Lafayette (68 page)

Adrienne’s death left Lafayette’s heart and spirit all but broken. He wanted no part of public life, and in the seven years that followed, he seldom wandered from La Grange and the comforting embraces of his children and grandchildren, whose faces mirrored his beloved Adrienne so hauntingly. Life at La Grange settled into a hypnotic routine broken only once, by the loss of his beloved aunt Charlotte, who died in 1811 at Chavaniac, at eighty-two.

When weather permitted, Lafayette threw himself into his agricultural projects. His damaged hip was too stiff and painful to allow him to ride a horse, but he limped about with a cane and traveled about the farm in a small hackney—and developed a noticeable paunch. His farm continued to prosper; many of the animals he bred won prizes. “I have become a pretty good agriculturist,” he boasted, “and lame though I am, I husband my strength where walking is concerned, and manage to do and to oversee what is essential.”
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On days too wet or cold for outdoor pursuits, he dictated anecdotes for his
Mémoires
to his son, George, who never left his father’s side. And he wrote letters, of course—especially to Jefferson, his last close tie to the glorious American Revolution and the disastrous French Revolution. After two terms as president, Jefferson had followed Washington’s example and refused to run for a third term. His Virginia protégé, James Madison, Lafayette’s companion in Indian country in 1784, was now president, and Jefferson had retired from public life to Monticello and started a voluminous correspondence with Lafayette. The two shared reminiscences, along with irrational dreams of spreading American liberty in other lands. As he had with Washington, Lafayette exchanged countless gifts—he sent Jefferson a
pair of sheepdogs. And the two friends reported regularly to each other, with detailed analyses of events in their respective worlds.

“At this moment,” Lafayette reported to Jefferson, “immense continental forces are attacking the Russian Empire. Will [Czar] Alexander fight? Will he negotiate? He runs a risk in either case, of defeat or ensnarement; but if he stretches out the war for a long time by retreating strategically and extending the French line of supply, he could well embarrass his opponent.”
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“You must have heard by now of the glorious achievements of our little Navy,” Jefferson reported back to Lafayette on America’s war against the British in 1813. “I do not know if history will ever provide an example of a more brilliant naval engagement than Perry’s victory on Lake Erie.”
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Lafayette’s analysis of the Russian campaign proved prescient. The czar followed Lafayette’s battle plan, with a strategic retreat that not only extended the French line of supply, it left nothing but scorched earth for the French to conquer. Ashes covered fields where grain and other foodstuffs had grown that might have fed French troops. The retreating Russians burned forests that might have fueled French campfires or repaired French wagons, and they burned every structure that might have sheltered French troops from Russia’s vicious snows and arctic weather. The French marched into Moscow on September 14, but the Russians turned it into an inferno that left it useless for winter quarters.

With the invasion of Russia, Napoléon’s French empire and his Continental System began to collapse. The “Grande Armée” that tramped across the Russian steppes was the military hallmark of that system, integrating a half-million French, Prussian, and Austrian troops into a single “Great Army”—a
European
army that ruled three-quarters of the continent. What his army had not seized by force, he acquired by marriage, linking Austria’s Hapsburg empire to France by divorcing the barren Empress Joséphine in favor of Hapsburg archduchess Marie-Louise, the daughter of the Austrian emperor. A year later, she bore him a son, whom he named Napoléon II and proclaimed king of Rome.

Far from bringing economic union, Napoléon’s Continental System had shattered the economies of member states. Funneling raw materials from conquered nations into France for manufacture had undermined manufacturing in satellite nations, produced mass unemployment, and provoked widespread worker unrest. His scheme for cultural and linguistic unity was equally disruptive. The great Italian sculptor Canova and other prominent artists denounced the removal of Italian art to Paris. Beethoven protested by stripping his
Eroica
symphony of its dedication to the French emperor. To silence the mounting criticism, Napoléon censored the press and theater, banned new literary works, and arrested his opponents.

“Your very existence is truly miraculous,” one of Napoléon’s officers warned Lafayette, but Lafayette simply shrugged, insisting that “living retired with my family on a farm, I have not given my enemy much cause for antagonism . . . although I have nonetheless always been open about my opinion of the famous emperor’s ‘System’ and my deep desire to see it end.”
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Its end was drawing near. Europe responded to the scheme for linguistic unity by refusing to teach French in schools and speak it in daily life. Tacit protests turned into rebellion in Spain, where guerrilla forces rose against Joseph Bonaparte, whom Napoléon had placed on the Spanish throne. As the guerrillas gained momentum, British forces invaded and linked up with remnants of the Spanish army in a war that ultimately cost France 300,000 troops and huge financial losses that depleted the arms and manpower of the Grande Armée Napoléon led into Russia. In November 1812, the fearsome Russian winter struck prematurely and sent his army reeling back from Moscow through howling blizzards and frigid cold. Russian partisans struck from all sides, decimating the French forces and slowing the retreat of survivors until they starved to death. In the disorder, Prussian and Austrian troops deserted, and, by the end of November, only 10,000 of the more than 450,000 troops who invaded Russia were still fit for combat.

News of the disaster provoked uprisings against French occupation throughout Europe. In May, the Congress of Vienna sent Napoléon an ultimatum, demanding a French pullback behind its natural boundaries of the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees and the restoration of all pre-Napoleonic monarchies. In June, English and Spanish forces defeated the French, and the English crossed the Pyrenees into southern France, while the Austrian army recaptured parts of northern Italy. When Napoléon failed to respond to the Congress of Vienna’s ultimatum, it adjourned, and a coalition of allied forces annihilated what was left of the Grande Armée at the Battle of Leipzig in October. Early in 1814, allied armies invaded France from the north, and, as they approached Paris, the once impotent French legislature made secret overtures for peace. Napoléon’s Austrian empress, Louise, fled with her little son, Napoléon II, to Vienna—and to a lover who offered her more attention than her husband did.

Napoléon’s minister of foreign affairs, Talleyrand, remained in Paris and changed spots again by deposing Napoléon as emperor and assuming the presidency of a provisional government. Talleyrand invited the heir apparent—the comte de Provence—to return from exile in England and assume the throne as Louis XVIII, succeeding his late nephew, the short-lived boy-king Louis XVII.

In the midst of the turmoil, Adrienne’s aunt, the comtesse de Tessé, and her husband fell ill, and Lafayette went to Paris to look after them. Within
a few weeks, the count died, and Adrienne’s beloved aunt followed him to the grave two weeks later. They bequeathed to Lafayette their town house at No. 8, rue d’Anjou, just off what is now the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, behind the present-day American Embassy.

On March 31, 1814, the allied armies entered Paris, and, as Lafayette watched, a grand carriage bore the horrifyingly fat new king, Louis XVIII, to restore the French monarchy. Napoléon and his shrinking force encamped helplessly forty miles south of Paris at the royal palace of Fontainebleau, where his generals urged him to abdicate. On April 6, he agreed, and, in exchange for averting a savage end to the conflict, the allies granted him sovereignty to the island of Elba, off the western Italian coast opposite Corsica, with the title of emperor, an annual income of 2 million francs and a guard of four hundred volunteers.

With a new French government came the inevitable new constitution. Called the Constitutional Charter, it restored the king’s “divine right” as “supreme head of state” and Roman Catholicism as the state religion. The king made certain “gracious concessions” by retaining some rights from older, more liberal constitutions, including equality before the law, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of thought and expression, and freedom of religion. Louis assumed legislative as well as executive powers. Although he alone would initiate new laws, the Charter created a bicameral quasi-legislative body to vote on them. The king would appoint the members of the upper house, or Chamber of Peers, and voters would elect members of the lower house, or Chamber of Deputies, with voting eligibility determined by the amount of taxes they paid to the crown each year. In the end, only about ninety thousand were eligible to vote in a nation of more than 25 million. Although Lafayette railed at the regressive voting restrictions, most of France was content with the Charter. More than half the French population was illiterate, and 75 percent lived in small villages where, for centuries, agriculture was their sole pursuit and the priest’s word their only law. Only Paris had more than five hundred thousand people; only Lyons and Marseilles more than one hundred thousand, and only five other cities more than fifty thousand.

The king invited Lafayette to his first royal audience, where both Louis and his younger brother the comte d’Artois “received me cordially.” At the audience, George introduced him to the young duc d’Orléans, who had inherited his title after his father, Philippe Egalité, died on the guillotine. Like George, the young duke had fled to America for two years, and the two had met when the duke visited the Washingtons at Mount Vernon for a few days.

Although the Restoration in France brought peace to the rest of Europe, it did not pacify the infinite numbers of chronic malcontents endemic to France. Bonapartists seethed with bitterness over Napoléon’s military humiliation in Russia. Demobilization left hundreds of thousands of former soldiers unemployed, as did the end of Napoléon’s Continental System, which had made France the economic hub of Europe. Adding to social discontent was the wave of angry émigrés who streamed back into France demanding the restoration of their former properties from equally angry peasants who had worked the land as their own for twenty years or more. Wisely, Lafayette retreated to the quiet isolation of La Grange to focus on farming instead of politics.

Napoléon, on the other hand, saw the rising discontent as an opportunity to return to power. After six months, he sailed back to France and landed in Cannes on March 1, 1815. With a detachment of only several hundred guards, he marched northward toward Paris through the fierce snows of the Alps,
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gradually gathering a huge army of unemployed workers, former soldiers, and malcontents along the way; although the king sent troops to arrest him, they rallied around their former leader and joined the enormous throng tramping across France. Three weeks later, the march reached the gates of Paris, where the entire population, it seemed, hailed Napoléon’s return—not, ironically, as the former emperor and the conqueror of Europe, but as the leader of a new revolution against the Bourbon monarchy.
Sensing popular sentiment, he donned the revolutionary cockade of 1789 rather than the trappings of the empire.

King Louis XVIII fled to Ghent, Belgium, and Napoléon once again moved into the royal apartments in the Tuileries Palace, but his hold on the palace—and, indeed, on France—was tenuous. The right favored restoration of the monarchy; the left favored revolution, war, and anarchy. Napoléon’s only hope, Lafayette explained, lay in “making himself a constitutionalist. His mind and his character are like opposing currents; he is a strange mixture of imperialist, terrorist, and liberal, but public opinion is stronger than he, and he has a prodigious talent: he submits to everything that he cannot dominate.”
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On April 19, a courier arrived at La Grange with a message from Joseph Bonaparte, begging Lafayette to come to Paris immediately. Napoléon had asked centrist leaders to establish a new French government. They had already amended the constitutional charter, which Bonaparte agreed to submit to a national plebiscite; he also called for new national elections for the lower house. Napoléon wanted to appoint Lafayette leader of the House of Peers—and, in effect, leader of the entire National Assembly. Although Lafayette felt a surge of excitement at his recall to leadership, he remained true to his principles and refused to serve a usurper.

“If my fellow citizens call me,” Lafayette declared, “I will not reject their confidence, but I will not reenter political life by the peerage or any other favor of the emperor.”
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Napoléon was furious. “Everyone in the world has learned his lesson,” he railed, “with the single exception of Lafayette. He has not yielded a jot. You see him calm. Well, let me tell you, he is ready to begin again.”
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