Pierre L’Enfant. After designing the badge and insignia for the Society of the Cincinnati and overseeing their production in France, he returned to New York and began an architectural practice. His Federal Hall became so renowned that when a new capital city was decreed for the banks of the Potomac River, he was chosen to design it. His supervision of the construction brought him into conflict with many stakeholders. He lost control of the project, although his basic design and some specific buildings remained. His later life was filled with difficulties that even overwhelmed his stint teaching engineering at West Point. He died, impoverished, in 1825. In 1902 his District of Columbia plan was readopted and the “grand avenues” he had imagined were constructed. In 1909 his remains were reburied in Arlington National Cemetery.
Comte d’Estaing. At war’s end d’Estaing was in Cádiz, in charge of a Franco-Spanish fleet that peace robbed of the chance to sail. He returned to his Passy home. The American state of Georgia granted him land as thanks for having attempted to relieve Savannah. In 1789 he published a play in verse, Les Thermopyles, and soon after was appointed commanding general of the Versailles National Guard. But because he overzealously defended Marie Antoinette and others of the royal family, and because he had in his possession medallions representing them, the Revolutionary council sentenced him to die. Before being guillotined in 1794, he reportedly said, “After my head falls off, send it to the British, they will pay a good deal for it.”
François de Fleury. Serving in India, Fleury rose to maréchal de camp, and then returned to France and took part in the Revolution as an army officer of the king, participating in battles at Montmédy, Givet, Cambrai, and Valenciennes. In many of these he was at the side of Rochambeau, his mentor since 1780. In a 1792 battle Fleury was grievously wounded. Resigning from the army, he lived as a pensioner until his death in 1799. In 1989 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers named its most prestigious medal for him; the medal’s face repeats the device on Fleury’s original medal from Congress, a helmeted Roman-era soldier standing in the ruins of a fort, holding in his right hand an unsheathed sword, and in his left, the staff of the enemy’s flag, which he tramples underfoot.
Conrad-Alexandre Gérard. Upon his return to France he only partially recovered his health. He ceased diplomatic work to perform other services for Louis XVI, including membership in the council of state. Offered the leadership of an Illinois and Wabash Land Company with a domain of three million acres, he felt unable to endure the rigors of another Atlantic crossing and life in frontier America. The king rewarded him with a lucrative appointment, the chief administrative post in Strasbourg, and he was granted membership in the Society of the Cincinnati. Tortured by advancing illnesses, he and his wife became patients and patrons of Franz Anton Mesmer and his “animal magnetism.” In 1790 he was replaced at Strasbourg by a mayor whom the Revolution selected. He returned to Paris, where he died the following year.
Comte de Grasse. Court-martialed at his own request in 1784 for having lost the Battle of the Saintes—the first sitting general of the French armed forces ever to be tried—de Grasse was readily acquitted. He then retired to Tilly and became a charter member of the French branch of the Society of the Cincinnati. He married for a third time but died shortly thereafter, in 1788. Of his later years, Washington wrote to Rochambeau, “It seemed as if an unfortunate and unrelenting destiny pursued him, to destroy the enjoyment of all worldly comfort.” During the French Revolution his Tilly home was sacked and the cannons presented to him by Congress were carried away, melted down, and made into coins. His four daughters escaped, settled in Charleston, and were awarded a thousand dollars each for their father’s service to America.
Marquis de Lafayette. After a triumphal tour of the United States in 1784, Lafayette settled in Paris as an adviser to French and American governments and a leading abolitionist. Appointed to the Assembly of Notables and the Estates-General, he advocated reforms and occupied a middle ground between revolutionaries and royalists. When the Bastille fell, he sent its key to Washington, “as a Missionary of Liberty to its Patriarch.” Commander of the National Guard, he rescued Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from certain death at Versailles, but thereafter found it increasingly difficult to defend them from the Revolution. Blamed when the royal couple briefly escaped custody, he denounced the Jacobins in 1792, which earned him a warrant issued for his arrest. Captured by Austrians, he was imprisoned outside France until 1797. Upon his release he refused to cooperate with Napoleon and was too prominent a national hero for the emperor to execute. After the death of his wife in 1807, Lafayette withdrew from national affairs until the restoration in 1815, and after it had an adversarial relationship with the new monarchy as he involved himself with revolutionary movements in Greece and elsewhere. In 1824–25 he made a last, triumphal tour of the United States, and on his return to France continued to speak out for reform and to be a thorn in the side of the monarchy until shortly before his death in 1834. He was buried with soil that he had brought back from America for just that purpose.
Duc de Lauzun. Commandant of the French troops in America once Rochambeau had departed, Lauzun returned to France and to a series of romantic affairs at court. Raised to maréchal de camp, in 1788, upon the death of his uncle, he succeeded to the title of Duc de Biron. In 1789 he was appointed a deputy to the Estates-General. Sufficiently revolutionary despite his noble titles, he was named head of the Army of Flanders, reporting to the new National Assembly. He continued in that and in other senior posts for the Revolution’s military arm until his forces were defeated in 1793. Chastised for losing, he resigned, but was then arrested, charged with showing too much leniency toward the Revolution’s opponents, and sent to the guillotine. He offered his executioner a glass of wine.
Louis XVI. The king’s modest attempts to liberalize France were compromised by the indebtedness incurred during the American Revolution. There was no peace dividend because the expense of maintaining the military to protect France, primarily from Great Britain, continued high. In 1786 his government’s receipts were 457 million livres but expenses were 587 million. He sought viable ideas for liberalizing his rule, but there were few presented to him that did not entail considerable curtailment of the culture of Versailles, and so most of the ideas were rejected or made little impact. Classism became progressively more deeply embedded in the military and in governance, as the nobility lobbied for and won more influence over the increasingly angry and oppressed proletariat—until on July 14, 1789, a mob stormed the Bastille and began the Revolution. The mob continued on to Versailles and nearly succeeded in assassinating Marie Antoinette; the royal couple was conveyed to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, where they remained under house arrest. What had been an absolute monarchy became a limited one, until in 1791 Louis hastened the end of that arrangement by his unsuccessful attempt to flee to the protection of Prussia. The royal couple’s flight changed the minds of those in the revolutionary leadership who had previously thought that Louis had been cooperating with the Revolution. In 1792 he was accused of treason and on January 21, 1793, was guillotined. His death brought to a close more than a thousand years of continuous French monarchy. Marie Antoinette survived her husband, but in the Reign of Terror of April 1793 she too was executed. In 1815 the bodies of the king and queen were exhumed and reburied alongside his ancestors at Saint-Denis.
Vicomte de Noailles. Continuing to believe in the tenets of equality and fairness embodied in the American Revolution, as a member of the Estates-General Noailles proposed the abolishing of ancestral titles. However, his own nobility forced him to emigrate to escape the guillotine, and he settled in Philadelphia. His wife and parents, left behind, were soon executed. In America his monetary capital, access to foreign credit, and closeness to Lafayette helped him amass a new fortune as a partner in William Bingham’s bank. After the 1802 amnesty, Rochambeau asked Noailles to take command in Saint-Domingue, which he did. He escaped the British several times, once by replying to a query in
perfect English that he, too, was seeking General de Noailles; but in a fight at the head of twenty grenadiers he was fatally wounded, and died in Cuba in 1804.
Mauduit du Plessis. Upon first returning to France, he wrote to Washington that his “zeal” for the American cause remained undimmed and that for it he would “always be ready to Lose my Life.” In 1787 he was posted to Haiti as commandant of the Port-au-Prince Regiment, and there became much more of a royalist. In 1791 he resisted orders from the revolutionary government in Paris, among them, to free Haiti’s slaves. He also arrested the Haitian revolutionary officials. When revolutionary regiments from France reached Saint-Domingue, they convinced du Plessis’s men that he had acted wrongly, and they seized and executed him.
Pierre du Ponceau. Remaining in Philadelphia, du Ponceau studied law and began a law practice. He married, started a family, and took his place among the foremost U.S. intellectuals. As a lawyer he argued cases before the Supreme Court and wrote legal articles. He was a champion in the United States for the French Revolution and for French legal cases. Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1791, he became its president in 1827 and held that post at the time of his death in 1844. His close friendships included Presidents Monroe and Jefferson, with whom he shared a passion for Native American languages. One of the world’s foremost linguists, he won a prestigious European prize for his book on Native American grammatical systems, and was among the first Westerners to understand that written Chinese characters represented spoken words rather than ideas.
Comte de Rochambeau. Louis XVI appointed Rochambeau governor of Picardy, and in 1791, the last maréchal de France authorized by royalty. During the early phase of the Revolution he served as commander of the Royal Army of the North; when his forces suffered reverses he was sacked and replaced by Lafayette. A charter member of the Society of the Cincinnati, he continued in friendly correspondence with Washington, who never ceased to refer to him and to de Grasse as the “co-adjutors” of Yorktown. In 1793, during the height of the Terror, Rochambeau was arrested, and the two British cannons that Congress had presented to him were confiscated. As he was entering the cart to be taken to the guillotine, the executioner said, “Withdraw, old marshal; thy turn will come.” It did not do so soon, as after the fall of Robespierre the new revolutionary council consisted of officers that Rochambeau had trained, and who revered him. Pensioned by Napoleon, he died in 1807.
Comte de Ségur. Appointed minister to Saint Petersburg in 1784, he made commercial treaties and wrote plays for Empress Catherine II’s theater. Sufficiently republican despite his nobility, he joined the Revolution early and became its ambassador in Berlin. Leaving there abruptly after a duel, he went into retirement until the advent of Napoleon, then served in legislative and administrative posts. He was still enough of a noble in 1814 to be a member of Louis XVIII’s Chamber of Peers, but joined Napoleon again for the emperor’s Hundred Days in 1815. Forgiven for this lapse by the monarch in 1819, he served him and his successor, Charles X, until the short-lived Revolution of 1830, when he joined the insurgents. He died less than a month after France’s first constitutional monarchy began.
Baron von Steuben. Steuben was intimately involved in the last stages of the American Revolution, overseeing the demobilization of the army in 1783, and the establishment of the Society of the Cincinnati. Its first meeting was held in his home, and he then served as its acting head. His fame in Europe having become considerable, he sought to return to France with honor and to receive money, but his applications were rejected. In the United States, in the postwar atmosphere, his public advocacy of a standing army did not help him. He obtained what he had been promised, a modest pension, enabling him to winter in New York City and to spend summers in the Mohawk Valley. He became steadily more enfeebled until his death in 1794.
Charles-Armand de la Rouërie. Returning to France after disbanding his legion, Armand raised Virginia tulips and kept a pet monkey. He solved his indebtedness by marrying a neighbor who brought a considerable dowry. He became involved in the politics of Breton. While in Paris to discuss the region’s grievances, he was briefly imprisoned in the Bastille, which increased his heroic status. He formed the Bréton Association, civic-minded nobles whose motto, “live free or die,” echoed American ideals and who signed their compact in blood. They embraced personal freedom for their poorer neighbors but rejected the radical tenets of the French Revolution. They became hunted men. In 1793, shortly after learning of the death of Louis XVI, Armand died. His enemies exhumed his body and threatened fellow Bréton rebels with his severed head.
Comte de Vergennes. His efforts on behalf of the United States went mostly unrecognized in America in the self-congratulatory climate of the post–Revolutionary War, and in France those efforts were blamed for the country’s continuing debts. Such attitudes obscured the degree to which Vergennes’s actions had assured the establishment of the United States and helped to restore France to a position of prime influence in European affairs, the main aims of his and Louis’s foreign policy. Thanks to his adroit maneuvering, and even as the royal hold on power became more difficult to sustain, his tenure as foreign minister continued, and Louis also appointed him president of the Royal Council of Finances. Vergennes counted as one of his accomplishments the signing of a commercial treaty with Great Britain in 1786 that was remarkable for its liberality. He remained fully involved in the governance and politics of France until his death, in office, in the spring of 1787. On learning of Vergennes’s passing, Louis XVI lauded him as “the only friend I could count on, the one minister who never deceived me.”
Louis XVI, king of France (top), and his foreign minister, Comte de Vergennes (bottom), decided to aid the rebels in America even before the Declaration of Independence was signed.
The playwright Caron de Beaumarchais (top left), through a fictitious company underwritten by France and Spain, worked with Silas Deane (top right) to supply munitions that enabled the American victory at Saratoga in the fall of 1777. Then negotiations in Paris by Benjamin Franklin (bottom left), Arthur Lee (bottom right), and Deane rapidly led to the Franco-American pacts of February 1778.
At Brandywine Creek (top left), Americans were joined by French officers, several of whom were wounded during the defeat. In a lesser-known but important action, Major François de Fleury held Fort Mifflin on Mud Island (bottom) long enough to delay the British for the winter. Fleury’s later heroics at the Battle of Stony Point won him a Congressional Medal, one of only six awarded in the war (modern version, top right).
General George Washington, pictured reviewing troops at Valley Forge with the Marquis de Lafayette (top), had earlier longed for strategic counsel. Broadly experienced advice from Brigadier-General Louis Duportail (bottom), who became chief of the American Army Corps of Engineers, and from other French officers, helped him avoid mistakes and fashion a Fabian strategy to preserve the army.
The Belle Poule incident at sea in June 1778 gave France reason to declare war on Great Britain, and was celebrated at Versailles by a coiffure (top). That summer, the Comte d’Estaing, seen here in a cartoon as the preserver of America (bottom), led French naval forces in a failed attempt to oust the British from Newport, Rhode Island.
The Comte De Grasse’s victory in the Battle of the Virginia Capes (top), and French naval control of Chesapeake Bay allowed Franco-American land forces to surround Cornwallis’s at Yorktown. In the culminating siege, French cannon (bottom left) played an important role. French casualties at Yorktown on land and sea exceeded American ones. The Rochambeau, Washington, and De Grasse joint victory of 1781 was commemorated in a 1931 stamp (bottom right). Placement of French and American forces (map, below) reflected strict instructions from Louis XVI that French forces allow precedence and the right side of the battlefield to American command.
In 1782, peace negotiations to end the Revolutionary War began in Paris, between America and Great Britain, and separately among France, Spain, and Great Britain. Benjamin
West’s painting of the Anglo-American negotiations remained unfinished because the British contingent refused to sit for it. From left to right: John Jay, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens, and William Temple Franklin.
Acknowledgments
I thank the following institutions and librarians for their assistance during the research and writing of this book: the New York Public Library and librarian Melanie Locay for use of the library’s Frederick Lewis Allen Room; the New-York Historical Society Library; the Scoville Library of Salisbury and librarian Sara C. Woloszyn; the Charleston Historical Society collection at the Addlestone Library of Charleston; and the Cornell University Library. In Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Bibliothèque Historique de Paris, the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de La Courneuve, the Service Historique de la Défense, and the Bibliothèque Mazarine.
How the French Saved America Page 31