Lafayette Read Free

thousands of French troops, Lafayette helped lead a brilliant military campaign in Virginia that climaxed with Britain’s defeat at Yorktown and earned him world acclaim as “the Conqueror of Cornwallis.”
    Lafayette’s triumph in America, however, turned to tragedy in France when he tried to introduce American liberty to his native land and took command of the French Revolution. In releasing the French from their chains of despotism, he unwittingly unleashed a horde of beasts who plunged France and Europe into decades of unimaginable savagery and world war. The despots of Europe—and the French themselves—punished him and his family horribly, sending him, his wife, Adrienne, and their two daughters to dungeon prisons and exile, and some of his wife’s family to the guillotine. America’s James Monroe saved the surviving family members, winning Adrienne’s release and helping Lafayette’s fourteen-year-old son escape to America and the safety of George Washington’s home in Mount Vernon. Ultimately, it was the courage of Lafayette’s brilliant, adoring wife who saved his name and some remnants of the family fortune.
    Lafayette lived in two worlds, and his story is the story of both during the most critical period in Western political history. Born in the Old World, his spirit belonged to the New, and the revolutions he led ineach changed the course of both: one spawned American democracy; the other became the uterine vessel for genocidal political ideologies— communism, fascism, and Nazism.
    Lafayette was an intimate of the New World’s heroes and an enemy of the Old World’s villains. The savage Robespierre condemned him to death for treason, but Washington loved him “as if he were my own son,” and he called Washington “my adoptive father.” Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Quincy Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, Anthony Wayne, and Benjamin Franklin were trusted friends. Schooled at Versailles with the future Louis XVIII and Charles X, he mingled as easily with Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, with Frederick the Great and William Pitt, as he did with his troops on America’s battlefields, where he won veneration as “the soldier’s friend.”
    Over the years, grateful Americans have named more than 600 villages, towns, cities and counties, mountains, lakes, and rivers, educational institutions, and other landmarks for the great French knight who helped win their liberty. Ironically, not a single community in France has ever acknowledged his existence in this way. The isolated mountain hamlet of Chavaniac hyphenated his name to its own only after American philanthropists bought and restored the château where he was born, converting it into a museum and a source of income for surrounding communities. Paris named a street and a small square for him, and a department store took his name to identify its location on that street—not to celebrate him. To this day, many in France call him traitor—especially radicals at opposite ends of the political spectrum—royalists, Bonapartists, and fascists on the right; socialists, communists, and anarchists on the left. For such extremists, Lafayette’s American-style republican self-government represents a threat to the absolute power they still seek— and the profits that power would put in their pockets.
    The pervasive French distrust of Lafayette and the American ideals he took to Europe have colored not only many French biographies of Lafayette but also the works of American biographers who relied too much on their French predecessors instead of original documents. That reliance is easy to understand because there is so much original material available that most biographers simply cannot or will not read it all, and much of it is written in an older French that many Americans mistranslate so badly that they obscure or alter its meaning. Lafayette lived an extraordinarily long life for his era—seventy-seven years—and participated in