Lafayette (54 page)

When Lafayette descended from the altar, a swarm of guardsmen and men from the regular army all but crushed him in their eagerness to embrace him. “Some kissed his face, others his hands, the less fortunate his uniform,” wrote a journalist at the scene. “After great effort, he mounted his horse. He had hardly seated himself in his saddle that they started kissing him again, his legs, his boots, the harness of his horse and, finally, the horse itself.”
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An officer said, “Mounted on his white horse . . . he seemed to be in command of all France,” while another witness declared, “You are watching Monsieur de La Fayette galloping into the centuries yet to come.”
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Although he rode off the Champ de Mars wreathed in public adulation, he left the king and queen—especially the vengeful queen—humiliated by the insignificant role he had given them. Equally humiliated were radical Assembly demagogues from both ends of the political spectrum—the royalists on the right and the “madmen,” as Morris called them, on the left. Lafayette had ignored them all. Mirabeau pouted that Lafayette was a modern-day Caesar: “It is useless to point out to what degree the king was compromised,”
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he wrote to the king, “and to what degree the
Fête
served to make him [Lafayette] the man of the Federation, the unique man, the man of the provinces.”
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While Mirabeau and Lafayette’s other enemies fumed and fussed, Paris and the visiting citizen soldiers continued celebrating
Lafayette et liberté
.
Each night, dazzling displays of fireworks exploded in the skies over Paris, while gigantic torches bathed the city streets and public buildings in multi-colored illuminations; thousands flocked to two huge balls on the Champs-Elysées and on the square where the Bastille had stood a year earlier. The entire city metamorphosed into a carnival-
cum
-ballroom, with clowns, acrobats, and other entertainers jowling, jumping, and juggling on every corner, and small orchestras serenading crowds of clumsy, drunken dancers in every street and square—all without a single incident of violence. The people adored Lafayette and his vision of a new and stable
Nation
, with liberty and prosperity guaranteed by a constitution—and the three-million-man national guard under his command. Street-corner agitators and
coupe-têtes
stayed discreetly out of sight, although the disturbing strains of “Ça ira, ça ira” echoed occasionally from dark alleys and drew anxious glances from merrymakers within earshot:

Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!

Les aristocrates à la lanterne,

Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!

Les aristocrates on les pendra.
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After a week’s revelry, Lafayette stunned friends and enemies alike by rejecting the post of national commander, saying that control of the guard in more than one department would concentrate too much power in the hands of one man and risk replacing royal autocracy with a military autocracy. Just as he had rejected political power in the National Assembly, he now rejected military power, believing that the French were as able as Americans to govern themselves without an autocrat; that the citizen soldiers of the National Guard—like those in America’s state militias—would return peacefully to their homes and farms.

“The time will come perhaps,” William Short wrote to Gouverneur Morris, “when he will repent having not seized that opportunity. . . . It would have been easy for him to have engaged the assembly to have fixed the epoch of the elections for the next legislature. I fear now that nothing but some crisis which I do not foresee will engage them to do it. It is natural enough to suppose that any body of men whatever who concentrate in themselves all sorts of power—who suppose themselves authorized to prolong their existence indefinitely—& who are exempt from all punishment for crimes unless caught in
flagrant délit
will not be readily disposed to descend from such an height.”
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Lafayette, of course, was simply following the chivalric example of his “beloved general” in America by ceding military control of the nation to civil governance. “I hope our work will finish at the end of the year,” he
wrote to Washington, “and your friend . . . will rejoice in abandoning all power and political duties to become a simple citizen in a free constitutional monarchy.”
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On July 20, he gathered the fourteen thousand citizen soldiers together to send them home to their provinces. Still clinging to his fantasy of an American Utopia in France, he cried out:

As we leave each other, I will not speak to you of my deep and everlasting thanks to you nor my devotion to the people and the protection of their rights, to which I have devoted my life. Certain of your trust and confidence, I will talk to you of our duty. We must, gentlemen, repeat that word—duty—as brothers who are separating but who, once separated, will continue to act as one, tied by the same belief, knowing that the slightest infraction will be felt by every member of this great family. Let our love of liberty, gentlemen, be our guide. That word says it all: love of order, respect for law and for morality; with liberty, all property is inviolate; the lives of the innocent are sacred, man is innocent until proved guilty under the law; with liberty, there are universal guarantees and all prosper. But let us not forget, gentlemen that liberty is based on strict principles that fear license as much as tyranny.
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What Lafayette seemed unable—or unwilling—to recognize was that France feared neither license nor tyranny; indeed, it had lived with and known little else for thirteen centuries and embraced them both.

A month later, he heard from Washington: “I am happy, my excellent Friend, to see that, in the midst of the frightful tempests that have beset your political vessel, you have been able, by your talent and your courage, to steer it until now on so sure a course through so many reefs; and rejoice that your young king seems so well disposed to assent to the rights of the nation. Not for an instant have my wishes diminished for your success in so hazardous and important an enterprise; but often the articles we receive from English newspapers fill us with more fear than hope. How much all those involved in this daring journey will owe to their principal pilot when the ship reaches port and finds peace, liberty and glory! That is where it is headed, and I hope it will soon reach it.”
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Sadly, the ship had already veered sharply from that course—not just in France, but elsewhere in Europe. As Morris put it to Washington, “The French disease, in other words, Revolt, [is spreading to] Hungary, parts of Germany, Italy and Savoy, with France and Flanders already in different stages of that disease. Poland is constitutionally afflicted with it. In Sweden and Holland slight circumstances would bring it forward.”
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Across Europe, rebels hailed—and monarchs damned—Lafayette for having carried the disease from America and released it on their continent. Both rebels and monarchs would soon punish him harshly for doing so.

The
Fête de la Confédération
marked the peak of Lafayette’s popularity and influence in France. As Morris had warned him, France had no American citizens to support a Constitution, and without them, both Lafayette and his dream of constitutional rule were doomed. In rejecting political and military power, Lafayette’s political ineptitude was matched only by that of the king, who was a past master of the art—“a creature who,” Morris said, “eats and drinks and sleeps well and laughs and is as merry a grig as lives. . . . Poor man, he little thinks how unstable is his situation.”
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The king missed an opportunity to build popular support after the ceremonies at the Champ de Mars. After the unanimous cry of
“Vive le roi,”
almost every delegation of the National Guards approached him with enthusiastic pleas for him to visit their provinces—something no king had ever done. Even Lafayette was taken aback when the king refused.

The “madmen” surged into the leadership vacuum that Lafayette and the king created. Cordeliers flocked to the streets with leaflets assailing Lafayette as “the vile tool of a despot.” The scabrous Marat spent much of his time immersed in a bathtub full of cool water to relieve the maddening itch that was rotting his skin, but he used the time resourcefully. He wrote leaflets assailing Lafayette as “a greedy courtier,” “vile panderer to despotism,” and “a mortal enemy of the nation,” and he issued a poisonous pamphlet detailing Lafayette’s fictitious adulterous adventures,
The Nights of Love of General Motier and the Beautiful Antoinette, Written by Her Little Spaniel
.
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Robespierre’s Jacobins added to the disorder, dispatching agents across France to organize revolutionary clubs and infiltrate local government and police. At the time of the
Fête de la Fédération
, in July 1790, the Jacobins had but 152 clubs in France—less than two in each of the 83 departments. Within a year, they had more than one thousand, with members influencing every area of French life, including the National Assembly. The Jacobins also organized clubs in the military to intensify rebellion among rank and file commoners against high-born officers. Sailors in the French fleet mutinied in Brest, and in eastern France, three regiments of regular troops rebelled in the city of Nancy. The commanding general, Lafayette’s cousin the marquis de Bouillé, crushed the mutiny, executing twenty soldiers and sentencing forty others to life imprisonment at hard labor. After Lafayette called his cousin “the savior of the public cause,” a Jacobin mob gathered near the National Assembly to protest the “massacres of Nancy” and shout
“A bas Lafayette!”
—“Down with Lafayette!” Riots erupted across Paris again. As soon as he snuffed out one, Jacobins and Cordeliers staged others that kept him galloping about the city in a tragically hopeless race to stem the course of history. Mirabeau warned the king: “Popular outbreaks are the ruin of Monsieur de La Fayette. He will one day fire on the people. By that act alone, he will deal himself a mortal wound.”
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In despair, Lafayette turned to the wellspring of his chivalric idealism: “My dear general,” he wrote in March 1791. “Whatever hope I may have had of overcoming the problems of our revolution, I continue to be bounced about in an ocean of dissatisfaction and commotion of every kind; I am attacked with equal animus from every direction . . . by all the adversaries of my doctrine of liberty and equality.”
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For the moment, Washington could offer little comfort. As president of the United States, he could not risk having spies intercept a letter of advice on the internal affairs of another sovereign nation. In reiterating his “deepest affection and esteem,” Washington told Lafayette, “Our nation (and it is really yours as well) is making rapid progress towards stable politics and social happiness. The laws of the United States, adapted to all the needs of the public good, are writted with wisdom, moderation and accepted with joy. . . . I hope ardently for the same in the country that is the immediate object of your patriotic attachment; the distance that separates us and the delicate nature of the subject has always made us [me] suspend our opinions of your affairs.” After transmitting his and Martha’s best regards, Washington noted that his nephew, “Your former aide-de-camp, George Augustine Washington, has a second son, whom he named for you.”
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With Lafayette’s prestige eroding, Jacobins forced the National Assembly to ignore his ultimatum to finish writing a constitution. Its every decree heaped more misery on workers, shopkeepers, and the lower classes. Still facing national bankruptcy, the Assembly flooded the nation with worthless paper money—more than 1 billion livres. Prices and unemployment soared. Life under the Third Estate grew as intolerable as it had been under the king, the aristocracy, and the
ferme
.

“This unhappy country presents to our moral view a mighty ruin,” Morris wrote to Washington. “Like the remnants of antient [sic] magnificence, we admire the architecture of the Temple while we detest the false god to whom it was dedicated. Daws and ravens and the birds of night now build their nests in its niches. The sovereign, humbled to the level of a beggar’s pity, without resources, without authority, without a friend. The assembly at once master and a slave, new in power, wild in theory, raw in practice. It engrosses all functions tho incapable of exercising any, and has taken from this fierce ferocious people every restraint of religion and of respect. Such a state of things cannot last.”
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