Lafayette (45 page)

By early May, the Assembly had been meeting for more than two months, six days a week, every day but Sunday, often from early morning until late at night, trading accusations on the causes of government deficits, without agreeing on any major reforms. When one Assembly member blamed the French deficit on America’s failure to pay its debts, Lafayette leaped to his feet to defend his adopted land, assailing the French government and declaring the
ferme’s
barriers to American products as the sole reason for America’s inability to settle its debts.

He then launched a devastating attack on the court for reaping “a cruel harvest” by taxing the poor. Such taxes, he maintained, collected little in comparison to “the profligacy and luxury of the court and the upper classes of society. But let us follow those millions into the country cottages, and we will see the last hope of sustenance for widows and orphans, the final burden that forces the farmer to abandon his plow or the family of honest craftsmen to turn to begging.”
⁴²
Waste, inefficiency, and corruption, he charged, had increased annual government spending 50 percent since the end of the Seven Years’ War. He demanded sharp reductions in royal spending, which accounted for nearly 15 percent of the annual government budget. He urged cuts in royal household budgets, the sale of unused royal buildings and lodges “for which the king pays but never enjoys,” the closing of nonproductive government bureaus, and an end to royal sinecures. He called for the closing of state prisons and the release of political prisoners and smugglers, whose only crime, he said, was to defy the
ferme
monopoly to appease their children’s hunger. An increasingly active ally in his political life, Adrienne led a group of Lafayette supporters on a tour of prisons and sent him a report that he cited in the assembly. “The king’s heart,” he told the notables, “would disavow these prisons as well as the laws of the kingdom that sent prisoners there, if he fully understood their uselessness and danger.”
⁴³

Then, in a final declamation that resounded beyond the gates of Versailles, across France, and the entire continent, Lafayette echoed Rousseau’s words: “The rights of the nation outweigh the needs of the government. However great the love of the people for the king, it would be dangerous to think that [the people’s] resources are inexhaustible . . . to cite my province alone, I can assure the king that the inequalities of taxation is forcing farmers to abandon their plows, craftsmen to leave their shops and depriving the most industrious citizens of so much of their earnings that they have little choice but move to other countries or turn to begging, and in that part of the kingdom, it would be impossible to raise taxes without increasing misery and despair.

“Now is the moment,” he cried out. “I appeal to each of your hearts . . . we can no longer avoid facing the enormous public catastrophe that is about to overrun our unhappy land. We can only pray that the crisis created by wasteful luxury and mindless court profligacy will impress those of us who can abolish those evils more than it impresses its innocent victims.

“It seems to me,” he declared, “that the time has come for us to beseech his majesty . . . to convoke a National Assembly.”
⁴⁴

The words
Assemblée nationale
reverberated eerily across the room, off one wall, then another. One by one, the notables gasped and turned to each other in dismay, hoping no one outside the hall had heard the dreaded
words. At first, the comte d’Artois assumed that Lafayette had simply misspoken and had meant to convoke the Estates General. The impasse at the Assembly of Notables had provoked several similar, earlier calls. The Estates General had last met in 1614 and brought together representatives of the three estates: the nobility, the clergy, and the “Third Estate” of privileged commoners—professionals, bankers, and bourgeois business and property owners.

But no, that was not what Lafayette meant. The Estates General gave each estate one collective vote, invariably allowing the combined votes of noblemen and clergy to defeat the Third Estate, which represented nearly ten times the voting population of the other two estates combined. A national assembly would give
each member
a vote, commoner, clergyman, and nobleman alike—a violation of Roman Catholic belief in the divinely ordained “order of things,” which placed the nobility and clergy above the common man. A national assembly would strip the aristocracy and the church of their authority and deliver national sovereignty to commoners.

“What, Monsieur!” the comte demanded again. “You demand the convocation of the Estates General?”

“Yes, Monseigneur,” Lafayette replied, but corrected him, “and even more than that.”

“You want me to write what you have said and take it to the king?”

“Yes, Monseigneur.”
⁴⁵

A long silence followed; the echoes of Lafayette’s words—
more than that: a national assembly—
crackled like sparks, about to ignite the fuel of revolutionary ideas that had spilled from the hall onto the streets. Assembly president Loménie de Brienne, the archbishop of Toulouse, warned King Louis that Lafayette was “the most dangerous man of them all.”
⁴⁶

On May 25, 1787, the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia to create a new nation; on the same day in Versailles, the Assemblée des Notables dissolved in indecision and propelled an old nation toward destruction. Ironically, the king, whose inertia, uncertainty, and disinterest had encouraged assembly inaction, thanked the Assembly for doing nothing, and the Assembly president, Archbishop de Brienne, predicted, “The present crisis will become the starting point of a new splendor.” As both would soon realize in prison cells, the crisis was the starting point of a new stygian darkness.

Ever-jubilant for small victories in a great war, Lafayette predicted “good effects of this Assembly. . . . On the last day of our session,” he boasted to John Jay, “I had the joy of making two motions that received unanimous approval: one in favor of our Protestant citizens, the other to revise the criminal code.”
¹
Although the king vetoed Lafayette’s proposal to revise the criminal code, he approved some of Lafayette’s proposals for Protestant rights by legalizing Protestant marriages, legitimizing Protestant children, and granting Protestants the right to own property. Although he limited Protestant worship to the privacy of their homes, he allowed them to establish Protestant cemeteries. Jefferson assailed the king’s concessions as too restrictive, but Lafayette was elated and invited Protestant pastors from Nîmes to his home in Paris to celebrate. “The spirit of liberty is gaining ground in this country,” he exulted in a letter to Washington. “Liberal ideas are growing from one end of the country to the other.”
²

The king also yielded on the issue of provincial assemblies, but insisted on appointing half the members of each assembly himself. They, in turn, would “elect” the other members to ensure indirect royal control of the entire assembly.

The failure of the Assembly of Notables to raise taxes sent the French economy into free fall, and, by midsummer, the treasury was empty. The king ordered the new provincial assemblies to convene and do what the Assembly of Notables had failed to do: tax themselves to pay for his family’s lavish spending. Appointed a representative of the noble order at the Auvergne assembly, Lafayette went to the provincial capital, Clermont-Ferrand, in August, where, as in every other province, the assembly rejected all new taxes—without commensurate reforms in royal spending. “No reforms, no taxes,” became their rallying cry. The Dauphiné, the inherited province of the crown prince, followed suit, and Brittany’s assembly not only rejected new taxes, it sent twelve noblemen to Versailles to demand spending reforms at the palace. The king promptly imprisoned them in the Bastille. When Lafayette protested, the queen told him that as an Auvergnat he had no business involving himself in the affairs of Brittany. “But I am a Breton, madame,” he snapped, reminding the queen of his mother’s birthright—“just as your majesty is a Hapsburg.”
³
The quick-tempered queen demanded that her husband strip the insolent Lafayette of his rank of maréchal de camp—and the king complied.

“They honor me more than I deserve,” Lafayette scoffed, and retired from the active military to devote himself to politics.

Provincial dissent over taxes increased restlessness in Paris, where the slogan “No reforms, no taxes” took on new but insidious opposite meanings for reformers and anarchists. Though all shouted the same words in unison, reformers opposed one without the other; anarchists opposed both and shouted for an end to all government. Pamphlets variously assailed and mocked
l’Autrichienne
, Queen Marie-Antoinette, as “Madame Déficit
”
. Crowds routinely hissed and hooted her and her brother-in-law, the comte d’Artois, when either appeared in public. “But what harm have I done them,” the queen protested at the hissing that greeted her at the Paris opera one evening.
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“The fiscal problems in France remain unsolved,” Lafayette explained to Washington. “We have to cover an enormous deficit with new taxes, but the nation is reluctant to pay for what it has not voted. The notions of liberty have propagated rapidly since the American Revolution. The Assembly of Notables set fire to combustible materials. A war of words has erupted in the press. . . . The people hoot at the Comte d’Artois and burn several ministers in effigy. . . . The discontent has become so widespread that the queen no longer dares come to Paris for fear of being mistreated. The events of the last six months have at least impressed everyone that the king no longer has the right to tax the nation . . . unless such taxes have been stipulated by a national assembly.”
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Lafayette rejoined the Auvergne assembly for the autumn term, but three months of debate produced the same results as the summer session: no
reforms, no taxes. When he returned to Paris in December, he found his and Adrienne’s names excluded from the list of invitations to the queen’s dinners, balls, and other festivities. For Adrienne, the opportunity to stay home was a welcome one. Besides her own children, an endless parade of American children continued to march through her door—all part of Lafayette’s impulsive offer to Greene, Knox, and Hamilton for international student exchanges. Just as the Caldwell boy prepared to return home, Peter Otisquette, another Indian boy, arrived, and after he and Kayenlaha left, George Washington Greene, Nathanael Greene’s son—another of George Washington’s many godsons—appeared at the door. A year earlier, Nathanael Greene had died prematurely at forty-four, but his widow, Caty, had taken advantage of Lafayette’s promise to give the boy a chance to study in France.

“No affair in my life can be more capital,” Lafayette wrote to Caty Greene, “no task more pleasing than the one I owe your confidence and that of the good and great man of whose friendship I was proud and happy.”
⁶
As he had done with Caldwell, Lafayette enrolled young Greene at the prestigious Pension Lemoyne, where he could visit Jefferson, across the road, or easily walk down the Champs Elysées to the Pont Royal and cross the Seine to Lafayette’s home. Thus, the boy had two families in Paris, although only one—the Lafayettes—paid for his education.
⁷

In the autumn of 1787, a letter from Washington enclosed a copy of the new American Constitution: “I don’t have to tell you that I read the newly proposed constitution with care and unbounded interest,” Lafayette replied. “I admired it greatly and found the different methods of electing the two houses of congress well conceived. . . . For the sake of America, the human race, and your own renown, I beg you, my dear general, do not refuse the responsibility of the presidency during the first few years. You alone can make this political machine operate successfully.”
⁸

With a copy of the American Constitution in his possession, Lafayette added the word “constitution” to his political rhetoric and helped organize “a constitutional club.” What began as a “Society of Thirty,” however, quickly mushroomed into a large, albeit informal, political party of progressive social and political thinkers, variously called “the Americans” or “Fayettistes.” Members included the marquis de Condorcet, a prominent mathematician who championed abolition; the duc de La Rochefoucauld, a champion of the poor; and comte César de La Tour-Maubourg, a French general and fellow Auvergnat from Le Puy, not far from Chavaniac. Accomplished commoners and clergymen also joined—the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly; the club-footed bishop of Auton, better known as Talleyrand; and Abbé
Sieyès, the chancellor of Chartres, who was working on an inflammatory pamphlet called
Essai sur les privilèges
—“Essay on Privileges.” To Lafayette’s distress, the grotesque giant the comte de Mirabeau also joined the group. A violent ex-convict, Mirabeau exuded seductive oratory that veiled his hideously pockmarked, leonine face and even more hideous soul that reveled in all kinds of debauchery, including adultery, rape, and pedophilia. From the first, Lafayette despised him, but would have no choice but to deal with him as a power from the huge southern province of Provence.