Lafayette (46 page)

Although not officially a member, Jefferson was an active and welcome participant. An almost diurnal guest at the rue de Bourbon, Jefferson became Lafayette’s closest friend. Fluent in French by now, Jefferson mixed easily with the Society of Thirty, whom he called the “real patriots” of France because of their spiritual ties to America. “This party,” he said, “comprehended all the honesty of the kingdom . . . the men of letters, the easy bourgeois, the young nobility . . . who were able to keep up the public fermentation at the exact point which borders on resistance, without entering on it.”
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In February, Lafayette returned to the Auvergne assembly, where the newfound freedom of debate unleashed an old and bitter rivalry between northern and southern factions. Within a month, the assembly ignored its mission to solve the national fiscal crisis and voted to split the Auvergne into two new provinces. By spring, separatist political movements developed in virtually every province, and, in the months that followed, riots erupted in cities across France that fractured the provinces into smaller semiautonomous entities. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the autonomous states in the fractious American confederation agreed to cede much of their autonomy to a new national union.

“In the middle of our troubles [in France],” Lafayette wrote to Washington, “it is a great consolation to me to rejoice over the success of my adopted nation. . . . Permit me once more, my dear general, to plead with you not to refuse the presidency; the constitution as written answers many prayers; but unless I am strongly mistaken, there are certain points that would pose a danger if the United States did not have the good fortune to have their guardian angel to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each article, determine the degree of power to give the government, limit the powers that could be abused and, finally, indicate what still needs to be done to attain that perfection which the new constitution has come closer to reaching than any other form of government past or present.”
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Ironically, as Lafayette urged Washington to seize America’s reins of government, Washington sent Lafayette paternal advice to move cautiously in France. “I do not like the situation of affairs in France,” he warned. “Little more irritation would be necessary to blow up the spark of discontent into a flame that might not easily be quenched. . . . Let it not, my dear
Marquis, be considered as a derogation from the good opinion that I entertain of your prudence when I caution you, as an individual desirous of signalizing yourself in the cause of your country and freedom, against running into extremes and prejudicing your cause.”
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On September 23, 1788, the political forces swirling about him eroded what little remained (or ever existed) of Louis XVI’s will, and he summoned the Estates General to meet the following spring, for the first time in 174 years, to restore order to France’s tangled political, social, and economic affairs. The king appointed half the members of the first two estates, with the remainder of the two estates elected by their peers—fellow noblemen in the First Estate and fellow clergy in the Second. Although commoners elected members of the Third Estate, electors had to be at least twenty-five years old and pay so high a poll tax that it disenfranchised almost the entire commoner population, including peasants, craftsmen, shopkeepers, and laborers. Of the 610 members of the Third Estate, 25 percent were lawyers, and nearly 20 percent were industrialists, merchants, and bankers. Fewer than 10 percent were agriculturists. Intensifying popular distrust was the Estates General unit rule, which gave each estate a single collective vote and, therefore, allowed the nobility and clergy, with one vote each, to ignore the interests of the Third Estate, which represented 90 percent of the voting population but had only one vote.

On the advice of his ministers, the king recalled the Assembly of Notables in November 1787 to reassess Estates General voting rules. Lafayette proposed giving the Third Estate at least two votes, to prevent the nobility and clergy from dominating the proceedings, but the Assembly turned him down, two to one. “Today,” Lafayette noted to a friend after his defeat, “is the anniversary of Lord Cornwallis’ defeat. Today also ended a campaign of my own that I will remember with pleasure. You are right to think that the court thinks so ill of me. . . . My conscience and the confidence of the public are my two supports.”
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Early in 1789, the palace announced it would print paper money to pay half the crown’s debt. The result was economic disaster. The
ferme
doubled its duties on food; prices soared; markets crashed; vendors refused paper currency; and textile producers closed their doors, laying off more than two hundred thousand workers across France—more than fifty thousand in Normandy alone and eighty thousand in Paris. Making matters worse, two successive years of drought and a freak hailstorm in the Paris region had decimated harvests and produced food shortages that sent prices 60 percent higher. Food riots erupted in the Dauphiné, Provence, Languedoc, and Brittany. Mobs of peasants and impoverished workers raided church-owned granaries, wheat convoys, and bakeries in every town and city. Mobs swarmed through the streets; thieves broke into homes—including Jefferson’s—to
steal anything made of gold or silver to trade for food. Pamphleteers flooded Paris with leaflets accusing Versailles and the aristocracy of starving the nation into submission and emasculating the Estates General before it even met by retaining the unit rule.

As France reeled violently amid demands for popular rule, the United States walked calmly and firmly toward that end. In September 1788, the Congress of the American Confederation met for the last time, setting the site of the new government in New York and fixing early 1789 for convening the First Congress and balloting by presidential electors. In December, Maryland ceded ten square miles of land along the Potomac River as a site for a new federal city. Many of Lafayette’s old friends in America won election to the First Congress in routine fashion—except for the peg-legged New York lawyer, Gouverneur Morris, whose campaign for a powerful chief executive earned him the displeasure of constituents. Ironically, it was he who had composed the final draft of the Constitution. Forty days after his electoral defeat, he arrived at Le Havre, braving tempest-tossed winter seas to begin a new life in Europe as a representative for American business interests. Toward the end of February, he limped up to Lafayette’s door on the rue de Bourbon, with Jefferson at his side.
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Morris spoke French brilliantly, was a good friend of Washington, and had high hopes of replacing Jefferson, who had already applied for leave to return to America. The two Americans stayed to dinner, and Lafayette’s older daughter, Anastasie, sang from memory a song that Morris himself had written. Morris had brought a letter to Lafayette from George Washington, addressing Lafayette’s pleas for Washington to assume the United States presidency.

“Your feelings approach those of my other friends more than my own,” Washington replied. “In truth, the difficulties seem to me to multiply and grow larger as the time approaches for me to give a definitive response. In the event circumstances dictate my acceptance, my dear Sir, I will accept the burden with such reluctance and so deep a distrust of my abilities as to render the world incredulous.” Washington predicted that the new congress would be the finest ever assembled in the world. “Only understanding, honesty, industry and frugality are needed to make us a great and happy people.”
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Shortly after Morris’s visit, Lafayette set off again on the bone-shattering ride to Auvergne—this time to stand for election as a member of the Estates General. Morris predicted that Lafayette’s efforts to introduce American-style republicanism in France would result either in “Tyranny” or “Anarchy.”
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“In effect Time is needful to bring forward Slaves to the Enjoyment of Liberty,” he warned. “Time. Time. Education. But what is Education? It is not Learning. It is more the Effect of Society on the Habits and Principles of each Individual, forming him at an early Period of Life to act afterwards
the part of a good Citizen. . . . Progress towards Freedom must be slow and can only be compleated in the Course of several Generations.”
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Lafayette ignored his friend’s warnings and pressed on with his revolution. At first, he considered running for election as a member of the Third Estate, but concluded that the majority of that order already shared his views and that he would have a greater impact among the conservative nobility by winning them over to social, political, and economic reform.

“Monsieur de La Fayette is since returned from his political Campaign in Auvergne crowned with success,” Morris wrote to Washington:

He had to contend with the Prejudices and the Interests of his Order, and with the Influence of the Queen and Princes . . . but he was too able for his Opponents. He played the Orator with as much
Eclat
as ever. He acted the Soldier and is at this Moment as much envied and hated as his Heart could wish. He is also much beloved by the Nation for he stands forward as one of the principal Champions for her Rights. . . . We have I think every Reason to wish that the Patriots may be successful. . . . The Leaders here are our Friends. Many of them have imbibed their Principles in America and all have been fired by our example. Their opponents are by no Means rejoiced at the Success of our Revolution.
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Morris warned, however, that widespread “depravity” among delegates to the Estates General had put Lafayette’s constitutional revolution in jeopardy:

An hundred Anecdotes and an hundred thousand Examples are required to shew the extreme Rottenness of every Member. . . . There is one fatal principle which pervades all Ranks. It is a perfect Indifference to the Violation of Engagements. Inconsistency is so mingled in the Blood, Marrow and every Essence of this People that when a Man of high Rank and Importance laughs today at what he seriously asserted Yesterday, it is considered as the natural Order of Things. The great Mass of the common People have no Religion but their Priests, no Law but their Superiors, no Moral but their Interest. These are the Creatures who, led by drunken Curates, are now in the high Road
à la liberté
and the first Use they make of it is to form Insurrections everywhere for the Want of Bread. We have had a little Riot here yesterday and I am told some Men have been killed.
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The day after Morris penned his letter, George Washington took the oath of office in New York as the first popularly elected president in the United States—and, indeed, the world. A few weeks later, his protégé Lafayette took his seat in the French Estates General in Versailles, among noblemen bent on preserving despotic rule by the aristocracy. By the time the Estates General convened, the continuing drought and spreading famine and unemployment had produced some four hundred riots across France and blanketed the land with universal distrust of anything remotely associated with the king, including the Estates General—and with good reason. Almost every member of the Estates General had his own private agenda. Together, members brought more than fifty thousand petitions to debate—almost all unrelated to famine, unemployment, or reform of the realm.

On May 4, King Louis XVI led the official opening procession, surrounded by his two brothers and the younger prince. The crown prince, or dauphin, lay in bed, gravely ill. Queen Marie-Antoinette followed with the two princesses and, behind them, members of the court and government ministers. The nobility, including Lafayette, followed, in gold jackets, with flamboyant, Henry IV–style wide-brimmed hats from the sixteenth century. All carried swords, the symbols of knighthood and fealty to the king. The clergy followed in red or violet capes. Because of its inferior social status, the Third Estate of commoners was barred from the procession and entered the hall through a side door—wearing black.

“The procession is very magnificent,” Gouverneur Morris extolled in his diary. “Neither the King nor Queen appear too well pleased. The former is repeatedly saluted as he passes along with the ‘Vive le Roi’ but the latter meets not a single acclamation. She looks, however, with contempt on the
scene in which she acts a part and seems to say, for the present: ‘I submit but I shall have my turn.’”
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After the appropriate prayers, the bishop of Nancy preached a sermon while the king nodded off and fell asleep. The next day did not begin auspiciously. The king rose to address the assembly, then realized he had forgotten the manuscript of his speech and sat down nervously while an aide raced back to the royal apartments to retrieve it. A few minutes later, he delivered his meaningless welcome, then deferred to his finance minister, who outlined the needs of the nation and relayed the king’s order for each of the estates to begin debate the following day in three separate chambers.