Lafayette (69 page)

Early in May, Bonaparte dusted off the Fayettiste symbols of the revolution and staged a huge pageant on the Champ de Mars in front of his old school, the Ecole Militaire. As Lafayette had done twenty-five years earlier, Napoléon swore to support the new constitution and proclaimed peace with the nation’s European neighbors. On May 10, the department that included La Grange elected Lafayette as its representative to the national legislature—the Chamber of Deputies, or lower house—and George won election at Chavaniac. On June 4, the Chamber of Deputies elected its leaders—all young men, although they paid homage to the old republican by selecting Lafayette as third vice president.

Despite Bonaparte’s efforts to establish a peaceful, constitutional regime, the allies feared him and French lust for power too much not to act. They declared France in violation of the Congress of Vienna accords and massed their troops in Belgium, on the northern French border. On June 12, Napoléon led his 180,000-man army from Paris to engage them. Eight days later, he returned, disheveled, physically exhausted. He had met his Waterloo. On
June 18, 1820, an allied force of more than 200,000 British, Dutch, German, Saxon, and Prussian troops had outmaneuvered, outgunned, and all but overrun the French armies, which fled in panic back to France. With allied forces pouring into northern France, Napoléon demanded that the Chamber of Deputies vote him emergency dictatorial powers and dissolve. When Lafayette protested, Napoléon’s brother Lucien accused him of disloyalty.

“That is a slanderous accusation,” Lafayette thundered. “What gives the previous speaker [Lucien Bonaparte] the right to accuse this nation of being disloyal for failing to persevere in following the Emperor? The nation has followed him in the sands of Egypt, and in the steppes of Russia, on fifty fields of battle, in his reverses as in his successes . . . and for having thus followed him we now mourn over the blood of three million Frenchmen!”
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That evening, Lafayette made a motion “that we all go to the Emperor and say to him that . . . his abdication has become necessary to save the nation.” The Chamber agreed, but Bonaparte rejected their demand. Lafayette responded by threatening, “If the Emperor does not send in his abdication within an hour, I will propose to the Chamber that he be dethroned.”
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On June 22, 1815, four days after Waterloo, Napoléon ended his “Hundred Days” by abdicating in favor of his son, Napoléon II. Lafayette arranged passage to America for the fallen Corsican, but when Napoléon reached Rochefort, a British squadron prevented his ship from leaving port. Napoleon appealed for safe passage to the British government, which granted it to him on a British vessel that carried him to the forsaken island of Saint Helena, off the west African coast in the southern Atlantic. He died five years later, on May 5, 1821, three months short of his fifty-second birthday. His older brother, Joseph Bonaparte, was more fortunate: he sailed to America and settled in Bordentown, New Jersey, in a Georgian mansion, whose interior he transformed into a French-Empire showpiece.

After naming Napoléon II emperor, the Chamber of Deputies elected a five-man directory to assume executive power, bypassing Lafayette as a relic, out of touch with the times. They did, however, appoint him to a peace mission, with the hopeless task of negotiating a halt to the Allied march on Paris. The allies laughed at the French appeal and sent their troops swarming into the capital to hoist the white flag of the Bourbon monarchy above the Tuileries Palace. When Lafayette returned with George to his house on the rue d’Anjou, the entire Lafayette clan was there waiting. Prussian troops had overrun Brie, and high-level Prussian officers had commandeered the château at La Grange as their headquarters.

In drawing up the peace accords, the allied powers resolved to teach their incorrigibly arrogant French foe to leave its neighbors alone and live within its own borders. As reparations, they extracted not only the costs of the twenty-five-year global upheaval unleashed by the French Revolution
but also many of the costs of the perennial havoc the French had wreaked on Europe during the millennium since Charlemagne’s Franks had ravaged the continent. To crush any French ambitions for territorial expansion, the allies sent more than one million soldiers to occupy two-thirds of France— sixty-one of the eighty-three departments—for at least five years, and more, if necessary. The allied-imposed Second Restoration returned Louis XVIII to the throne as a puppet king and stripped the boy Napoléon II of his title and all imperial claims.
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With only slightly more than ninety thousand privileged men permitted to vote, the first parliamentary elections returned a fanatically ultra-Royalist Chamber of Deputies, which ruthlessly sheared the Constitutional Charter of individual rights. It permitted the imprisonment of suspects without trial, imposed harsh punishment of authors for criticizing the regime, subjected antigovernment demonstrators to trial by courts-martial, and allowed for the exile or execution of military leaders who supported Napoléon during the Hundred Days. The second Restoration set off a new round of internecine French savagery. During the White Terror—so named for the color of the Bourbon monarchy’s flag—mobs of royalists and former émigrés dragged Jacobins, Bonapartists, and republicans from their homes, beating and killing untold thousands, especially in royalist provinces in the south and west. Although allied troops eventually ended the slaughter, the White Terror silenced the voices of French extremists on the left—and brought peace to Europe for the first time in seventy-five years. The intervention of British friends in the allied high command restored La Grange to Lafayette in the autumn of 1815, and he returned to private life.

Three years of startling economic gains followed and produced such surprising political and social stability in France that the allies believed the French had, at last, learned the advantages of peace at home and abroad. They withdrew their troops two years early, in 1818 instead of 1820, and the government eased restrictions on individual rights and the press. At La Grange, Lafayette’s flock of merino sheep multiplied to more than one thousand head; his dairy herd grew to fifty cows; and his more than five thousand apple trees yielded a delicious cider that became the staple beverage in the region and one of the most sought-after ciders in France.

La Grange became a vastly profitable enterprise that kept Lafayette riding about in his trap each day from six or seven o’clock in the morning until three in the afternoon. He awoke with the sun, at five in summer—usually after seven hours of restful sleep. He spent an hour in bed reading and sometimes writing, then sat, or, if the pain in his joints permitted, knelt to talk silently to Adrienne for a quarter hour, holding before him the miniature portrait of her when she was fourteen. Inscribed on the frame were her dying words,
“Je suis toute à vous”
—“I am yours entirely.” In it, also, was a lock of
her hair. By seven o’clock, he was ready to tour his “plantation,” as he liked to call it. With George hovering always at his side, he took a short respite for a mid-morning breakfast—often in one of the help’s cottages, sitting with his men, whose reverence for him increased accordingly.

His return from the fields took him into his study, where George helped him with his
Mémoires
and his voluminous correspondence. At six each evening, the courtyard bell sounded dinner, and as many as thirty people poured into the huge dining room—his children and grandchildren, of course, and an endless procession of guests. Lafayette sat in the middle of the long board, with Virginie and Anastasie opposite as hostesses, and the various grandchildren climbing over each other to sit near their grandfather. George always sat at his father’s side, growing more amazed each day as he gained new insights into the man he called Papa. George’s faithful former tutor, Frestel, brought the total number of family members at the table each night to a dozen, but guests arrived continually to swell the number to unpredictable levels. Lafayette’s in-laws, the Tracys, La Tour-Maubourgs, and Lasteyries, visited regularly, as did his old friends the Ségurs, retired generals like de Broglie, and an endless parade of illustrious guests, many from America for whom a visit to La Grange was a patriotic duty. Worldly men like Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher, came to discuss political science with the author of the French “Rights of Man,” and less worldly, would-be revolutionaries traveled from all parts of Europe to learn how to overthrow autocratic monarchs in their lands. He fed them not only respect, which few of his generation ever offered, but money—and, of course, the fine food, drink, and lodging that he lavished on every visitor to La Grange.

In 1817, crops failed on neighboring farms and threatened Brie with famine. Lafayette opened the gates of La Grange, often feeding soup and bread to seven hundred people a day—and giving each a sou. When his foreman told him his granaries could not feed all the neighbors
and
the huge Lafayette household, Lafayette moved the household to Chavaniac and instructed his foreman at La Grange to continue feeding the hungry in Brie. In 1818, the grateful people of his department elected him to the national assembly—to the annoyance of King Louis XVIII and the allied monarchs, who feared he would rekindle the flames of revolution. Their fears were not ill founded.

With the threat of retaliation by allied forces removed, growing numbers of young liberals, republicans, and Freemasons spoke out in opposition to the royal régime. The Indépendants, as they called themselves, needed only a leader to carry their banner in the Chamber of Deputies. Who better than the legendary hero of two worlds, the friend of Washington? Lafayette’s knight’s blood flowed warm again as the new generation rallied about him, and he raised his rhetorical flag of American liberty in the French assembly,
demanding freedom of the press, sanctity of the individual, personal liberties, and—heresy of all heresies in a monarchy—the right of all taxpayers to vote. His son had never before seen his father in full armor, charging passionately into the face of the enemy.

The steady stream of liberal rhetoric, however, soon tempted French extremists to test the political waters in the hopes of provoking another revolution. In 1820, a fanatic assassinated the king’s nephew, who was second in line to inherit the throne. The government reimposed censorship and arrest without trial, and it introduced so-called plural voting, which gave the wealthiest of the privileged two votes instead of one and all but blocked the election of young Indépendants. The sixty-one-year-old Lafayette, with thirty-nine-year-old George at his side, retaliated by organizing the young liberals about him into a new political club,
Les Amis de la Liberté de la Presse
—the Friends of the Liberty of the Press. On May 15,
Les Amis
sent thousands of students swarming through Paris streets demanding restoration of individual liberty and freedom of the press and repeal of plural voting. Six hundred students armed themselves and formed barricades; the cavalry charged, broke through the barricades, cracked student skulls, and dragged nine conspirators off to prison. Lafayette called on Parliament “to return to the national, constitutional and peaceable path—the path of good will,” but royalists booed and cursed him.

“When civil war breaks out,” a royalist replied to Lafayette, “its blood is on the head of those who have provoked it. The previous speaker [Lafayette] knows that better than any one. He has learned . . . with death in his soul and the blush of shame on his cheeks, that he who excited furious mobs is obliged to follow them and almost to lead them.”
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Revitalized, Lafayette could not resist parrying, “It seems to me the aristocracy is getting angry—like women who get angry with the artist who paints their portrait.”
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Lafayette’s remarks had little effect on the overwhelmingly royalist majority in the French Chamber, but it drew ever-growing numbers of young revolutionaries to his door on the rue d’Anjou—from Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, even Brazil. “The ideas of liberty are fermenting everywhere,” he wrote to James Monroe, who had succeeded Madison to the American presidency, “and France is participating a great deal. Revolution and counterrevolution are face to face. This new generation is enlightened and generous—intellectually superior to the Jacobins and Bonapartists. I am sure today’s young will support the right to pure liberty.”
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The ferment he described had started in Italy among the Carbonari, a secret society of young men whose antimonarchist beliefs and methods spread through Europe like a virulent fever.
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As it worked its way into France, its leaders sought a figurehead whom they described as “a gentleman
of olden days who fought for the mere beauty of the cause, the pleasure of combat and to oblige a friend.”
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They enlisted Lafayette, who, excited by their youthful fervor, readily offered them his money as well as his voice, and, without Adrienne’s firm hands on the family purse strings, Lafayette dipped far too carelessly—and too deeply—into his capital to finance their cause.

In the autumn of 1821, the Charbonniers, as they were called in France, organized a plot to overthrow Louis XVIII. The king posted spies outside La Grange to track Charbonnier leaders, and the police were able to smash the coup before plotters had fired a shot. Police swept across France, arresting thousands. Although they considered arresting Lafayette and George, the king’s advisors feared repercussions if they imprisoned the legendary Prisoner of Olmütz. The government silenced the press, and, in the election of 1823, the royalists silenced Lafayette by using plural voting to defeat his bid for reelection. When the new royalist-dominated Chamber met in February 1824, it extended its right to remain seated from five to seven years. At sixty-six, Lafayette had again failed in his quest to bring American liberty to France.

On his desk, however, was a letter from President Monroe with a resolution from Congress inviting him to visit the United States as “the Nation’s Guest.” The timing could not have been better—for both men. Lafayette’s political life seemed at an end, and, after forty years, he longed “to see for himself the fruit borne on the tree of liberty” he had helped plant in America.
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Monroe, on the other hand, had just issued a fierce warning to European powers to stay clear of American waters north and south. He enjoined them from colonizing any more lands in the Americas or attempting to export monarchy to independent American nations. The president believed that the presence of Lafayette—the last living major general of the American Revolution—as “the Nation’s Guest,” on the approaching golden anniversary of independence from the British monarchy, would serve as symbolic reinforcement of his new Monroe Doctrine.