“Lafayette, we are here.” – Col. Charles E. Stanton, visiting Lafayette’s tomb after the arrival of American forces in Paris during WWI

“As I admired this noble countenance of stone, a wry smile crept across the [French] curator’s face. Suddenly the silence was broken. ‘Why,’ asked the curator, ‘should we have a bust of Lafayette?’” – Laura Auricchio, The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered, p. xix

“[Gauthier] spat. ‘Americans and their childish fascination with Gilbert de Lafayette. They suit one another because neither has a thimbleful of sense.’”- The Flight of Virtue, chapter twelve

Behind my other nonsense, for the last month I have been working steadily on my editor’s returned copy edits for my next novel, which I’m pleased to report have been going swimmingly overall. I am very excited to start sharing information about where we’re going next, but I want to get a couple more stray ducks in a row before I really spill that tea, so I thought this week we’d get back to Flight of Virtue continuity before it gets buried in the shuffle. More specifically, I want to take a look at FoV’s plot catalyst, the marquis de Lafayette, both in terms of his life and his unique relationship with the nation he helped create.

In my last entry on Toru Dutt about how an author’s culture can influence how they write, and in my own case, FoV is a good example of this, particularly in regards to Lafayette. A novel that largely functions as a love letter to the marquis and his place in American history and is centered on rescuing him from his Continental imprisonment, probably could only be written by an American writer steeped in a national narrative that holds him up unreservedly as a hero. This is not to say that I wrote about him completely uncritically (see my above flavor text), but as noted by historian Laura Auricchio in my other quotation, even the idea of writing a story about him is more or less an alien one in his native France in a way that Americans have tended to find baffling. Lafayette’s relatively modest burial plot in the rather far-flung Picpus Cemetery in Paris’ 12th arrondissement is such a peculiarly American pilgrimage site that when the caretaker heard our accents, he merely gave us a gentle version of the Parisian eye roll, asked for our €4 admission fee, and specifically told us how to get to Lafayette’s grave. And the caretaker was right, really—we’d come pretty much clear across metro Paris from where we were staying just to see him, which is not something many French people would bother to do.

So how did things get this way? Well, first some background information. Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, was born in 1757 as the only child of parents who were respectively one of the most ancient noble families in Auvergne (modern Haute-Loire) and Brittany. The Lafayettes (to use the contracted Anglo spelling) had served as marshals during the Hundred Years’ War and had been raised to their marquisate in 1690, likely due to the high placement of several family members in the courts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. Despite the favor they were shown, the House of Lafayette was more notable for its substantial wealth, especially in the generally impoverished milieu of the French nobility, rather than its political power. And although their income precluded the necessity of a career, many of the Lafayette men took their familial martial legacy very seriously and served in various military positions within the royal army. Lafayette’s father, Michel, was no different in this regard and served with distinction as a colonel in the French Grenadiers.

Unfortunately, this attraction to valor would be Michel de Lafayette’s undoing and he was killed in the Battle of Minden (1759) in Westphalia during one of the many Continental engagements of the Seven Years’ War (still sometimes referred to colloquially in its US theater as the French and Indian War). At the age of two, our Gilbert became the marquis de Lafayette, and his grieving mother largely left the toddler marquis to be raised by his paternal grandparents and aunt at the family’s Auvergne seat, the medieval Château de Chavaniac, for the next decade of his life. When Lafayette was eleven, he was sent to his mother and her de la Rivière relatives in Paris to begin his formal education. His maternal great-grandfather, the comte de la Rivière, was the commander Louis XV’s “Black Musketeers,” the king’s personal horse guard, and was in position to see that Lafayette was enrolled in the musketeers’ officer school, as well as the Collège du Plessis, a part of the University of Paris.

But in 1770, within a year and half of coming to Paris, Lafayette’s mother, grandfather, and great-grandfather, died. Compounding their bequests with his already substantial Lafayette inheritance left the twelve-year-old Gilbert with a yearly income of roughly 120,000 livres, and making him one of the richest individuals in France. We tend to think only of young women heiresses as being commodities on the aristocratic marriage market, but Lafayette, as a rich, young man whose remaining older relatives could only exercise a limited amount of control over the full-fledged marquis, he was an extremely enticing prospect as a son-in-law. This is what brought duc de Noailles knocking after Lafayette had completed his musketeer training and been given a second lieutenant’s commission around his fourteenth birthday. The Noailles, unlike the Lafayettes, were a very prominent political family, having made their fortunes as generals and admirals in Louis XIV’s army, they had also gained several influential civilian and ecclesiastical posts, and one of the duke’s great-aunts had married one of Louis XIV’s legitimized sons with Madame de Montespan. In short, the Noailles were a big deal, but prominent families always need more money and Lafayette would fit that bill nicely, especially considering that the duke had five daughters to marry off.

Putting some consideration into the prospective groom’s age, the duke decided on his twelve-year-old daughter, Adrienne, as the best candidate for the young marquis. The duke and the closest thing Lafayette had to a guardian in Paris, his uncle, the new comte de la Rivière, were ready to seal the deal, but the duchesse de Noailles prevailed on everybody to wait until both Lafayette and Adrienne were at least a little older. So I’m sure you’ll all be thrilled to know that the marriage wasn’t celebrated until 1774–when the bridal party were at the much more reasonable ages of seventeen and fifteen, especially when you learn that Adrienne was pregnant within the year…🙄 When he wasn’t busy playing house with Adrienne, Lafayette continued his education and transferred to his father-in-law’s dragoon regiment on the promise of a swifter ascent up the officer ranks. The duke probably felt that he had his young son-in-law (and his money) pretty well in hand, but global events were in motion that change that, rapidly.

By 1776, when Lafayette was nineteen, talk of the American colonies’ revolt against Britain was a major topic of discussion, and a preoccupation of the French royal government as Louis XVI and his ministers were gauging how involved they should become in the conflict. Already interested in the principles of the American cause, Lafayette would be introduced to Silas Deane, who was at Louis’ court as a representative of the Continental Congress, trying to drum up French support and resources. Deane would be largely be responsible for pulling in many of the prominent foreign commanders who would serve in the Continental Army, including Friedrich von Steuben, Casimir Pułaski, Tadeusz Kościuszko, Johann de Kalb, and Thomas Conway—but he was enthusiastic to recruit Lafayette too, even though the marquis had little of the practical military experience of any of those other guys. Because Lafayette had something else that the Continental Army was in desperate need of…

So, faced with an excited teenager and his impressive disposable income, one can forgive Deane for pretty much enlisting Lafayette as a major general on the spot. This did not go over well with anyone in Lafayette’s family, particularly after the king had decided against (for the time being) on sending any French officers to America in an official capacity. Adrienne, pregnant again, was distraught at being separated from her young husband bent on a dangerous adventure halfway around the world, and the duke de Noailles was furious at being undermined by the American delegation as both Gilbert’s father-in-law and superior officer in the dragoons. He ordered Lafayette to join the regiment in Marseilles, and the marquis was forced to go AWOL in an attempt to sail without his family’s permission for the colonies with the other foreign officers. Learning from Deane that the Continental Congress couldn’t afford to pay for his passage, Lafayette did exactly what you’d imagine a rebellious rich kid to do—he spent £112,000 of his own money and bought his own ship, the Victoire. After some more subterfuge and a couple of close calls evading agents of the king and the duke, Lafayette and his new ship escaped the European coast and he showed up like something out of a Homeric epic in Georgetown, South Carolina in June 1777.

Despite Lafayette’s verve and money, the Continental Army’s beleaguered commander in chief, George Washington, was understandably less than enthusiastic at being saddled with an untested young man who he was told was now a general in his army. But for all of his volubility of personality, Lafayette also lacked the arrogance and vanity of some of the other foreign officers that grated so on Washington and his staff. He soon won his commander over with both his instant and obvious love of the cause, as well as his nigh-worshipful attitude toward Washington himself, who wasn’t entirely above flattery. The two developed a father-son relationship, which would come to mean as much to the childless Washington as it did to the orphaned marquis. Lafayette further ingratiated himself to his new environment by becoming English-fluent within a year of his arrival (unlike many of the foreign recruits), and by displaying an avid interest in America generally. And since we know there’s nothing Americans love more than outsiders being interested in us, the colonial public was even more susceptible to the charms of the gallant young marquis than his commander was.

It also helped that Lafayette, perhaps against the odds, turned out to be a decent officer and a military asset to the American army. He served with distinction in several of the major engagements of the war, including the Battle of Brandywine, where he was wounded in the leg, and suffered through the infamous winter encampment at Valley Forge. He would return to France in 1779, both to take some much-needed leave, and to aid renewed efforts by Benjamin Franklin to bring France formally into the war on the American side. The king would put the marquis under house arrest for his unauthorized departure two years prior, but this was merely a temporary formality and Lafayette was soon released, hailed as a hero by the French public. He stayed in France just long enough to get the king’s consent for a declaration of war against Britain and to knock Adrienne up again, before he was sailing back to America to finish the job.

Victory at Yorktown in 1781 would cement Lafayette in the American public imagination, both for his bravery and for the friendship he had offered the struggling nation when it had been less prudent to do so. This combined with his personal closeness to Washington, now the most celebrated man in the hemisphere, made it so the marquis was basically an honorary American from Day One. Indeed, the Maryland legislature made him and his male descendants natural-born citizens under its state constitution, as did Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Virginia; which in turn granted them full natural United States citizenship when these states ratified the US Constitution in 1789. So, technically, a French male descendant of Lafayette could be elected President of the United States without ever having set foot in the country. Though I think they would find out, as Lafayette himself did, that sometimes the rules of citizenship are a little murkier than they appear on the surface, particularly in this era were being a “citizen” of anywhere was a new concept.

Despite the acclaim he enjoyed on this side of the Atlantic, I don’t think Lafayette ever had any intention of staying in America (as new citizen Baron von Steuben would). Much more like Tadeusz Kościuszko, the marquis wanted to return to his own country and bring American liberty home. Fueled by his now international reputation, Lafayette bounced up the French royal ranks from a captain of dragoons to maréchal de camp, a field rank of roughly sergeant-major general, or the third-highest command rank in the entire French army, at now the age of twenty-five. But more importantly, to him anyway, was that he became a leading reform voice in the French government, culminating in his heavy involvement (with Thomas Jefferson’s help) in drafting the language of what would be France’s Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789.

This would be the zenith of Lafayette’s binational popularity, when he was dubbed Le Héros des Deux Mondes—The Hero of the Two Worlds—but it wouldn’t last. As the Bastille fell and the French Revolution began in earnest, Lafayette, now the commander in chief of the newly-established National Guard, soon found himself in an increasingly untenable political situation. Despite his commitment to democratic reform, the marquis still saw himself as a loyal subject of Louis XVI, which did him no favors with the more radical populist leaders, nor with the king, who (understandably) blamed him for the revolution even happening. Too radical for the ancien régime-aligned nobility and too moderate for the increasingly powerful Jacobins, Lafayette devolved into a vacillating figure, who by trying to promote compromise pleased no one. What remained of French public support for him largely disintegrated after the so-called Champs de Mars Massacre of 1791, where National Guard troops under Lafayette fired into a large citizen assembly after radical leaders lynched two men accused of being royalist spies and the riled up crowd, thought to have been at least 10,000 people strong, began throwing rocks at the guardsmen. Much like the Boston Massacre (1770) in America, exact events—including whether Lafayette actually gave the order to fire into the crowd—are impossible to determine, but with dead citizens’ blood on his hands, Lafayette was pilloried by the Jacobin press and he resigned as commander of the National Guard.

Lafayette didn’t remain in political exile long, as by 1792 the French National Convention declared war on Austria and prepared to invade Belgium, then in Austrian control. Desperately short of experienced military leadership, Lafayette was promoted to lieutenant general and given command over the Army of the Centre and sent to the eastern theater of the war. But at this stage of the revolution, France’s regular troops were almost completely untrained and recruited from Jacobin hotbeds with an intense dislike for authority generally and the army’s officer corps in particular. Within days of the start of the Austrian conflict, Maximilien Robespierre was calling for Lafayette’s removal, but at least the marquis was spared the fate of fellow general Théobald Dillon, who was dragged by his own soldiers to Lille, where a citizen mob literally tore him apart. Lafayette rode to Paris to defend himself and denounce the Jacobins on the Convention floor, but this was a serious underestimation of his remaining political caché, and he was in turn denounced as a traitor by Robespierre. Despite this, he was transferred to the Army of North, where he remained for two months until the royal family was imprisoned and Georges Danton issued a warrant for Lafayette’s arrest. He crossed the border into Belgium, hoping to then sail to the United States under the aegis of his hereto-unused American citizenship. Unfortunately for him, he was captured by a coalition of Austrian and Prussian forces, who, once they (meaning Prussian king Frederick William II and Holy Roman Emperor Francis II of Austria) understood that the arch-nemesis of all monarchs, Le Héros des Deux Mondes, had just walked into their clutches, had exactly zero intention of letting him go anywhere.

Lafayette would spend the next five years in active incarceration in several Prussian and Austrian strongholds, the last of which was a former Jesuit college in the city of Olmütz, Moravia (modernly the town of Olomouc, Czech Republic). A succession of American ambassadors to France and friends of Lafayette tried to free him both through legitimate diplomatic channels and outright prison-break schemes, but they were hampered both by the tenacity of the European monarchs’ antipathy for the man who in their eyes had turned the world upside down, and by the French revolutionary government’s control over Adrienne de Lafayette, who they’d arrested as a traitor and was threatened with execution. Through some gutsy maneuvering by then ambassador James Monroe (against orders of non-intervention by President Washington), the American embassy secured the marquise’s release, and she and her daughters traveled to Vienna hoping to do the same for Lafayette. Adrienne would be unsuccessful, and the family would end up spending the next two years under house arrest in Lafayette’s prison until Napoleon would sign a treaty with Austria releasing them in 1797.

Although willing to see Lafayette freed, Napoleon had intended for the family to remain in exile, but some well-timed flattery from Adrienne would at least allow them to return to her family estate at Château de la Grange-Bléneau in Seine-et-Marne. Lafayette’s French citizenship would be restored to him in 1800, and the subsequent politics of both the Empire and the Bourbon Restoration would permit him to return to active political life, but never at the level he’d enjoyed at the beginning of the Revolution. In part because his centrist position continued to make him unpopular and mistrusted by all of the ever-changing sides of French government; and of course, nobody wanted to risk giving him a military command. The closest he would ever come to his glory days would be during the July Revolution (1830), when he helped defend Paris from the royalist troops attacking the city’s barricades. The revolutionary Chamber of Deputies was willing to install him as a military dictator, but Lafayette refused this measure as unconstitutional. Despite his love of France’s republic, he would end up supporting the ascension of Louis-Philippe to the throne to avoid another civil war like the one that engulfed his early adulthood. He would largely live in retirement after this, though he would be an outspoken critic of Louis-Philippe’s increasingly repressive regime, particularly his actions against the Paris Uprising of 1832 (aka, the one in Les Misérables). By the time of his death in 1834, he had recovered enough of his former reputation that Louis-Philippe kept his funeral from being public in order to prevent people from attending it and the public openly protested their exclusion.

But really the marquis’ last hurrah was the year-long visiting tour he made of the United States in 1824/5. Arriving in America for the first time in forty years, he was ostensibly invited by his old friend James Monroe, now the president, as a part of the commemoration of the United States’ fiftieth anniversary, but what began as a celebration of the nation quickly turned into a celebration of Lafayette. People lined the roads between the major cities just to watch him pass, memorabilia of every conceivable stripe was churned out to mark the occasion, and parties in his honor went on as long as he could be kept in one spot. He visited all twenty-four existing states and traveled over 6,000 miles and people couldn’t get enough of him. Fayetteville, North Carolina became the first of dozens of American cities, towns, and municipalities named for him, and a number of places would continue to celebrate their town’s “Lafayette Day” well into the next century.

Some of this was a sort of national reckoning with the passing of the last of the revolutionary generation. Figures like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Monroe were still alive to greet the marquis on his visit, but most of their compatriots had already died, and both Adams and Jefferson would be gone within a year of Lafayette’s departure. As historian Harlow Unger would put it, “Lafayette had materialized from a distant age, the last leader and hero at the nation’s defining moment.They knew they and the world would never see his kind again.” (Lafayette (2002)). And I think that’s the other half of the equation: even among extraordinary men and times, America recognized Lafayette as special. Not a flawless human being, certainly, but something almost as rare—a true friend. A friend who loved us from the start, and believed in us when almost no one else did. A friend we adopted as our own when no one wanted him. And a friend we run to greet before anyone else in France, just to let him know we still haven’t forgotten him.