UNC prof's book shows famous Frenchman on both sides of Atlantic
Most Americans learn in school that the Marquis de Lafayette came to the United States to help win the American Revolution.
Far fewer know why people named a mountain, a reservoir and more than 40 U.S. counties, cities and towns--from Fayetteville, N.C., to Lafayette, Calif.--after the Frenchman. Almost nobody knows that he remained a passionate advocate of women writers to his last days. Or that his full name was Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette.
But Lafayette was a complex, controversial figure, who supported national revolutions throughout his long, extraordinary life, said Lloyd Kramer, professor of history. Kramer sets out to explain Lafayette's wide-ranging influence and friendships in a new book, Lafayette in Two Worlds, just published by UNC Press.
Scion of a noble family, Lafayette left the French army in 1777, bought a ship with his own money and defied French government policies by sailing off to join America's Revolution. Condemned temporarily in his own country, he volunteered to fight without pay. George Washington almost immediately appointed him major general in the Continental Army.
He was 19 years old.
"Americans embraced Lafayette because they were anxious about their standing in the world, and he offered confirmation from Europe that they were doing the right thing," Kramer said. "As a result, he helped us define our identity as an important new nation--standing for ideas that made America different from the aristocratic, monarchical societies of Europe. In my book, I argue that Lafayette was a major figure in the emergence and construction of American nationalism.
"I also show how his cultural and political role in American and European history went far beyond his famous participation in revolutionary events."
In 1781, Washington gave the young soldier command of the Continental Army of Virginia, with responsibility for harrying Lord Cornwallis and his troops until Washington and Rochambeau could trap them at Yorktown.
"Washington, who had no son, had an almost paternal attachment to Lafayette," Kramer said. "Militarily, it was a good choice, however, because Lafayette was a decisive, innovative commander in the crucial Virginia campaign."
Later, after ragged crowds stormed the hated Bastille prison during the French Revolution, Lafayette organized and led the Parisian National Guard. As the revolution intensified, radicals condemned his policies and forced him to flee for his life in 1792.
Austrian royalists, who saw him as a dangerous revolutionary, imprisoned him for five years, mostly in solitary confinement, Kramer said. In a sense, Lafayette became the classic political middleman, scorned by both sides for his moderation and willingness to compromise.
He remained a political scapegoat for leftists and French conservatives during most of the past two centuries. Only recently, with Marxists out of fashion and monarchists in short supply, has his reputation in France improved.
Lafayette spent two years after his release in exile with his wife Adrienne in Germany and Holland and was allowed back into France following Napoleon's seizure of power in 1799.
He returned triumphantly to this country in 1824 and visited every state, including North Carolina, the biggest cities and such aging figures as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Huge, adoring crowds turned out to cheer him, Kramer said, partly because he was a unique surviving link to George Washington and partly because he assured a new generation of Americans that they were worthy heirs of the nation's founding fathers.
"James Monroe invited Lafayette because Americans felt they had never repaid him adequately for his service in the Revolution," he said. "Also, because he was identified with the liberal democratic wing of French politics, the visit was a way for Monroe to support European liberals who were being repressed and were very much in eclipse at the time."
Lafayette, in turn, used the trip as a springboard for commentary on emerging democratic ideals in Europe.
"One of his key themes always stressed that America differed from Europe and that Europe should learn from America," Kramer said. "Americans loved him because of his very flattering image of this new country as a more egalitarian model for future political systems."
Lafayette's wife died in 1807, and he remained a widower for the last 27 years of his life. But he developed numerous close friendships with creative women in the years before his own death in 1834. In contrast to other biographers, Kramer gives much attention to these women friends and argues that controversial women were at the center of Lafayette's personal life.
His strong-willed close friends included the beautiful opera star Maria Malibran, novelist Germaine de Stael and Fanny Wright, an English feminist who bought and freed slaves in Tennessee. Even in his mid-70s, Lafayette met often with Cristina Belgiojoso, a stunning Italian princess and writer exiled in Paris. He wrote her passionate letters, offering support and advice and expressing both his devotion and his regret at their 50-year age difference.
"Lafayette was a man who differed from most of his male contemporaries in that he took women seriously, both personally and as intellectual colleagues," Kramer said. "He not only strongly supported a law to make divorce legal in France, but he also was an early advocate for women to participate actively in public life and debate. Lafayette's `two worlds' thus included women as well as men and books as well as politics."
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