Lafayette Read Free Page A

some of the most cataclysmic events in modern history: the AmericanRevolution, the French Revolution of 1789, the abdication of Napoléon and the restoration of the French monarchy, and the French Revolution of 1830. He “reigned” over France twice in his life and personally enthroned a French monarch. Not only did Lafayette compile his own voluminous memoirs, but both the French government and American Congress commissioned enormous compilations of every document each nation produced during the American Revolutionary War. The results were two massive works: five volumes,
quarto
, by Henri Doniol—
Histoire de la Participation de la France à l’Etablissement des Etats-Unis d’Amérique
—and six volumes,
octavo
, small type, by Francis Wharton—
The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States
. Added to these two overwhelming works—and Lafayette’s own six-volume memoirs—are the endless multi-volume biographies, autobiographies, diaries, and collections of letters and personal papers of those who knew him intimately: Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Gouverneur Morris, to name just a few whose works color the portrait of this complex man. In France, his doctor, his friends, his comrades in arms, political colleagues, enemies, and a host of others who knew him wrote biographies and autobiographies that portray their impressions of Lafayette. There is also the small jewel of a volume by his wife and his daughter— written in their prison cells—that details the tenderness, love, and devotion he lavished on his family. To this library must be added the countless eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories and the political, social, and economic analyses written in France, England, and the United States.
    Beyond the enormous mass of published books are thousands of pages of his correspondence, essays, and pronouncements, collected at various institutions in France and America—in the Library of Congress, the libraries at Cornell University and the University of Chicago, the New York Public Library, the archives of the French Foreign Ministry in Paris, the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Château de Vollore, and the Château de Chavaniac, Lafayette’s birthplace in Auvergne, in central France. Without a pilgrimage to difficult-to-reach places that helped shape his life, it is impossible to understand this complex aristocrat.
    University of North Carolina professor of history Lloyd Kramer maintains that Lafayette’s modern biographers have made “cultural assumptions about human behavior [that] transform him into a psychologicalcase that John Quincy Adams [an intimate of Lafayette’s for fifty years!] would not recognize. Indeed, the ‘Lafayette’ that Adams described has more or less disappeared from history.” I believe that other intimates of Lafayette–Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and others–would be as hard put as Adams to recognize the descriptions of Lafayette that range from “naive,” in some biographies, to “glory-thirsty,” in others. 2
    For Professor Kramer, these “generalizations . . . became questionable” while he “pursued the peculiar activity of a historian.” 3 They were even more questionable for me, as a former journalist, pursuing the peculiar activity of a biographer. Like Professor Kramer, I have read all of Lafayette’s correspondence and the correspondence of others to him or to others about him—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin . . . and on and on. There is no need to
interpret
Lafayette’s personality, motivations, sentiments, maturity, or effects and influences on others— no need to
imagine
what he may have thought or what his motives
may
have been; no need for this imaginative interpretation or for psychological evaluation.
    Everything about the man—everything he said and thought, along with