Lafayette (53 page)

Adrienne, on the other hand, refused to abandon her home or beliefs and defied the new religious laws. Unlike her husband, she was a fiercely
devout Roman Catholic and refused to take the civil oath the Gallican priest administered to prorevolution parishioners at her church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. “Instead,” her daughter Virginie recalled, “she went regularly to churches and chapels where the persecuted clergy had taken refuge and continued to preach [Roman Catholic orthodoxy]. She constantly welcomed into our home
refusés
priests and their parishioners who were fleeing persecution and asked our protection; she encouraged them to continue preaching and to fight for the freedom to practice their religion. My father did not for a moment consider interfering with her, but you can imagine how painful it was for my mother to realize how much her actions were eroding his popularity.” Adrienne refused to waver from her devotion, however, and, when Lafayette invited the new Gallican bishop of Paris to dinner at the rue de Bourbon, “she refused to receive him as a clergyman,” Virginie wrote. “She dined out, although it caused a frightful stir.”
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The religious schism reached into the Tuileries Palace as well. The king—a devout Roman Catholic—had pledged to accept the constitution as soon as the Assembly completed it, but in doing so he had not anticipated that it would outlaw the Roman Catholic Church. He turned for advice to his only sworn protector among the revolutionaries:

“Sire,” Lafayette replied. “Your majesty has deigned to assure me of his confidence and his disposition to follow my counsel. . . . I swear to Your Majesty that . . . the last drop of my blood will prove to you my fidelity . . . my ardent love for my country and the most loyal feelings for Your Majesty.”
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The king said he was “fully reassured” by Lafayette’s “loyalty of character and his attachment to my person.”
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The queen was less certain: “I am quite sure that Monsieur de La Fayette wishes to save us,” she declared, “but who is going to save us from Monsieur de La Fayette?”
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Despite the mounting horrors of religious civil war, Lafayette clung desperately to his dream of establishing republican government in France. “There is ample material to criticize and libel,” he admitted to Washington, but he insisted that “we have made . . . more changes in ten months than even the most presumptuous patriots could have hoped for. . . . Reports about our anarchy, our internal disturbances, are vastly exaggerated. In the end, this revolution, as in America, needs just a bit more action by the government to strengthen liberty and make it flourish throughout the world.”
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As summer approached with the constitution still unfinished, impatience and unrest continued spreading. The fanatic Robespierre took advantage of Lafayette’s distaste for political leadership and won election to the presidency of the Jacobin club, a powerful political organization founded, ironically, by constitutional moderates like Lafayette and Bailly.
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With
Rousseau’s
Social Contract
as his bible, Robespierre converted the Jacobins into a radical leftist group that preached the sovereignty of
La Nation
, which Robespierre defined as “infallible, with unlimited authority, regardless of the consequences, no matter how extreme these may be.”
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Appalled by the Jacobin shift to extremism, Lafayette left the Jacobins and formed a new “Club of 1789” with centrists eager to finish writing the constitution and allow the nation to elect a new government. “The Revolution has been accomplished,” Lafayette thundered in the National Assembly; “nothing remains but to establish its constitution.”
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But Assembly Jacobins invented endless numbers of issues to keep it mired in acrimonious debate—none of them constitutional issues. In a debate over capital punishment, Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin, a professor of anatomy at the Paris University Medical School, proposed a more humane method of execution than the ax or wheel. The wheel often left criminals dismembered but not dead, while the executioner’s ax frequently missed its mark and embedded in the chest or skull. Guillotin proposed an invention of Dr. Antoine Louis—the “Louison,” a device that severed heads at the neck swiftly, cleanly, and accurately; the criminal, according to Guillotin, would feel nothing but “a gentle caress.”
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The assembly approved the instrument but renamed it the Guillotine, despite Guillotin’s furious protests.

Adding to the histrionics in the National Assembly were the demands of a new, more radical group called the
Société des amis des droits de l’homme et du citoyen
(Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and the Citizen), which demanded that the Assembly scrap previously approved provisions of the constitution and begin again. Organized by Danton, Marat, and Desmoulins in the Cordelier
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convent at Saint-Germain des Près, the “Cordeliers” demanded abolition of all titles. Lafayette stunned the Assembly by rising to support them, saying their proposal had “something of the American character, precious fruit of the New World that must serve in large measure to reinvigorate the old.”
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Although weary of Lafayette’s constant references to America, the majority voted with the Cordeliers, and the marquis de La Fayette forever after called himself Lafayette. His bitter enemy, Danton, further reduced his rank by scornfully referring to him by his patronymic name, Motier.

With the National Assembly unable or unwilling to finish its constitution, Lafayette and Bailly acted on their own to move the nation toward self-government. They asked the local Paris Assembly, where they had a controlling influence, to organize a
Fête de la Fédération
—a Festival of Federation—to celebrate the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on July 14. They would ask the national guard—the citizen soldiers across France—to elect delegations of about one hundred fifty members from each
of the eighty-three French departments to represent them in Paris—to demonstrate how quickly and smoothly the rest of the nation could act if the National Assembly would only finish its work.

From its inception, the
Fête
was a brilliant social, economic, and political stratagem—a Lafayette masterpiece of symbolism. Preparations for the
Fête
absorbed tens of thousands of the restless unemployed who wandered the streets aimlessly in the heavy summer sun and found their only joy in the camaraderie of a riotous mob. They now thronged to the huge Champs de Mars—a vast parade ground that stretched from the Ecole Militaire—the officers’ training school—to the Seine River. For weeks, the mob dug with picks and shovels and moved the dirt in wheelbarrows to the edge of the esplanade. Bands played to lighten their labor; women and children brought them food and drink; actors and singers entertained them when they rested. To the cheers and applause of the gigantic throng, Lafayette rode in on his white horse every day or two, dismounted, and picked up a shovel to dig alongside the laborers for a few hours. Gradually, they transformed the entire esplanade into a gigantic stadium, with huge, sloped “grandstands” of earth along both lengths. At one end of the field, in front of the Ecole Militaire, they built a tribune draped in scarlet for the king’s throne; at the other end, by the Seine River, they constructed a magnificent Arch of Triumph, fraught with symbolism, including a platform at its top for members of the National Assembly—the people’s representatives. In the center of the stadium, they fashioned the Nation’s Altar, from which to celebrate Gallican mass and administer the oath of allegiance to the nation.

As June turned to July, departmental guard units streamed toward the capital along the roads of France—by foot, donkey, horse and carriage; citizens joined them—peasants and noblemen alike. They toasted each other and the new spirit of brotherhood at every roadside tavern, inviting others to join them with the words that became a national slogan:
“Lafayette dit: Vienne qui voudra!”
—“Lafayette says, come whoever wants to!”
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In Paris, the envious Mirabeau predicted that Lafayette would use the
Fête
to seize power. “He will make himself generalissimo, have himself named to the generalship, then receive the dictatorship from those who say they represent the nation.”
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On July 10, fourteen thousand citizen soldiers from everywhere in France assembled in the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville—the
elected
representatives of three million citizen soldiers from eighty-three departments. By acclamation, they proclaimed themselves the Assembly of the Federation and Lafayette their president. The next day he led a delegation of guardsmen to the National Assembly, where he called upon them to finish writing the constitution. As elected commander of three million citizen soldiers, he did not need to threaten; they understood.

“The national guard has come to pay you their respect and recognition,” he declared. “The nation, which is still seeking its freedom, has charged you with giving it a constitution. But it has waited in vain. . . . Finish your work, gentlemen, and determine the number of amendments needed in a basic French constitution; our patience is growing thin for a constitutional code for our first legislature. . . . The rights of man have been declared; the sovereignty of the people has been recognized; powers have been delegated. . . . The people are indebted to you for the glory of freedom under the constitution, but they await a finality that cannot come without a plan for organizing the government and then a government.”
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From the king’s former riding ring, they marched across the Tuileries Gardens to the palace, where Lafayette presented his deputation to the king: “We wish to venerate your majesty with the most beautiful of all titles, that of chief of the French and king of a free people. Rejoice, Sire, in the prize of your virtues; let this expression of genuine homage, which despotism could never elicit, be the glory and recompense of a citizen king.”
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Lafayette called the king’s response “noble and touching: ‘Tell your fellow citizens that I would have liked to tell them all what I am telling you here; tell them that their king is their father, their brother, their friend; that he can only be happy when they are happy . . . when they are free . . . when they prosper.’ ”
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Before leaving, the guardsmen from the provinces asked to be presented to the queen, whom they had never seen. She emerged with the dauphin, now five, in her arms, and, as she passed each of the men, each kissed the little boy’s hand.

The next day dawned a dismal gray, with light rain falling intermittently. A cheerful crowd of 160,000 blanketed the sloped mounds that rimmed the Champ de Mars, and at least that many covered the grassy plain beyond. They had come from all parts of France; many had camped there all night to ensure their witnessing the historic ceremony. Lafayette had drawn the order of march in the procession, with the king, queen, and dauphin entering from the south to take their seats at the same time that members of the National Assembly entered from the north to take their seats atop the Triumphal Arch, at a level superior to that of the royal family. Then Lafayette and his legendary white horse, Jean Leblanc, led the parade of guardsmen through the Arch of Triumph, with a troop from each of the eighty-three departments marching its banner to the National Altar. Troops from the regular army and navy followed, until detachments from every department and the entire military surrounded the altar, among them an inconspicuous young Corsican officer, Napoléon Bonaparte.

“The spectacle of that day . . . was really sublime and magnificent,” American chargé d’affaires William Short wrote to Morris, who was in London
on a diplomatic mission for Washington. “The most perfect order & harmony reigned as well then, as at the illuminations & bal[l]s of the Sunday following.”
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Once the troops were in position, two hundred priests, each wearing the revolution’s secular red, white, and blue sash, climbed the steps to the altar, followed by Talleyrand, the papal-turned-Gallican bishop of Autun, who changed political—and religious—colors quicker than a chameleon. As smoke poured from great urns at each corner of the altar, Talleyrand blessed the regimental flags and celebrated mass—all the while whispering to his acolyte, “Don’t do anything to make me laugh.”
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After the prayers, Lafayette trotted majestically across the stadium to the king’s throne, and, as he had as a young Black Musketeer, asked the king’s orders. He then rode back to the center of the stadium, dismounted, and ascended the altar stairs. After a dramatic pause for silence, his voice boomed out: “We swear to be forever faithful to nation, law and king, to protect persons and property . . . and to remain united with all Frenchmen by unbreakable bonds of brotherhood.”
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Lafayette then raised his hands in admonition, and more than 300,000 people thundered as one,
“Je le jure!”
— “I so do swear!”
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The president of the National Assembly repeated the oath from the triumphal arch, then the king from his throne. The queen then rose to present the crown prince—the dauphin, their next king—to the cheering throng. As the artillery fired salvo after salvo of celebratory fire, the crowd shouted
“Vive l’Assemblée nationale!”; “Vive le Roi!”;
and
“Vive Lafayette!”
Atop the altar, Lafayette turned and pointed toward the triumphal arch, where a small troop marched in bearing a flag never before seen in Europe. As the crowd quieted, Lafayette snapped to attention and saluted: the flag bearer was John Paul Jones, with Tom Paine at his side, carrying the first American flag with the Stars and Stripes ever displayed outside the United States. For Lafayette, the flag symbolized the fulfillment of his dream to unite his native and his adoptive lands under the banner of liberty.

“I think this will have produced a good effect,” Short wrote Morris. “The demagogues of the assembly never remained more silent or more quiet. . . . The Marquis de La Fayette seemed to have taken full possession of the
fédérés
—his popular manners pleased them beyond measure & of course they approved his principles. When I left Paris he was adored by them—that moment may be regarded as the zenith of his influence. He made no use of it, except to prevent ill.”
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