Marquis de Lafayette: The Hero of Two Worlds

This video is brought to you by Squarespace. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. Check out Squarespace through the link in the description below. More about them in a bit.

Sometimes history throws us a figure so dynamic it seems like they’ve witnessed every important event of their era. In the case of the Marquis de Lafayette, he didn’t just witness these events; he often caused them. Born in the latter half of the 18th century, Lafayette’s life reads like a script for an epic Oscar winner. As a teenager, he fought in the American Revolutionary War. As a young man, he spearheaded the first phase of the French Revolution before fleeing a death sentence at the guillotine. He was friends with George Washington, Louis XVI, Thomas Jefferson, and Simón Bolívar, and was instrumental in both the downfall of Napoleon and the revolution that overthrew France’s last Bourbon king. In short, Lafayette was a man who packed a lot into his seven decades.

While he remains famous for his role in the Revolutionary War, how much do we really know about the rest of his life? Join us today as we peek inside the life of the Marquis de Lafayette, the man who changed the fate of both America and Europe forever.

When the Marquis de Lafayette was born on September 6, 1757, in France, it was into an old noble family of soldiers. In fact, the title Marquis de Lafayette is aristocratic, but since his real name was Marie Joseph Paul Évariste Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, we’ll just go with Lafayette for the rest of this video because it’s easier. While young Lafayette was both pampered and connected, he learned to ride horses in the company of three future kings. Life wasn’t exactly easy; when he was barely two, his father was killed fighting in the Seven Years’ War, and by the time he turned 13, he had also lost his mother and grandfather. Still, the gigantic fortune he inherited must have softened the blow.

By 1774, Lafayette was married and a courtier at the Versailles of newly crowned King Louis XVI. However, Lafayette came from fighting stock, and the pompous luxury of Versailles bored him. He wanted to win glory as a soldier and fight in some great war. Luckily for him, one of the greatest wars in history was about to begin.

On April 19, 1775, the growing animosity between Britain and its American colonies exploded when soldiers and local militiamen clashed at the towns of Lexington and Concord. It was the opening salvo of the Revolutionary War, often referred to as the shot heard around the world. Over in France, the Marquis de Lafayette certainly heard it. By the summer of 1777, 19-year-old Lafayette had become so obsessed with the war raging in America that he decided to join in. That July, he arrived in Philadelphia, where he presented himself to the Continental Congress. The Congress took one look at this scrawny teenager with no battle experience and initially dismissed him. However, when Lafayette declared that he was willing to fight for free, their calculation changed.

In the summer of 1777, the war was not going well for the Americans. Smallpox was devastating their ranks, and they had only won symbolic victories. The British were on the verge of capturing Philadelphia. Congress would take any free help they could get, which is how George Washington found himself face to face with a rich French teenager who had somehow been given the rank of major general. Washington had been saddled before with useless European royals who came over to fight because they were rich and looking for adventure, and invariably they turned out to be useless. However, Washington’s snap judgment would turn out to be wrong. Over the month of August 1777, Lafayette rose from being someone Washington couldn’t stand the sight of to his personal favorite. It helped that Lafayette was brave in battle and a natural leader of men.

Under Washington’s tutelage, the Marquis soon bloomed into a great general. He pulled off an impossible retreat from Barren Hill and was instrumental in harrying Benedict Arnold’s forces in 1781. More importantly, he soon became the fledgling nation’s best ambassador. In 1779, Lafayette returned to France to drum up support for the American revolutionaries. Although Louis XVI didn’t need much convincing that opposing Britain was a good idea, it was still impressive how much aid Lafayette managed to secure. By April 1780, Lafayette triumphantly reported to Washington that six thousand infantry and six ships were on their way from France.

His most impressive moment would come in 1781. That summer, in the run-up to Yorktown, Washington ordered both Lafayette and Anthony Wayne to head south into Virginia. Both their troops were in need of reinforcements. While Wayne executed the ringleaders of a mutiny, Lafayette took a different approach. He told his men they were free to go, leveling with them about the dangers they faced. He reminded them of what they were fighting for and why they had signed up. After Lafayette’s speech, nearly all of the deserters returned. He rewarded them by spending his own money on new boots and blankets, and together they marched toward Yorktown and into history.

It was Lafayette’s troops who were partly responsible for trapping Lord Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown. Once Cornwallis surrendered on October 19th, it effectively marked the end of the Revolutionary War. In the aftermath, Lafayette was hailed as the hero of two worlds, and many states made him an honorary citizen. Returning to France, he was promoted to Marshal de Camp, or Brigadier General. It was a proud time in Lafayette’s life, not yet 25, having helped engineer the success of the American Revolution, the most significant revolt in living memory. Little could he have known that this was just a warm-up for the main act.

In the latter half of the 1780s, France made a grim discovery: it was broke. The royal treasury was empty, and credit lines were maxed out in the face of a countrywide financial collapse. Louis XVI made a fateful decision and summoned the Estates-General, a meeting of France’s three estates: the aristocracy, the church, and the commoners. Generally, French kings avoided calling the Estates-General; the last meeting had been in 1614, 174 years previously. But if Louis wanted to head off the brewing crisis, he had no choice. On May 4, 1789, 1,200 representatives of the three estates convened in Paris, among them Lafayette, elected as a deputy of the nobility.

While Lafayette was lumped in with the other French aristocrats, he wasn’t just another posh figure. He had spent years immersed in the ideals of American independence and was determined to bring them to France. The Estates-General officially opened on May 5th and quickly devolved into a massive debate about the regime. The commoners were fed up with living in a convoluted and backward France filled with pointless privileges and regressive taxation, but they were also tired of being outvoted and pushed around by the other two estates. On June 17th, the deputies of the Third Estate declared themselves a sovereign National Assembly, organized with Lafayette’s help.

The king tried to counter by locking the meeting hall, but the assembly repaired to a tennis court, where they took an oath not to disband until they had forced a liberal constitution on France. They had just the guy to write it: with help from his friend Thomas Jefferson, Lafayette drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, one of the most important documents ever written. In it, Lafayette set out his conception of universal rights with a strong emphasis on personal liberty. Although the assembly would redraft his work before adopting it, Lafayette’s ideas still heavily influenced the final version.

Three days after Lafayette presented the assembly with his draft, a Parisian mob stormed the Bastille and the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall. The morning after, representatives of Paris’s 60 districts convened at the Hôtel de Ville and declared the creation of their own National Assembly, the Paris Commune. As part of this shake-up, a city-wide National Guard was formed to replace the king’s men, and who could be a more natural fit as commander of the guards than the hero of two worlds? On July 17th, a reluctant Louis came down from Versailles to meet the man now heading the army that effectively controlled Paris. Lafayette saw the king wearing a revolutionary cockade and had a flash of inspiration, adding a strip of white cloth to the king’s cockade, representing the Bourbon monarchy.

Lafayette and Louis XVI then went out onto the balcony, where the gathered Parisians shouted, “Long live the king!” It was the birth of the tricolor, the revolutionary symbol that is still the flag of France. Lafayette hoped it would mark the birth of a liberal republic, one in which the king was a figurehead and the actual governing was done by middle-class business types. However, he would soon be proven wrong; the people of Paris were going to realize that they preferred their kings without heads at all.

Before the French inevitably began executing people, we want to take a moment to tell you about today’s wonderful sponsor, Squarespace. With Squarespace, if you have an idea for a website, business, or podcast, the only way to figure out whether that’s worth pursuing is to get it out there into the world. It can be daunting, but not knowing how to set up a website is not an excuse. Squarespace allows you to create a powerful website for whatever you’re up to. You can easily set up a store, handle podcasts, and more, all starting with a stunning template that you can customize. Once you’ve gone through the easy customization process, there are no updates or tech issues to deal with. Squarespace also handles all the website-related tasks, including social integrations and 24/7 customer support. So head to squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you’re ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/biographics to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Now, back to Lafayette. The wheels on Lafayette’s plan started coming off that same autumn. On October 5th, a riot over bread prices in Paris turned into an army of heavily armed, very unhappy women. The next day, they marched on Versailles, some 19 kilometers distant. When Lafayette got word, he first tried to stop them, only to realize his guardsmen would mutiny if he did. So the Marquis changed tack and rode out ahead of the angry women, nominally there to protect them but actually wondering what he was going to do when the mob arrived.

Lafayette zipped inside the palace to try and convince Louis to announce his support for the assembly’s liberal reforms. However, while he was talking, the crowd invaded the palace, killing two guards and sticking their heads on pikes. The situation was getting desperate, and Lafayette forced the king out onto a balcony to say his piece. It was a tense moment; the crowd could have easily broken in and lynched not just Louis but Lafayette too. Luckily, the plan worked, and the crowd began hollering along with the king, offering to escort Louis and his family back to Paris. It was more like they ordered him, understanding that saying no would result in his head being stuck on a pike too. Thus, the royal family was escorted back to the capital and effectively imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace.

Lafayette had bought them time and influence with the mob. From then on, he was at the forefront of the French Revolution. For the next year and a half, Lafayette stood as the assembly abolished feudalism and stripped powers from the aristocracy. He was the most visible symbol of the changes under his watch. The bourgeoisie gained new rights, and it was the mannered liberal revolution of Lafayette’s dreams. Sadly, it was already slipping out of his grasp.

The Marquis’s fall from grace came on July 17, 1791. On that day, the Paris National Guard opened fire on a group of protesters demanding the king’s resignation. Fifty people were injured or killed, and as commander of the guard, Lafayette’s popularity plummeted. He resigned his post and transferred into the army. With Lafayette sidelined, the radical elements began gaining power. By April 1792, the situation had escalated to the point where France declared war on Austria, beginning a series of conflicts that would wrack Europe for a quarter of a century.

Sent to lead one of the three main armies, Lafayette returned from the front to Paris twice to denounce the radicals and plead for common sense, but no one was listening. On August 10, 1792, a working-class revolt in Paris overthrew the monarchy and brought the hyper-radical faction, headed by Robespierre, to power. Seeing which way the winds were blowing, Lafayette abandoned his post and crossed the lines into enemy territory. Just in time, too; before news even arrived of his desertion, the assembly declared Lafayette a traitor, effectively inviting him to dance with Madame Guillotine.

Although Lafayette escaped with his head, his nightmare wasn’t over. Arrested by the Austrians, the Marquis spent the next five years shunted between jails, gloomily listening as the news from France got worse. Six months after Lafayette crossed the lines, Louis was guillotined, ending Lafayette’s hope of a constitutional monarchy. Another six months later, the Reign of Terror began. Although his former comrades in America begged for his release, there was nothing to be done; Lafayette had been sentenced to rot in a cell.

In just a few short years, a great man would ride to Lafayette’s rescue—perhaps the greatest man in European history: Napoleon Bonaparte. He would transform France’s fortunes. During Lafayette’s years in prison, the situation in France gradually reversed. On July 27, 1794, also known as 9 Thermidor, Robespierre was overthrown and subsequently guillotined. In the wake of the Thermidorian Reaction, the Directory rose to power, corrupt and reactionary. The French Directory would last a mere four years before it too was overthrown, but luckily for our story today, it did two very important things in those four years: it promoted a promising young general named Napoleon and insisted that any peace deal included the freeing of the Marquis de Lafayette.

On September 19, 1797, Lafayette walked free from his Austrian prison. At first, the Marquis thought Napoleon was awesome, but soon he grew worried about Napoleon’s ambition and lust for power. If Lafayette thought Napoleon’s ambition was excessive, he was in for a surprise. On November 9, 1799, Napoleon overthrew the Directory in the Coup of 18 Brumaire, installing himself as the First Consul of France. Dramatic as this was, Lafayette’s attention was elsewhere. On December 14, George Washington passed away in Virginia. Having already lost his real father, the Marquis now lost his surrogate one. This may help explain why Lafayette spent most of 1800 out of the picture.

It wasn’t until autumn that Napoleon tried courting the hero of two worlds, offering him an ambassadorship to America. When Lafayette gently inquired about France becoming a democracy, the reply he received was not encouraging. So Lafayette turned down the post and began speaking out against Napoleon. In May of 1802, he was one of the few voices to vote against Napoleon becoming First Consul for life, declaring, “I cannot vote for such a magistracy until public liberty has been sufficiently guaranteed.” But that guarantee never came, and Lafayette retired from public service that same year.

Although Thomas Jefferson offered to make him governor of the newly purchased Louisiana Territory in 1803, Lafayette refused. He also turned down another offer from Napoleon to be given an elevated rank in the Legion of Honor. When Napoleon finally had himself named Emperor on December 2, 1804, Lafayette seemed to have given up on politics entirely. However, he wouldn’t be able to resist coming back. In April 1814, the War of the Sixth Coalition ended with Napoleon abdicating and being sent into exile on the island of Elba. In the wake of the empire’s collapse, the Bourbon monarchy was recalled to the French throne in the portly shape of Louis XVIII.

The sight of yet another Bourbon king on the throne wasn’t exactly music to Lafayette’s soul. In his heart, he was still a child of the American Revolution and preferred a world without royals. But when forced to choose between another Bourbon king and Napoleon’s continued reign, the Marquis knew who he preferred. On March 1, 1815, Napoleon escaped the island prison and returned to France, causing Louis XVIII to flee. Napoleon marched on Paris, kick-starting a period known as the Hundred Days. Disgusted at Napoleon’s resurrection, Lafayette left retirement and took up a post in the Chamber of Deputies, determined to become a lone voice against the emperor’s tyranny.

Instead, he wound up helping to end Napoleon’s rule for good. In the aftermath of Waterloo that June, Napoleon’s brother came to the Chamber to rally support for the emperor. Instead, he was forced to listen as Lafayette made a barnstorming speech, laying the deaths of millions at Napoleon’s feet. Many of the younger deputies hadn’t realized until that moment that Lafayette, now pushing 60, was still alive. Regardless, the speech worked; afterward, Lafayette led the charge for Napoleon’s second abdication. On June 22, the emperor obliged, before going into his second exile. The Marquis then went to the Tuileries Palace to thank him. Napoleon met him not with anger or outrage, but with a wry smile, saying, “You got rid of me.”

However, the Bourbons were back—the kings Lafayette had fought so hard to rid France of 25 years ago. What would he do now? Lafayette would soon have an answer. Although no one in 1815 could have realized it, the Marquis was destined to extinguish the Bourbon line once and for all.

The next ten years were a decade of disappointment for Lafayette. Initially willing to give Louis XVIII a chance, he soon became convinced that the king needed to go. Starting around 1819, Lafayette began clandestinely funding liberal plots to overthrow the monarchy, but they went nowhere. By 1824, the Marquis was frustrated and all too aware that the Bourbons were catching on to his schemes. He needed a break, a place to lie low and recalibrate, a place where he didn’t carry all the baggage he did in France. Luckily, that place was only a boat ride away.

That year, President James Monroe wrote to Lafayette, inviting him to attend celebrations of America’s 50th anniversary. By then, Lafayette was the last surviving major general of the Revolutionary War, one of the last links Americans had to their nation’s birth. Lafayette accepted. On July 13, 1824, he left France to begin what would become a 13-month victory tour of all 24 U.S. states. Wherever he went, he was celebrated, welcomed, and honored. It was a colossal outpouring of love; towns were renamed after him. If you live in one of the dozens of places in the U.S. named Lafayette, chances are it was named during this journey