Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette has often received recognition for helping the United States of America flap her fledgling wings and gain independence from Great Britain. But his position in the French Revolution is less discussed. Follow his career in his own country during the tumultuous decades of the late 18th century.
Lafayette and the French Revolution
The eventful summer of 1789 found Lafayette riding a wave of popularity at home. His role in the American Revolution gave him favor among all French revolutionaries.
For his part, Lafayette saw the initial turmoil of the French Revolution as indication of a healthy struggle for democracy. He hoped it would prosper like the American experiment in self-government. He fully endorsed the purpose of Jacobin club members who banded together to defend the new French Constitution. However as 1789 gave place to 1790 and the Jacobins began to demand the deposition of King Louis XVI, Lafayette withdrew his initial support.
He allied himself with the Feuillants instead, a political club who favored constitutional monarchy. Although Lafayette considered himself an ardent friend to liberty, he believed that the rights of the people could be established and protected by the Constitution. A balanced body of law, he believed, could check the excesses of the monarchy, regulate the clergy and nobility, and promote the rights of the common citizen simultaneously.
Lafayette and the National Guard
Following the attack on the Bastille in July of 1789, the National Assembly realized that some entity must keep the peace in an increasingly riotous capital. So they created the National Guard. They appointed Lafayette commander of the volunteer force. His duties included keeping the higher classes from revenging themselves on the lower, or vice versa.
Before three months had passed, Lafayette and his guards had to intervene to keep a mob from attacking the royal family at Versailles. Parisians demanded that the king move to Paris. When the royal family did not comply the mob turned ugly and broke into the palace. Lafayette arrived in time to find the terrified Queen Marie Antoinette seeking refuge in the King’s apartments. He convinced the king and queen to speak to the crowd. Lafayette’s appearance pacified the mob and the royal family was allowed to depart unharmed for Tuileries.
Lafayette, Danton, and Robespierre
Lafayette’s popularity did not survive a year. As the Jacobins flooded Paris with pamphlets defaming their opponents, Lafayette was increasingly termed a royalist, a spy, a puppet who pretended to favor democracy only for his own safety.
His public image received another blow during the Champ de Mars Massacre in 1791. Danton and the Cordeliers had been holding a public rally on the square. The assembled crowd, under the influence of alcohol and oratory, decided that two men found hiding under the wooden platform were spies. They proceeded to hang them. The National Guard arrived on the scene and tried to disperse the mob. After the crowd refused to comply, the Guards supposedly fired shots into the assembly. Lafayette, although not present, was held responsible for the death of innocent civilians by “his” National Guard.
This massacre, coupled with the king’s near escape that same year, laid Lafayette open to Robespierre’s charge that he was working to restore the old order. Lafayette had to resign in public disgrace. He was not silent however. He urged the young government to check the radical elements within it, (by which he meant the Jacobins), and to concentrate on establishing a peace treaty with their foreign enemies Austria and Prussia.
Lafayette and the French War with Austro-Prussia
Instead of taking his advice, the government appointed Lafayette to command one of three divisions sent to fight the advancing Austro-Prussian troops. Lafayette led his men to the border with many qualms about the kind of government he left behind him in the capital.
The military campaign went disastrously. When the Jacobins seized full political power, Lafayette decided it was time to retreat. He deserted his post in the army in 1792. A short time later the French Legislative Assembly declared him guilty of treason.
He attempted to flee France and sail for America from the Netherlands. But he did not succeed. Austrian troops in Belgium captured him and held him as a prisoner of war in various dungeons around Germany and Austria for the next five years.
Ironically foreign imprisonment may have saved his life. Robespierre would doubtless have marked such a prominent head for the guillotine. As it was, Lafayette survived the Reign of Terror and lived into the Napoleonic Age.
Sources
Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
La Fayette: Citizen of Two Worlds. Online Exhibition from the Cornell La Fayette Collection in the Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. Accessed January 22, 2010.
Reel number 1, Marquis de Lafayette Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
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