Lafayette (37 page)

“He was deeply moved by the plight of the people,”
⁵⁵
according to one local official.

The responsibility for the peasants’ plight, he found, lay with the
ferme
to which his estates belonged.
Ferme
carries the double meaning of a commercial “firm,” or company, and a “farm,” and in eighteenth-century France
la ferme
—in the sense of “the company”—was an all-powerful, government-licensed monopoly that controlled the production, distribution, and sale of every essential product grown or made in France. The
ferme
protected its members in each province by imposing duties on all goods entering a province from other provinces or foreign nations, whether for sale in the province or simply passing through to another province or country. In effect, every product was taxed and retaxed and taxed again innumerable times, depending on its destination and the number of provincial borders it crossed to get to market from its point of origin. For the privilege of establishing and retaining its monopoly, the
ferme
paid royalties to the king and high officials, so that all shared in the wealth the
ferme
generated. Indeed, the king, his ministers, and participating monopolists—some of them aristocrats, others bourgeois—depended on the
ferme’s
ability to create artificial market shortages and high prices to bathe them all in luxury—even as it pushed the ordinary man toward bankruptcy and starvation. In the autumn of 1782, poor crops had sent prices soaring in the Auvergne, and, instead of easing shortages by distributing surplus stocks from its granaries, the
ferme
withheld grain and seed from market throughout the winter. By spring, seeds were so scarce and priced so high that poor farmers had no choice but to sell their lands to richer landlords of the
ferme
at desperation prices.

Outraged by
the ferme’s
assault on impoverished peasants, Lafayette proclaimed his solution: “I will . . . build public granaries to serve as seed banks
for grain—and to which I shall contribute my own grain.”
⁵⁶
In effect, he forced the overseers of his vast estate to withdraw his granaries from the monopoly, not only sacrificing his and their profits, but undermining the power of the
ferme
to maintain high prices, artificial shortages, and famine. For the first time, Lafayette recognized that Auvergnats, his people by blood—living in the shadows of his own castle—needed his help as much as Americans, his people by adoption.

His quick, decisive action ended local grain shortages and famine and earned him the immediate acclaim of Auvergnats, who now saw him as a popular social and political leader instead of just another absentee lord of the manor. After five days at Chavaniac, Lafayette visited neighboring towns in Auvergne before returning to Paris. Town after town greeted him with cries of
“Vive Lafayette!”;
brass bands, government officials, judges in red robes and police in dress uniforms paraded to honor his visit. Not just the Conqueror of Cornwallis, he was now the
Frappeur de la Ferme
⁵⁷
—the Foiler of the
Ferme
, who had spanked the monopolists.

After he returned to Paris, the king awarded him France’s highest military honor—the Cross of St. Louis. His father-in-law, the duc d’Ayen, was one of six living members of the Noailles family who held the cross, and the king gave the duke the honor of inducting his son-in-law into the Order of the Cross, which Louis XIV had created in 1693 for French military men who distinguished themselves by their virtue, merit, and outstanding services to France.
⁵⁸
His induction set off another flurry of public adulation. “All that Xenophon said of his young Athenian [Alcibiades] would pass for fabulous, if la Fayette had not achieved it,” proclaimed a Paris literary magazine.
⁵⁹
The editor of a new edition of
Plutarch’s Lives
dedicated it to Lafayette, “a young hero whose modesty equals his courage and wisdom.”
⁶⁰
He compared Lafayette’s career to that of Scipio Africanus, the Roman general who crushed Hannibal and conquered Carthage. A Lafayette cult emerged in Paris, with pamphlets describing mythological adventures of the “unsullied hero of purest motives and rarest wisdom, defying evil men and cruel times in the cause of truth and reason.”
⁶¹

Still officially charged by Congress to further American interests in Europe, Lafayette used his enormous personal influence to champion American trade. Freed of mercantile ties to Britain, American merchants could, for the first time, sell their goods anywhere in the world without first sending them to England for taxation by the British government prior to resale. The problem was to get other nations to buy American goods. Most nations were no different from England: they too maintained impenetrable trade barriers to protect their own industries, and France was no exception. The French government taxed American goods at the port of entry, and the
ferme
, in turn, taxed the goods as they crossed every provincial boundary, thus pricing
American products—tobacco, lumber, cloth, and tools—out of the French market.

Before leaving for Chavaniac, Lafayette had asked the French government to declare certain ports free for unrestricted entry of American goods into France. “I cannot repeat too often,” he wrote to Foreign Minister Vergennes, “that after a great war and a beautiful peace, it would be ridiculous to lose the fruit of so much blood and treasure, and that only to please one class of people [the
ferme]
who please no one. After having taught England some lessons, let us learn the ones that she now gives us and try to make the Americans feel as well treated by their friends as by their enemies and not force them to give preference to the latter.”
⁶²
To the finance minister, Lafayette wrote that France could recapture the costs of the war by trading with the United States, but warned that “we have lost time in obtaining that goal, and at a time when the English are making up for their errors, I think it is important for us to reduce the barriers to our trade for Americans . . . it is up to us to capture almost all the American trade . . . [but] our own trade barriers are threatening us with loss of most of the largest part of that trade.”
⁶³

By the time Lafayette returned to Paris from Chavaniac, his victory over the
ferme
in Auvergne and his letters to the ministry had earned him a new reputation as a champion of free trade—a role he eagerly embraced. Determined to prevent French monopolists from impoverishing American farmers as they had Auvergnat farmers, he found a friendly ally in Vergennes—not because the foreign minister shared Lafayette’s sense of social responsibility, but because trade with America had, from the first, been one of the cornerstones of his policy for undermining British commerce and restoring French commercial and military power in the world. Although Vergennes declared Bayonne and Dunkerque free ports for American goods, Lafayette wanted more. Using the minister’s own logic, he suggested that French trade with America would improve faster by opening Lorient and Marseilles and making the entire coast of France accessible to American goods to facilitate distribution into the French heartland. By now Vergennes knew the foolishness of arguing with his zealous young friend over American interests; he opened the four ports to American trade.

Believing his work complete, Lafayette did what he had never done before: he took his wife for a summer’s vacation of two idyllic weeks of play, rest, and contemplation at Chavaniac—their first conjugal visit to his birthplace. Adrienne met her husband’s beloved
tante
Charlotte, with whom she had maintained a warm, regular correspondence. He guided Adrienne through his maze of boyhood memories, along his secret forest paths; he showed her how to pick edible mushrooms and berries, placed sweet wild blackberries between her lips, introduced her to villagers he had known as a boy.
She met and charmed the peasants who lived on Lafayette lands. Like them and all Auvergnats, she was deeply religious, attended daily mass and Sunday services, and won the admiration of both peasantry and priests. She visited the temporary home of the weaving school she had established and gave the director another 6,000 livres to speed its completion and sustain its maintenance.

While Adrienne attended mass one morning, her Gilbert
⁶⁴
wrote to George Washington that his conduct of the war had been highly praised throughout all Europe:

Never did a man exist who so honourably stood in the opinions of mankind, and your name, if possible, will become still greater in posterity. Every thing that is great, and every thing that is good were not hitherto united in one man. Never did one man live whom the soldier, Statesman, Patriot, and Philosopher could equally admire, and never was a revolution brought about, that in its motives, its conduct, and its consequences could so well immortalize its glorious chief. I am proud of you, my dear general, your glory makes me feel as if it was my own—and while the world is gaping at you, I am pleased to think, and to tell, the qualities of your heart do render you still more valuable than any thing you have done.

Adieu, my dear General, Mde. de Lafayette joins with me in Presenting our Best Respects to Mrs. Washington. She loves You With all Her Heart. . . . Adieu, adieu, My dear General, Do often remember your adopted son.
⁶⁵

On September 3, 1783, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and John Adams strode into the Hôtel d’York,
¹
not far from Lafayette’s home in Paris, to sign the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. The American signatories invited the tortured former president of Congress, Henry Laurens, whom the British had captured and exchanged for Cornwallis, to share in the historic American triumph. As the Americans and British were signing the Treaty of Paris, French and Spanish diplomats signed a separate treaty with the British at the Palace of Versailles ending their war with Britain and establishing peace in western Europe for the first time in more than forty years.

From his camp in the hills above the Hudson north of New York, a jubilant George Washington wrote to Lafayette that the treaties “will put a period to my military services & carry me back to the walks of private life, & to that relaxation and repose which can not but be grateful to a mind which has been on the stretch for more than eight years.”
²

For France, which lost twenty-five hundred men in the American Revolution, the Treaty of Versailles avenged her humiliating defeat in the Seven Years’ War and the galling disgrace of an English commissioner overseeing Dunkerque. He sailed home to England immediately after the signing, and King Louis XVI proclaimed an official holiday— the
Fêtes de la Paix
, or Festival of Peace. After a Te Deum at Nôtre-Dame Cathedral, the court staged a gala ceremony in the front courtyard of the Tuileries Palace in Paris. A huge bonfire lit the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville, or city hall, that evening, and the king ordered gargantuan buffets of food and wine in public squares for all the people of Paris—and orchestras to entertain as they ate, drank, danced, and savored victory over their historical nemesis, England.

In the weeks that followed, the Lafayettes made their magnificent home one of the most important social centers in Paris—a rendezvous for all Americans of note living or visiting the capital during one of the most festive eras the city had ever witnessed or ever would again. Paris was aglow with new theaters and clubs; publishers printed new books and periodicals; the Montgolfier brothers sent the first lighter-than-air balloons soaring over Paris and carried the first passengers across thirty miles of countryside from the Tuileries Gardens behind the royal palace. After winter’s chill forced balloon enthusiasts into warmer arenas, Dr. Friedrich Anton Mesmer of Vienna entranced them with demonstrations of his new discovery—“animal magnetism.” Before everyone’s eyes—including those of the delighted Lafayettes—Mesmer “cured” the sick and crippled by inducing trancelike states that harmonized their “dysharmonized” bodily functions. Lafayette enrolled as a “disciple”—for an initiation fee of 2,500 livres (about $25,000)—and Mesmer gladly shared a few secrets of animal magnetism with him, including a “cure” for Lafayette’s devastating seasickness whenever he set foot aboard ship. Polar forces would quickly restore his body’s harmony, Mesmer assured him, if he simply embraced the mainmast while facing the North Pole.

Although the advent of peace permitted the French finance minister to reduce government spending, Queen Marie-Antoinette found ingenious new ways to increase it, including a study of the different classes of society within her realm. To examine peasant life, she ordered the construction of a hamlet, which still stands, on the palace grounds at Versailles, complete with flocks of sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, and geese. Workers dug an artificial stream and raised a cluster of thatched-roof houses and a working mill on its banks. Palace designers fashioned colorful peasant dresses for the queen, who strolled the footpaths, parasol in hand, to the applause of her courtiers, poised in equally stunning peasant dresses at the windows of the otherwise empty, uninhabited houses. Peasant life, she concluded, was pleasant indeed, if simple, with none of the hardships portrayed by social reformers such as Lafayette. It was a short carriage ride from her hamlet up the hill to the Petit Trianon, her palatial little marble playhouse, where she often went with a few close friends to escape the bustle of palace life.