Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette: Hero of Two Revolutions

At nineteen, he bought a ship with his own fortune to sail to a rebellion that was not his own, defying his king and his family to fight for American independence. He would go on to draft a declaration of rights in France, survive five years in Austrian dungeons, and return to America thirty years later to be mobbed by adoring crowds in all twenty-four states. Few careers straddled two revolutions, and two continents' idea of liberty, as literally as his.

A Fortune and a Cause

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier was born September 6, 1757, in Chavaniac, in the Auvergne region of France, into an old noble family. His father, an army officer, was killed in battle when Gilbert was two; his mother died young as well, leaving him, by his early teens, heir to an extraordinary fortune — roughly 25,000 livres a year from his mother's estate and 120,000 more from an uncle's bequest. He was educated at the Collège du Plessis in Paris and trained as a cavalry officer at the Académie de Versailles, entering the King's Musketeers as a commissioned officer at thirteen. In 1774 he married Adrienne de Noailles, a match arranged for family advantage that grew, by all evidence, into genuine devotion; she would later share his imprisonment and die from its effects.

Rather than settle into the comfortable career expected of a young marquis, Lafayette became convinced that the American colonists' revolt was a just cause worth risking everything for. He purchased and outfitted a ship, the Victoire, at his own expense — some 112,000 pounds — and sailed for South Carolina against the wishes of the French court, landing on June 13, 1777. The Continental Congress, badly needing European allies and unable to pay him, commissioned him a major general anyway, at nineteen, serving without salary. He met George Washington on August 5, 1777, and the two formed an almost immediate bond that shaped the rest of both men's lives.

Blood at Brandywine, Glory at Yorktown

Lafayette's American war was not ceremonial. At the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777 he was shot in the leg while rallying retreating troops and was formally commended for bravery. He fought at Rhode Island alongside the French fleet, pressed Washington to the front at the critical moment at Monmouth, and skillfully extracted his men from a superior British force at Barren Hill. After a return trip to France to lobby for more troops and money, he came back in 1780 and took senior command of combined American and French operations. At the siege of Yorktown in the autumn of 1781, his troops helped pin Cornwallis's army in place and stormed one of the key British redoubts; Cornwallis's surrender on October 19, 1781, effectively ended the war. France made him a maréchal de camp, skipping him past numerous ranks, and a Knight of the Order of Saint Louis.

Architect and Casualty of the French Revolution

Home in France, Lafayette carried the American example directly into French politics. Elected to represent the nobility at the Estates General in 1789, he helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, working in close consultation with Thomas Jefferson, and modeled it explicitly on the American precedent. Named commander of the newly formed Paris National Guard on July 15, 1789, he is credited with proposing the tricolor cockade that combined the white of the monarchy with the red and blue of Paris.

His moderation, an asset in America, became a liability in Paris. He wanted a constitutional monarchy on the English or American model, not the abolition of the crown, and he founded a political club to counter the more radical Jacobins. That balancing act collapsed on July 17, 1791, when he ordered the National Guard to fire on a crowd at the Champ de Mars demanding the king's removal; estimates of the dead range from a dozen to over fifty, and his popular standing never recovered. Named to command an army on the frontier the following year, he denounced the increasingly radical Assembly, was declared a traitor, and fled toward Austrian-held territory in August 1792 — only to be captured and imprisoned as a dangerous revolutionary by the very monarchies he had hoped would shelter him.

Five Years in Chains

Lafayette spent more than five years in Austrian and Prussian custody — at Nivelles, Luxembourg, the Prussian fortress of Wesel, Magdeburg, and finally the grim fortress of Olmütz in Moravia — much of it in solitary confinement. His wife Adrienne and their daughters were eventually allowed to join him in 1795, an ordeal that permanently damaged her health. He was freed only in 1797 through Napoleon Bonaparte's diplomatic pressure at the Treaty of Campo Formio. Napoleon later offered him honors and posts, including a Senate seat and a diplomatic mission to the United States; Lafayette, who had voted against making Bonaparte consul for life, declined them all and retired to his estate at La Grange. Adrienne died in 1807 from complications tied to her imprisonment.

The Nation's Guest

Lafayette re-entered public life after the Bourbon Restoration, serving in the Chamber of Deputies and opposing the narrow, property-based franchise of the restored monarchy. In 1824, at the invitation of President James Monroe, he returned to the United States for the fiftieth anniversary of independence and was received with unprecedented adulation: he toured all twenty-four states over sixteen months, met an aging John Adams, visited Jefferson at Monticello and Jackson at the Hermitage, laid the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument, and sailed home aboard a US frigate renamed Brandywine in his honor. Congress voted him $200,000 and a large tract of Florida land in gratitude.

Age did not quiet him. In the July Revolution of 1830 he again commanded the Paris National Guard and was offered what amounted to dictatorial power; he refused it as unconstitutional and instead backed Louis-Philippe as a constitutional compromise, later breaking with him over the new king's authoritarian drift. He gave his last speech in the Chamber of Deputies in January 1834 and died in Paris on May 20, 1834, at seventy-six. He was buried beside Adrienne under soil brought from Bunker Hill; when news reached Washington, President Jackson ordered him honored as Washington himself had been, and John Quincy Adams delivered a three-hour eulogy calling him one of "the pure and disinterested benefactors of mankind."

Why Gilbert Is Called a Genius

"Genius" is not quite the right word for Lafayette, and the sources make no claim that it is. His gift was not intellectual originality — he was not a political theorist in the mold of Jefferson or a general of Washington's tactical stature — but an unusual, almost reckless consistency of principle joined to real physical courage and a talent for personal diplomacy. He staked his fortune and later his freedom on an idea, constitutional liberty balanced against monarchy, and held to it whether it was popular in Paris, unpopular with the Jacobins, or dangerous under the Austrians. That consistency let him do something rarer than genius: he served as a living link between two revolutions, trusted enough by Washington to receive real command and trusted enough by French moderates to draft their founding document. The honest counter-case is substantial. His judgment failed badly and lethally at the Champ de Mars, his belief that a constitutional monarchy could contain revolutionary energy proved wrong, and his later flight into Austrian hands was a serious miscalculation. He was, by the evidence, a man of exceptional integrity and courage whose politics were frequently outpaced by the events around him — not a genius of ideas, but a rare case of principle sustained across a lifetime of upheaval.

Legacy

Lafayette remains the most honored foreigner in American history, with dozens of cities, counties, and streets bearing his name, from Fayetteville to LaGrange. In France his legacy is more contested, claimed by liberals as a founder of constitutional government and criticized by both royalists and radicals for choices made in 1791 and 1792. What endures on both sides of the Atlantic is the image of the young marquis who left a comfortable life to fight for an idea, and stayed loyal to it — imperfectly, but unmistakably — for the next sixty years.