Hero of Two Worlds

Mike Duncan's biography traces the life of the marquis de Lafayette from his birth in rural France through the American and French Revolutions, decades of imprisonment and exile, and a final return to revolutionary activism, presenting him as a man whose commitment to liberty carried him through nearly six decades of public life.

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier was born on September 6, 1757, at Château de Chavaniac in the Auvergne region of France, into an ancient but impoverished noble family. His father was killed in the Seven Years' War when Gilbert was two, and his mother died when he was 12, leaving him an orphan but also, through inherited wealth, one of the richest young men in France. The powerful Noailles family arranged his marriage at 16 to 14-year-old Marie Adrienne Françoise de Noailles, known as Adrienne, absorbing him into the highest circles of aristocracy. Lafayette floundered at court, and a military reform eliminated his commission at 18, leaving him adrift. When he learned that Silas Deane, a Connecticut lawyer dispatched by the Second Continental Congress, was secretly recruiting French officers for the colonial rebellion against Britain, Lafayette seized his chance. He purchased a ship called La Victoire with his own money, secured a commission as major general, and in April 1777 sailed for America against the wishes of his family and the French government.

After a difficult Atlantic crossing and an initial rebuff from Congress, Lafayette won acceptance by offering to serve without pay. At the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777, he was shot through the calf while rallying retreating troops, earning George Washington's admiration and a rising reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. Over the winter at Valley Forge, Lafayette deepened his bond with Washington, forming the central relationship of his life, and developed lasting friendships with Colonel Alexander Hamilton and Colonel John Laurens, aides-de-camp on Washington's staff. He proved himself a capable officer, participated in the troubled Franco-American campaign at Newport, Rhode Island, and returned to France in early 1779 as a celebrated hero. Back in Paris, he helped secure a French expeditionary force under the comte de Rochambeau.

Lafayette returned to America in 1780 and led an elite light infantry brigade before being dispatched to Virginia to counter British raids. Vastly outnumbered by Lord Cornwallis's forces, he conducted a campaign of retreat and harassment until Washington and Rochambeau raced south. The resulting siege of Yorktown in the fall of 1781, with Lafayette overseeing the storming of key redoubts, ended with Cornwallis's surrender and effectively concluded the war.

Between the wars, Lafayette transformed himself from soldier into social reformer. He championed religious toleration for French Protestants, advocated prison reform, and became a committed abolitionist. In 1786, he purchased a plantation in Cayenne, in the French colony of Guiana, intending to gradually free the enslaved people there through paid wages and education. He wrote Washington proposing they jointly prove emancipation was safe and beneficial, but Washington demurred. Lafayette joined abolition societies in France, England, and New York, becoming the first person with membership in emancipation movements in three countries.

When France's financial crisis erupted in 1786, Lafayette was among the notables summoned by the king to resolve it. At the Assembly of Notables in 1787, he called for the convening of a "national assembly," stunning his colleagues. Over the next two years, as political conflict merged with environmental disaster and famine, Lafayette helped guide France toward revolution through the Society of Thirty, a group of liberal nobles and intellectuals who funded pamphlets and shaped public discourse.

The Estates-General convened in May 1789. Lafayette, bound by an oath to his provincial electors, watched from the sidelines as the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly and swore the Tennis Court Oath. On July 11, he presented a draft declaration of rights articulating principles of natural freedom, equality, consent of the governed, and separation of powers. Three days later, a mob stormed the Bastille. Lafayette was appointed commander-general of the newly formed National Guard and designed the tricolor cockade, combining blue and red for Paris with white for the Bourbon monarchy, which became the permanent national colors of France.

For two years, Lafayette walked a treacherous line between liberty and order. During the Women's March on Versailles in October 1789, he escorted the royal family to Paris and, in an improvised gesture, kissed Queen Marie Antoinette's hand on the palace balcony to transform the crowd's hostility into cheers. At the Fête de la Fédération on July 14, 1790, he led the nation in an oath of unity at the peak of his influence. The decline was swift: His support for violent suppression of a military mutiny at Nancy alienated radicals, King Louis XVI's attempted flight to Varennes in June 1791 exposed Lafayette's inability to control the sovereign, and on July 17, the National Guard fired on demonstrators at the Champ de Mars, killing an estimated 50 people and destroying Lafayette's reputation.

After the insurrection of August 10, 1792, overthrew the monarchy, Lafayette attempted to march his army on Paris, but his soldiers refused. He crossed into Austrian territory expecting safe passage but was instead imprisoned as a dangerous revolutionary. He spent five years in prisons at Wesel, Magdeburg, Neisse, and Olmütz, enduring solitary confinement and deteriorating health. Back in France, the Reign of Terror claimed many of his relatives: Adrienne's mother, sister, and grandmother were guillotined. Adrienne survived 14 months of imprisonment and eventually joined her husband in captivity at Olmütz with their daughters. Napoleon Bonaparte's Italian campaign in 1797 finally provided the leverage for the family's release.

The Lafayettes settled at La Grange, an estate southeast of Paris. Lafayette maintained frank relations with Napoleon, telling the First Consul he would never endorse the regime as conforming to his ideas of liberty. When Napoleon held a referendum on becoming consul for life in 1802, Lafayette voted no. Napoleon attempted to buy Lafayette's support by returning and then repurchasing his largest Cayenne plantation for 140,000 livres, but the contract required Lafayette to renounce all claims to the people on the property, effectively re-enslaving those he had once purchased to free. Napoleon soon reestablished slavery in the French colonies. Adrienne died on Christmas Eve 1807, devastating Lafayette.

Lafayette waited out Napoleon's reign until the emperor's fall in 1814. During the Hundred Days of 1815, he was elected to the Chamber of Representatives and helped push Napoleon toward abdication after Waterloo. Under the Bourbon Restoration, he returned to politics, winning election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1818 and advocating for press freedom and liberal reform. When legal avenues were blocked, he secretly joined the French Carbonari, a revolutionary organization, though several planned uprisings collapsed.

In 1824, Lafayette accepted President James Monroe's invitation to tour the United States. Over 16 months, he visited all 24 states as "The Nation's Guest," reuniting with aging veterans and consistently advocating for abolition. His final revolution came in July 1830, when King Charles X suspended press freedom and dissolved the elected chamber. Paris erupted, and Lafayette took command of the remobilized National Guard. He helped install the duc d'Orléans as King Louis Philippe I, appearing on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville and wrapping the duke in a tricolor flag. But the new king quickly pivoted to conservatism, and Lafayette was stripped of his command by Christmas.

Lafayette died on May 20, 1834, and was buried beside Adrienne in the Picpus Cemetery, with soil from Bunker Hill poured over his coffin. At a Fourth of July celebration two years earlier, Samuel F. B. Morse captured the essential character of his long life: "He is a tower amid the waters, his foundation is upon a rock, he moves not with the ebb and flow of the stream" (436).