Lafayette (76 page)

Lafayette descendants continued to live in the château at La Grange, which is now the property of the marquis René de Chambray, a direct descendant. Although he no longer admits visitors, the marquis permitted the
compilation and photo reproduction of all materials relevant to Lafayette by the U.S. Library of Congress and the Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York, where they remain available to researchers. Although Lafayette’s descendants still owned the château at Chavaniac at the beginning of World War I, they had not lived in it for decades, and it fell into disrepair. In 1916, they sold it to an American philanthropic organization, which transformed it into a renowned children’s institution that housed, fed, and educated almost twenty-five thousand abandoned war orphans from France, Poland, Russia, Armenia, and other war-ravaged lands after World War I. Despite their generosity, a cynical French writer grumbled, “One can only imagine the reaction of American public opinion at the announcement of the purchase of Mount Vernon by a French association!”
¹

After World War II, the Lafayette Fund began the long task of restoring the château. Part is now a conference center, but the principal rooms hold period furnishings and works of art that have made the château one of the most remarkable, if least known, museums in France. As visitors go from room to room, a stirring, brilliantly produced self-guided tour uses hidden speakers and projectors to carry visitors back in time to Lafayette’s birth, his marriage and wedding feast, and other important events of his life in America as well as France.

The impact of Lafayette’s attempt to introduce American liberty in France remains one of the most curious—and most tragic—phenomena in western history. In the two centuries that followed, the French staged five revolutions, established five republics, and submitted—often enthusiastically—to despotic rule under three monarchs, two emperors, and one fascist dictator. In contrast to the single document that guided American government during those same two centuries, France has written more than a dozen constitutions and embarked on foreign military adventures that slaughtered millions across the face of Europe, West Africa, Indochina, and even Mexico. When Lafayette introduced American liberty to France, he unwittingly infected his people with an incurable passion for license and lust for world conquest—what the rest of Europe labeled the “French disease” during the French Revolution and under Napoléon I. Not long after Lafayette’s death, Louis-Philippe would send French armies to North Africa, and thirty years after Lafayette’s death, Napoléon III expanded the Second Empire across the face of Europe into the Russian Crimea, and even sent 30,000 French troops to Mexico in a vain attempt to reestablish the French empire in North America. Even the crushing defeat by the Prussians in 1871 did not subdue French lust for foreign conquest. By 1900, the Third Republic had established
a colonial empire in northern and western Africa and in Indochina— an empire larger than the one she had lost in the eighteenth century. Though not solely responsible, French colonial expansionism helped provoke World War I and the unnecessary slaughter of more than five million troops. And still France expanded her empire—into Lebanon and Syria. Even after her disgrace in World War II, France sent 100,000 more troops to their death in a futile nine-year war to retain her colonies in Indochina—and then repeated the savagery in Algeria, again losing 100,000 troops before finally granting independence to all her colonies in the 1960s. Only in the ensuing decades did she, for the first time in five centuries, forego foreign wars of aggression and confine herself to her own borders.

England’s Lord Acton argued that Lafayette taught the French the Americans’ “theory of revolution, not their theory of government—their cutting, not their sewing.” But, as historian Susan Dunn points out, “The cutting— whether colonial war or regicide, whether declaration of independence or tennis court oath—is the easy part. The art is in the sewing.”
²

1.
John Quincy Adams,
Oration on the Life of Lafayette
, 82 (Published by an Act of Congress, December 1834).

2.
Lloyd Kramer,
Lafayette in Two Worlds
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 4.

3.
Kramer, 5.

4.
John Stuart Mill, “Death of Lafayette,” published in
Monthly Repository
, 22 May 1834, cited in Kramer, 19.

5.
Brand Whitlock,
La Fayette
(New York: D. Appleton, 1929), II:283.

6.
Ibid.

1.
The original spelling of the name Lafayette was indeed
La Fayette
, the name of the hamlet that surrounded the family’s castle. Thus, the earliest known lord of the castle and hamlet was
Pons, de La Fayette
, or
Pons, lord of
[the vassalage]
La Fayette
. The occasional use of a lowercase
l
—as in
la Fayette
—is incorrect, because it implies that the full name of the town was Fayette, when, in fact, it was a corrupted abbreviation of Vil
la Faya
. The better-known modern spelling as a single word,
Lafayette
, was Lafayette’s own doing during the American Revolutionary War, to simplify his signature on hastily written orders and messages to his superior officers. He adopted the spelling permanently—and dropped the
de
that preceded it—when he abandoned his noble title and became
Citizen Lafayette
at the beginning of the French Revolution. In this book, I have used the single-word spelling in my own, original text, but left it as it appeared when citing original documents.

2.
Henri Doniol,
Histoire de la Participation de la France à l’Etablissement des Etats-Unis d’Amérique
(Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1886, 5 vols.), I:651–652.

3.
Etienne Charavay,
Le Général La Fayette, 1757–1834, Notice Biographique
(Paris: Société de la Révolution Française, 1898), 534. [The Lafayette quotation is from Appendix I, which is a fragment of a never-completed
Autobiographie de La Fayette par lui-même
, unrelated to and not included in Lafayette’s multivolume autobiography
Mémoires, Correspondence et Manuscrits du Général Lafayette publiés par sa famille
, cited below.]

4.
La Fayette to Mme. de Pougens, 11 Pluviose, an 6* (January 30, 1798), in Henry Mosnier,
Le Château de Chavaniac—Lafayette. Description-Histoire-Souvenirs
(Le Puy, 1883), facsimile at end. [*In October 1793, the French revolutionary Convention decreed a new revolutionary calendar that represented not only a rupture with the political past but also with the religious past. For details, see
chapter 17
, n. 50.]

5.
Charavay, 532.

6.
At one point, the Lafayette fiefdom stretched from what is now the city of Clermont-Ferrand in northern Auvergne to the city of Le Puy-en-Velay to the south.

7.
Originally any infantryman armed with a musket,
mousquetaire
came to designate a member of the king’s elite household cavalry after Henri IV organized a company of noblemen armed with lightweight, short-barreled carbines. His son, Louis XIII, replaced carbines with muskets in 1622, thus creating the first company of king’s musketeers. Cardinal Mazarin dissolved the group during the regency in 1646, but Louis XIV re-created it in 1657 under the name Gray Musketeers, because of the uniformly gray coats of the horses. In 1663, Louis organized a second company, the Black Musketeers, who rode only black horses and later rode to international fame in the novels of Aléxandre Dumas. Made up exclusively of noblemen, the two companies—each with 250 men, and their squires and valets—were quartered at Versailles, rode behind the king in military processions, and were at his side, day and night, when he went to war. (
Encyclopaedia Universalis—Thesaurus Index
, Paris, 1989.)

8.
Vercingetorix (d. 46
B.C.
) was chief of the Gallic tribe of the Arverni, who rebelled against Roman rule in 52
B.C.
, just as Julius Caesar had all but subjugated Gaul. Named leader of the Gauls, Vercingetorix used guerrilla warfare to harass Caesar’s supply lines and did battle on rocky, mountainous terrain that was unfavorable to the Romans. He successfully held the Arvernian hill-fort of Gregovia against an assault by Caesar. Vercingetorix followed up this victory by an attack on the Roman army that failed and forced him to retreat with 80,000 troops to the fortress of Alesia, where Caesar’s 60,000-man force laid siege and forced its surrender. Caesar captured Vercingetorix, took him to Rome in chains, and exhibited him in triumphal parades before executing him six years later.

9.
Charavay, 531.

10.
The Franks were a group of Germanic tribes who overran the native Gauls and eventually gave France its first king, Clovis I (c. 466–511).

11.
Jean Tulard, Jean-François Fayard, Alfred Fierro,
Histoire et Dictionnaire de la Révolution Française, 1789–1799
(Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, S.A., 1987, 1998), 19.

12.
Chavaniac Lafayette: Le Manoir des deux mondes
, Hadelin Donnet (Paris: le cherche midi editeur, 1990), 58.

13.
Ibid.

14.
The word
abbé
—literally an
abbot
—referred, in fact, to anyone wearing an ecclesiastical dress. It thus included scholars or lettered men who, in the absence of formal schools, served as private tutors to the rural nobility.

15.
Mémoires, Correspondence et Manuscrits du Général Lafayette, publiés par sa famille
(Bruxelles: Sociètè Belge de Librairie, Etc., Hauman, Cattoir et Compagnie, 1837, 2 vols.), I:12. [Note: Three identical French-language editions of
Mémoires
were published simultaneously, a six-volume edition in Paris, the large two-volume Brussels edition (with double columns to the page) cited here, and a twelve-volume edition also published in Brussels. All carry identical, detailed indexes listing complete contents in chronological order, making it easy to find any item in one edition on the appropriate page in the others.
For purposes of this book, I found the two-volume edition handier for both research and travel than the more cumbersome six-volume edition.]

16.
Ibid.

17.
Paul Pialoux,
Lafayette: Trois Révolutions pour la Liberté
(Brioude-Haute Loire: Edition Watel, 1989), 27.

18.
The palace had once been the home of Marie de Médicis (b. 1573, Florence, Italy—d. 1642, Cologne, Germany), daughter of Francesco de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, and Joanna of Austria. Shortly after French king Henry IV divorced his wife, Margaret, he married Marie de Médicis and made her his queen (October 1600) to obtain a large dowry that would help him pay his debts. In 1601 Marie gave birth to the future Louis XIII, and during the following eight years she bore the king five more children. She built the Luxembourg Palace and its vast, stunning gardens, and from 1622 to 1624 commissioned the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens to decorate its galleries with twenty-one paintings that portrayed the greatest events of her life and rank among his finest work. The paintings now hang in a special gallery in the Louvre Museum, and the Luxembourg Palace, which had been converted into apartments when Mme. de La Fayette moved to Paris, became a prison during the French Revolution. Later restored, it now houses the French Senate. Although the palace is closed to the public except by special arrangement, the gardens and park rank among the most beautiful in Paris and are by far the most popular and most frequented.

19.
Except for its spelling, the French
collège
was and remains a secondary school and bears no relationship to the American college. Originally, the English word
college
(cf.
collegial, collegiality
) referred to any building used for educational or religious purposes, and the first colleges in America—Harvard, Yale, and so forth—were, indeed, founded as divinity schools to train Puritan ministers.