Marquis de Lafayette

The hero of two worlds

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier was born on 6 September 1757 at the château of Chavaniac, in the mountains of Auvergne. His father, a colonel, was killed at the Battle of Minden in 1759, before the boy was two; his mother and grandfather died in 1770, leaving him, at twelve, a marquis with one of the great fortunes of France. In 1774 he married the fourteen-year-old Adrienne de Noailles, daughter of one of the most powerful families at court.

In 1777, defying a royal order to stay at home, he sailed for America on a ship he had bought with his own money. Congress made him a major general, unpaid, at nineteen. Wounded in the leg at Brandywine that September, he became almost a son to George Washington. He went back to France in 1779 to argue for an expeditionary force, returned to America the next year, and in 1781 helped trap Cornwallis's army at Yorktown, whose surrender in October all but ended the war. He came home a celebrity in both countries.

A declaration of rights

Lafayette brought American ideas home. In the Assembly of Notables of 1787 he called for a national assembly to be convened, and in 1789 the nobility of Riom, in Auvergne, elected him to the Estates-General. He sat with the liberal minority of his order.

On 11 July 1789 he laid before the Assembly a draft declaration of the rights of man, written with advice from his friend Thomas Jefferson, the American minister in Paris. It was one of several drafts; the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen that the Assembly adopted on 26 August drew on his among others.

Commander of Paris

Between the king and the crowd, 1789–1791

On 15 July 1789, the day after the Bastille fell, the electors of Paris acclaimed Lafayette commander of the city's new citizen militia, soon called the National Guard; the astronomer Bailly became mayor the same day. By his own account, he added the white of the monarchy to the red and blue of Paris to make the tricolour cockade. In March 1790 he sent George Washington the main key of the Bastille, which is still kept at Mount Vernon.

When the women of Paris marched on Versailles on 5 October 1789, his own guardsmen made him lead them there. He reached the palace late that night and assured the king of order; at dawn a crowd broke into the palace and killed two of the king's bodyguards. Lafayette calmed the crowd in the courtyard by appearing on a balcony with the queen and kissing her hand, and that afternoon escorted the royal family to Paris. Royalists never forgave him for having slept that night and called him “General Morpheus”. On 14 July 1790, at the Festival of the Federation on the Champ de Mars, he swore the oath on behalf of the National Guards of all France.

The Champ de Mars

The middle ground grew narrower. When the royal family escaped from the Tuileries in June 1791, Lafayette, whose guards were supposed to watch the palace, was accused of having let them go. After their return, the Cordeliers and other clubs called for the king's removal. On 17 July 1791 a crowd gathered at the altar of the fatherland on the Champ de Mars to sign a petition; after two men found hiding under the altar were lynched, the mayor, Bailly, proclaimed martial law, and the National Guard, led by Lafayette, fired on the crowd. Estimates of the dead range from about a dozen to perhaps fifty.

The shooting made him, for the radicals, the man who had spilled the people's blood. He gave up his command in October 1791, and in November lost the election for mayor of Paris to Jérôme Pétion.

Prison, and a long afterlife

When war with Austria began in April 1792, Lafayette commanded one of the armies on the eastern frontier. In June he denounced the Jacobins, first by letter and then in person at the bar of the Assembly. After the monarchy fell on 10 August he tried to turn his army against the new power in Paris, found that it would not follow him, and on 19 August crossed with a few officers into the Austrian Netherlands. The Austrians treated him as a prisoner, not a refugee: he spent five years in Prussian and Austrian fortresses, the last at Olmütz in Moravia, where Adrienne and their two daughters joined him in 1795. Her grandmother, mother and sister had been guillotined in Paris in July 1794. He was freed in September 1797, at Bonaparte's insistence during the peace talks with Austria.

Back in France after 1799, he kept his distance from Napoleon and voted against making him consul for life. Adrienne died in 1807. Under the restored Bourbons he sat as a liberal deputy; in 1824–25 he toured all twenty-four United States as the nation's guest; and in the July Revolution of 1830 he took command of the National Guard once more, embracing Louis-Philippe on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville in the folds of a tricolour flag. He died in Paris on 20 May 1834 and was buried at Picpus beside Adrienne, under soil he had brought back from America.