by Sarah Vowell
The purpose of Lafayette’s letter was to buck up his friend and mentor in light of a plot orchestrated by a few Continental Army officers and congressmen to oust Washington as commander. Lafayette, who may have been more appalled by this conspiracy than Washington himself, worried that the patriots’ greatest enemy might not be Great Britain’s formidable military. “I see plainly that America can defend herself if proper measures are taken,” he wrote, adding ominously, “and now I begin to fear she should be lost by herself and her own sons.”
The congressmen and officers who horrified Lafayette by plotting behind Washington’s back probably could have spared a moment to toast Washington for the miracle of keeping his underfunded hodgepodge of newbies from disintegrating. Especially since they were confronting such a venerable, well-oiled fighting force led by seasoned commanders who came from the sort of military families that had for generations made sure that there would always be an England. But Washington’s critics were way too preoccupied with how he had just hemorrhaged twenty percent of his troops by losing two major battles, thereby handing the British control of the capital, Philadelphia—all within three weeks. So while Lafayette’s faith in his comrade turned out to be well founded in the long run, Washington’s frenemies cannot be written off as mere petty schemers indulging in what one of his supporters belittled as “the shafts of envy and malevolence.”
Oh, the men in the Second Continental Congress were not lacking envy and malevolence any more than the sweethearts of the 113th Congress. Yet one of the naysayers wrote to John Adams about Washington’s recent failures, despairing of what would happen “if our congress can witness these things with composure and suffer them to pass without an enquiry.” In other words, technically, the congressional job description at that moment required kicking George Washington when he was down. The polite name for it is civilian oversight.
The thing that drew me to Lafayette as a subject—that he was that rare object of agreement in the ironically named United States—kept me coming back to why that made him unique. Namely, that we the people have never agreed on much of anything. Other than a bipartisan consensus on barbecue and Meryl Streep, plus that time in 1942 when everyone from Bing Crosby to Oregonian schoolchildren heeded FDR’s call to scrounge up rubber for the war effort, disunity is the through line in the national plot—not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people’s privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington’s army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen’s pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbors, getting on each other’s nerves is our right.
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In 1777, the nineteen-year-old Lafayette lit out for the New World for a few reasons, including a juvenile lust for glory, the appeal of escaping his nagging in-laws, boredom with the court shenanigans of Versailles, and a head full of Enlightenment chitchat about liberty and equality. But the boy’s most obvious motivation in crossing the Atlantic to join the American colonists’ war against the British crown was probably the simple glaring fact that before his second birthday, a British cannonball killed his soldier father in the Seven Years’ War.
The Battle of Minden, in which Lafayette’s father died (and a young Cornwallis fought), was just one of the many British triumphs of 1759, the so-called annus mirabilis in which they trounced the French from Quebec to India to the extent that one member of Parliament snorted, “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories.” Per the humiliating peace treaty that ended the war in 1763, France had to give almost all of French Canada to Britain, as well as Louisiana to Spain to make up for the Spanish loss of Florida. Thus the massive chunk of North America claimed by France for more than two centuries—from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico—was downsized to scraps. They were left with fishing rights off Newfoundland and a couple of foggy islands where they were allowed to dry cod and presumably their tears.
Thus Lafayette’s private contempt for Englishmen mirrored the larger French national hatred of Great Britain—a grudge the American rebels later exploited to drum up French support.
The death of his father at the hands of British forces merely provided the boy with a specific target at a young age. Soldiering in general was his destiny, just as it had been for his father before him and most of the grandfathers before that, stretching back to Joan of Arc and the Crusades.
War being the family business explains the boy’s ample birth name: Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, future Marquis de Lafayette. “I was baptized like a Spaniard,” he joked in his memoirs, “with the name of every conceivable saint who might offer me more protection in battle.”
It might be more specific to say that dying young in combat was the family business. All those chivalrous young casualties felled far from home may even explain how the family Lafayette sustained such a long line of warriors for hundreds of years: few of them had to grow up around jangled relatives damaged by war. In my family, one shell-shocked World War II vet flinching at firecrackers every Fourth of July for fifty years personified the painful side effects of military service. Even years after my uncle’s death, Independence Day is not only the anniversary of Jefferson’s Declaration. To me, it’s the anniversary of July 4, 1946, when fireworks hurled Uncle John A., who had just gotten home from the Philippines, into a combat flashback so real and frightening that he pushed his poor date down into what he thought was a foxhole and slammed a park bench right on top of her.
According to Lafayette’s assessment of his warmongering ancestors, “so large a proportion of fathers and sons were killed on the field of battle that the family’s misfortunes in war became a kind of proverb throughout the province.”
Then, as now, the province in question, Auvergne, was one of the least-populated regions in Europe, a mostly rural slice of central France known for agricultural products like blue cheese made from the milk of the many cows grazing its green, volcanic hills. Gilbert, as the redheaded boy was called, was born in 1757 in the Château de Chavaniac, his paternal manor house in a tiny hamlet around three hundred miles south of Paris. And by tiny, I mean Chavaniac’s population in 2007 was 291.
Curious what present-day Parisians think of the people of Auvergne, I asked a friend who lives there to ask around. And with the traditional Parisian generosity of spirit, a woman named Agnes reported back, “They are especially known for being miserly.” She added that the ones who move from Auvergne to Paris tend to become café waiters and are therefore of “the lower class.” This was an amusing if mean revelation, because, to American tourists, Paris café waiters are the front line of making us feel like rubes. The uppity servers rolling their eyes at our poorly pronounced drink orders are actually former farm kids? It reminds me of how the raggedy Continental Army regulars mistook French enlisted men for officers because their flashy uniforms were festooned with pink collars and red velvet lapels. Agnes did caution against lumping Lafayette with the hayseeds who were his boyhood playmates, adding, “Lafayette was a nobleman and therefore not in the same category as the men I just described.”
Lafayette might have been a nobleman, but he was still a country boy. According to his memoirs, the highlight of his childhood was when the region was terrorized by some sort of hybrid wolf-hyena-dog monster—the exact species remains up for debate to this day. Whatever it was, the Beast of Gévaudan, as it was known, stalked the countryside mauling peasants. The eight-year-old Lafayette, with “an enthusiasm for glorious deeds,” went on the hunt. The fact that a child that age was allowed to go out looking for the four-legged serial killer that the king had dispatched his personal gun-bearer to track down speaks of an older, hands-off parenting style. “Meeting it was the object of all my walks,” Lafayette remembered, foreshadowing his later can-do courage on the battlefield.
The Château de Chavaniac looms at the top of a small hill, a dark
gray rectangle bookended by a pair of round feudal towers. Surfaced in natural rocks instead of cut stone, it has a rough texture that makes it appear even older than its medieval roots. Visiting the place today provides insight into Lafayette’s later soft spot for the American bumpkins he served with—as well as an understanding of just how imprecise the French word “château” is. The rustic gloom of the Château de Chavaniac is a Woody Guthrie song compared to the Liberace concert that is the Château de Versailles.
I arrive too early on an icy December morning for the château to be open and decide to kill some time over a cup of tea in the village bar-tabac. The waitress and a pair of patrons seem surprised to see an outsider pop in, but they welcome me, along with my driver, an overdressed city slicker from Lyon. Given the proximity of Lafayette’s house, the townsfolk must be used to the occasional American looky-loo passing through town. Still, the place feels like enough of an old-fangled French time warp that when an elderly local comes in from the cold, the driver sizes up the new arrival and whispers with absolute certainty, “He’s here for his 9:30 white wine.” Sure enough, a glass of the stuff is placed before him on the bar. I must have some puritanical look on my face, because the driver laughs and says, “Welcome to France.”
The Château de Chavaniac is a museum open to the public, but only in warmer months, because the old rock pile lacks heat. Xavier Comte, a kindly official with the regional tourism bureau, has agreed to open the house for my benefit, possibly for the simple reason that Lafayette would want him to.
Monsieur Comte is game to show me around Chavaniac as long as I promise to dress warmly because of the area’s “rigorous winters.” The temperature the day of my visit is around twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit, which is barely noticeable in the dry mountains where I grew up. Yet damp European winters always bite harder, as if every day below freezing carries within it bitter memories of all the other cold days since Hannibal crossed the Alps.
My e-mails to Monsieur Comte before my arrival benefited from the polish of Google Translate, so my laughable French takes him by surprise. I had one of those impractical educations in the language. I learned to fake my way through Proust, but a quarter century later, all that’s left is me slaughtering addresses in taxis.
As a kindness, Monsieur Comte starts speaking French wonderfully, hilariously slowly, as though I were a brain-damaged simpleton who had imbibed too much of the 9:30 wine. We move from the original, medieval areas of the house to rooms added later and adorned with Louis-something-style chairs or, in the chamber where Lafayette was born, toile wallpaper. Comte mentions (I’m pretty sure) Lafayette’s warrior ancestors and the beloved grandmother who raised him here after his mother, distraught over her husband’s death, returned to Paris to stay with her family.
At the age of eleven, Lafayette’s mother wrenched him away from his grandmother’s pastoral home, summoning him to Paris and school. “I felt not a bit of curiosity to see the capital,” he complained. His mother’s family was even fancier than his father’s. Nobility originally from Brittany, they descended from King Louis IX and were well connected to the court of Louis XV.
At twelve, the boy without a father was left motherless as well. He was suddenly the richest orphan in France after his mother and her grandfather died within days of each other, adding vast lands in Brittany to Lafayette’s paternal holdings in Auvergne. So he was loaded if bereft, pointing out, “I had not thought but to lament my mother, never having experienced any need for money.”
Besides the money and land, Lafayette inherited a six-foot-tall hole in his heart that only a father figure like George Washington could fill. According to Jefferson, Lafayette’s “foible is a canine appetite for popularity.” The orphaned only child’s puppyish yearning for kinship is at the root of his accomplishments in America, the source of his keyed-up eagerness to distinguish himself, particularly on the battlefield. He tended to confuse glory with love.
After his mother’s death, young Lafayette, “burning with desire to be in uniform,” was sent to Versailles to follow in his great-grandfather’s footsteps and join the Black Musketeers, the aristocratic horsey set serving as the king’s household troops. He also attended the riding school at Versailles along with three future kings of France. What with his haughty blood, the rarefied company he kept, and, not least, his considerable wealth, this eligible bachelor was off the market before he turned fifteen.
The powerful duc d’Ayen, Jean de Noailles, the brigadier general of the king’s armies, arranged a marriage between Lafayette and his daughter Adrienne, age twelve. But when the duke’s wife found out, she was appalled at the idea of making a child bride out of her child and raised a ruckus. The duchess agreed to the arrangement only on the condition that the children wait a couple of years—and that Adrienne be kept in the dark. Even after the wedding in 1774, Adrienne’s mother vetoed consummation, sequestering the two in separate bedrooms.
The Lafayette-Noailles wedding reception was a big-enough deal that King Louis XV attended. I hope he was hungry, if the menu for the soirée that’s on display at the Château de Chavaniac is to be believed: there were thirty salads alone, plus roasted meats of just about every bird and mammal in France, with the possible exception of barbecued Beast of Gévaudan.
Louis XV died a few weeks after the Lafayette nuptials (from smallpox, not the opulent wedding spread), and his nineteen-year-old grandson was crowned Louis XVI in 1774. Rich blue bloods such as Lafayette and his recent bride were, theoretically, ideal additions to the new Austrian-born queen’s guest list. That is until Marie Antoinette literally laughed Lafayette off her dance floor. “The favor I enjoyed among the young nobility was short-lived,” Lafayette admitted. As his friend the Comte de Ségur put it, the yokel from Auvergne “seemed awkward, danced badly and spoke little.” Witnessing Lafayette blatantly botch a dance with Marie Antoinette at one of her swanky balls, Ségur winced that Lafayette “proved so clumsy and so awkward that the queen laughed at him.” According to Lafayette, “My awkward country manners—and a certain self-respect—made it impossible for me to adapt entirely to the required graces of the court.”
However, he was smooth enough to get past his mother-in-law’s obstacles keeping him from his wife’s boudoir. Adrienne was soon pregnant with their first child. His father-in-law was just as controlling, setting up Lafayette with a dull if distinguished job as a court flunky to the king’s brother and heir, the Count of Provence. Part of Lafayette’s marriage arrangement included a commission as an officer in the prestigious family cavalry unit, the Noailles Regiment, and he wanted to stay there and pursue a military career like his forefathers. Lafayette must have suspected that the only thing the portly Provence was likely to attack was a lunch buffet. And so he insulted his prospective employer, thereby talking his way out of the job, much to his father-in-law’s dismay. Said Lafayette, “I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence.” Spoken like every only child ever.
Lafayette happily continued soldiering, and three noteworthy things happened: news of the first shots in the American Revolution reached France; the Comte de Broglie, commander of the Army of the East and thus the general Lafayette was serving under at a training camp in the city of Metz, invited him to become a member of his military Masonic lodge; and Lafayette joined his brother Masons at dinner in Metz with the Duke of Gloucester, who made a big impression on Lafayette by letting rip a biting condemnation of his own brother’s treatment of his American subjects—his brother being Britain’s King George III.
After that, Lafayette swooned in his memoirs, “I gave my heart to the Americans.”
Incidentally, a rather action-packed equestrian statue commemorates Lafayette’s political arousal in Metz. He has his sword drawn with one hand while the other reins in his twisting horse, as if he has suddenly decided to ride through the night to Boston Harbor. The American Knights of Columbus donated the bronze sculpture to the city in 1920
both as a nod to the French contributions to the founding of the United States and as a grief-stricken token of remembrance for the American and French casualties of World War I. The Nazis tore down the statue out of spite when they occupied the city in World War II. In 2004, Lafayette and his horse were restored to their rightful spot before the Governor’s Palace on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Metz in 1944, when the U.S. Third Army under General George S. Patton defeated the Wehrmacht forces controlling the town.
As for Lafayette becoming a Freemason: one did not have to be an orphaned only child to be predisposed to joining a mysterious brotherhood with snazzy secret handshakes, but it didn’t hurt. Famous Freemason Benjamin Franklin said of the group, “While each lodge is created from individual members and while individuality is treasured, lodges are designed to be sociable and to encourage mutual works.” What a perfect arrangement for Lafayette, who harbored contradictory ambitions to both fit in and stick out.
Lafayette may have been in a Masonic lodge when he first heard the names of his fellow Masons Franklin and George Washington and their struggle against their government. (Fun fact: Washington went on to lay the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol building in 1793 wearing a Masonic apron embroidered for him by Adrienne, Lafayette’s wife.)
Devoted to principles of liberty, equality, and religious tolerance—which, dear Internet, is not necessarily the same thing as Satanism—Masonic lodges became the de facto clubhouses of the Age of Reason, attracting the French Enlightenment writers Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose influential book The Social Contract famously despaired, “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”
Hanging around Masonic lodges back in Paris, Lafayette came under the sway of Abbé Guillaume Raynal, a defrocked Jesuit priest turned writer. When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal’s 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day. Chronicling centuries of subjugation of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, Raynal took the European monarchies to task for colonialism and slavery. (An especially inconvenient opinion in France, an empire financially and chemically dependent on the sugar cultivated by slaves in its Caribbean colonies.) Raynal’s abolitionist beliefs had a profound effect on Lafayette, who went on to join the French abolitionist group the Society of the Friends of the Blacks and to purchase a cinnamon plantation in French Guiana to emancipate its slaves, educate them, and pay them for their labor.
