Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834)

Sources

French officer

Hands Across the Sea. More than anyone else, Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert de Motier, Marquis de Lafayette symbolizes the assistance Americans received from Europeans in their struggle for independence. Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben wrote the tactical manual for the American army and drilled it in European methods; Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur comte de Rochambeau commanded an army at Newport and Yorktown; Adm. François-Joseph-Paul de Grasse was crucial to the victory at Yorktown; Baron Johann de Kalb commanded a division and was wounded at Camden; Thaddeus Kosciusko designed the defenses at Saratoga and West Point; and Count Casimir Pulaski was mortally wounded at the head of his cavalry unit at the siege of Savannah. But no foreign officer was so revered in his lifetime and afterward as the Marquis de Lafayette.

Background. Born in the Auvergne, Lafayette was orphaned before his second birthday when his father was killed at the Battle of Minden. His mother died in 1770, while he was studying at the Collège du Piessis of the University of Paris. He joined the King’s Musketeers in 1771 and purchased a commission as captain in the dragoons in 1774, after marrying into the powerful Noailles family. Wealth and an entrée at the French court were not enough to satisfy him. In 1776 he offered his services to the Continental Army and was commissioned a major general.

War and Diplomacy. Serving as an unpaid volunteer without a command, Lafayette distinguished himself at once, fighting gallantly and sustaining a leg wound at Brandywine on 11 September 1777. When he returned to duty in December, it was as aide-de-camp to Gen. George Washington. His support was invaluable to Washington in the bleak days of Valley Forge. By the time he fought in the Battle of Monmouth in June 1778, he had an excellent reputation and a close relationship with Washington, who appointed him liaison officer when Admiral d’Estaing’s fleet arrived. In 1779 he returned to France bearing messages from the Continental Congress and helping arrange for a French expeditionary force. He was promoted to colonel in the French army for his efforts. Returning to the colonies, he was given command of the Virginia light infantry, refusing to let the numerically superior British close with his smaller force until Gen. Charles Cornwallis moved into Yorktown. Here once again his skills in liaison between French and American forces were of inestimable value in arranging the amphibious siege of Yorktown. When he returned to France in 1782, it was as a major general in the French army.

An Eventful Life. Having accomplished more than most people do in a long life, Lafayette was only twenty-five and his rendezvous with destiny not yet complete. Upon the fall of the Bastille in 1789, he took command of the Paris National Guard to secure the city and promote reform. His moderation satisfied neither the reactionaries nor the radicals. After briefly commanding the French army in the war with Austria, he was charged with counterrevolutionary treason, fled to Austria, and was imprisoned there for five years as a revolutionary. During Napoleon Bonaparte’s reign he remained politically inactive but after 1815 served in the Chamber of Deputies and took part in many French and European political movements advancing democracy and the rights of man. When he toured America from 1824 to 1825 as part of the celebrations of the American Revolution, he was received with wild enthusiasm. In the French Revolution of 1830 he once again commanded the National Guard, then resigned to protest the stalling of reforms. When he died in 1834, he was buried in American soil brought to Paris for his grave.

Icon of Democracy. Though Lafayette was a skilled commander, it was his role as a symbol that immortalized him. Initially this role cast him as a symbol to the Americans of the support of the outside world for their cause, then as a symbol to the French of the worthiness of that cause. By the end of his life, he had come to symbolize the worldwide aspiration for democracy and the rights of man, and he was looked to by Belgians, Irish, Greeks, and South Americans as inspiration for their freedom struggles; but no one lionized him quite as much as the Americans, and when an American army landed in France in 1917 to fight alongside the French in World War I, it was an American general who said, “Lafayette, we are here!”

Sources

Peter Buckman, Lafayette: A Biography (New York: Paddington Press, 1977);

Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier Marquis de Lafayette, Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers, 1776-1790 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977);

Constance Wright, A Chance for Glory (New York: Holt, 1957).