ornamented with “appropriate Decorations in honor of the Nation’s Guest.” These decorations, though, had little if anything to do with Lafayette: the names of every governor of Massachusetts would ring the boxes, while seats in the upper tier would feature the governors of each of the thirteen original states. A new “drop scene” would depict a temple with Corinthian columns described as “a monumental structure to the memory of General Washington,” as well as an equestrian statue of Washington and a “correct view of Washington’s Tomb at Mount Vernon.” Toward the end of the evening, “the Grand Washington Transparency containing a brief sketch of the civil and military life of this illustrious hero” would be displayed.

  Fan depicting Lafayette, Marie Antoinette, and an allegory of French patriotism, carried to a ball celebrating Lafayette at Castle Garden on September 14, 1824. (illustration credit 19.4)

  Other Lafayette celebrations looked forward to the nation’s bright future. One of these was held on September 11, 1824, the forty-seventh anniversary of the Battle of Brandywine, when Lafayette enjoyed a spectacular dinner hosted by the French residents of New York at Washington Hall, located on the northeast corner of Broadway and Chambers Street in lower Manhattan. That night, Washington Hall was reimagined as the crossroads of the globe: four faux-marble piers representing the four corners of the earth were erected at fifty-foot intervals, and a large model of the sun hung from the center of the ceiling, some thirty feet off the ground. All of the decorations were magnificent, but the pièce de résistance was an astonishingly detailed centerpiece representing the Erie Canal that ran the length of a seventy-foot-long table. As described by the Evening Post of September 13, “at one end was to be seen Lake Erie—in the centre Lake Ontario, and at the other end Lake Champlain.… Passage boats with passengers and baggage” dotted the water, which ran a “winding course” through the mock canals, while “at a distance various kinds of water fowl” sailed gracefully “to and fro.” Adding to the “most charming effect” of the scene, the “rich verdure” of the canal’s “mossy banks, studded now and then with roses, was here and there interrupted by aqueducts, rocks, and bridges which were thrown over the canal at different places.”

  To men living in New York as the long-anticipated canal was nearing completion, the visiting marquis and the grand engineering project represented much the same thing: the great potential of the United States to serve as a beacon to all nations and the promise that the New World would, one day, triumph over the Old. By linking the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, which, in turn, flows into New York Harbor—the gateway to the Atlantic Ocean—the canal was destined to become the first waterway to facilitate European commerce with the American interior. More than twenty years earlier, Gouverneur Morris had rhapsodized about the possibilities that such a canal might offer. Writing to his friend John Parish on January 20, 1801, Morris had described his summer travels in upstate New York and lower Canada, asking, “Shall I lead your astonishment up to the verge of incredulity?” He answered his own question: “I will.” Recounting the rush of thoughts that came to him on the shores of Lake Erie, Morris predicted that a relatively small investment of funds dedicated to constructing an inland navigation system “would enable ships to sail from London, through Hudson’s River, into Lake Erie,” providing unfettered access to the inner reaches of the continent, which, he explained, “excels the part we inhabit in soil, in climate, in everything.” Making a bold but pr
escient forecast, Morris boasted that “the proudest empire in Europe, is but a bauble compared to what America will be, must be, in the course of two centuries; perhaps of one!” Morris did not live long enough to witness the creation of the transformative waterway he envisioned, but the guests assembled in Washington Hall on the night of Lafayette’s fete were about to see Morris’s dream fully realized. Soon, America’s promise would be one step closer to fulfillment.

  Washington Hall, New York City. (illustration credit 19.5)

  As it happened, Lafayette’s triumphal tour also coincided with America’s bitterly fought presidential campaign of 1824. The election ended infamously: with no candidate winning a majority of electoral college votes, the decision was thrown into the House of Representatives, which selected John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson, who had won the plurality of both the electoral and the popular votes. To this day, the outcome is sometimes referred to as the “corrupt bargain.” With praising Lafayette being tantamount to praising America, and with every elected representative setting out to prove himself more patriotic than his neighbor, politicians and their spokesmen throughout the land did everything in their power to associate themselves with the “Nation’s Guest.” The House and the Senate heard innumerable orations filled with acclaim for Lafayette, and at the urging of Jefferson and Monroe, who were well aware of Lafayette’s tight fiscal straits, Congress awarded two lavish gifts to the visiting hero. On December 2, 1824—the final day of electoral college voting—a bill was introduced to the Senate issuing Lafayette $200,000 in stock and 24,000 acres of land, whose location would be determined by the president at a later date. These were certainly gifts of considerable monetary value, but they also had layers of symbolic meaning. In literal terms, they were meant to reimburse Lafayette for the money he had spent during the revolution. To Lafayette, who’d had to borrow heavily to pay for his ocean crossing, the sums received were most welcome. And to Americans, the ability to repay this long-standing debt of gratitude to an old friend signaled their own prosperity and reminded them how far their country had come in just fifty years.