Lafayette (7 page)

The twenty-year-old French king was still too inexperienced to resist Vergennes’s compelling arguments. Vergennes proposed General de Broglie, Lafayette’s commander at Metz, as commander in chief for the American army, and, in early November, de Broglie came to Paris to meet with Deane. With him, he brought his top aide, “Baron” Johann de Kalb, a gigantic Prussian-born major, who had been to America and spoke fluent English, but was decidedly not a baron and had never been one. The son of a Prussian peasant, with no chance for advancement as a commoner in the Prussian army, he had enlisted in the French army at twenty-two, dubbed himself “baron,” and tied his fortunes to de Broglie’s ambitions.

“A military and political leader is wanted,” de Broglie explained to Deane, through Kalb, “a man fitted to carry the weight of authority in the colonies, to unite its parties, to assign to each his place, to attract a large number of persons of all classes and carry them along with him; not courtiers, but brave, efficient, and well educated officers, who confide in their superior, and repose implicit faith in him.”
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De Broglie suggested sending Kalb to America with a staff of officers to explain the advantages to Congress. Deane agreed and sent an immediate report to Philadelphia: “Count Broglie, who commanded the army of France in the last [Seven Years’] war, did me the honor to call on me twice yesterday with an officer who served as his quartermaster general [Kalb] in the last war and . . . is desirous of engaging in the service of the United States of North America. I can by no means let slip an opportunity of engaging a person of so much experience, and who is by every one recommended as one of the bravest and most skillful officers in the kingdom. . . .

“I submit one thought to you,” he continued. “If you could engage a great general of the highest character in Europe, such for instance as . . . Marshal Broglie or others of equal rank, to take the lead of your armies . . . it would give a character and credit to your military, and strike perhaps a greater panic in our enemies. I only suggest the thought, and leave you to confer with the Baron de Kalb on the subject at large.”
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In early December, Kalb gave Deane a list of sixteen officers. Lafayette’s name was not among them. At Kalb’s insistence, Deane enrolled the officers at enormously inflated salaries and ranks that placed them above most American officers in the Continental army. He appointed the fifty-year-old “baron” a major general, a rank second only to that of Washington himself. “It is a universal custom in Europe to allow something extra,” he explained to Congress. “Men cannot be engaged to quit their native country and friends to hazard life . . . in a cause which is not their own.”
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A few days after Deane commissioned de Broglie’s officers, de Broglie commandeered two French frigates to take his prospective junta to Philadelphia. He gave Kalb special instructions for meeting with congressional leaders: “The main point of the mission with which you have been entrusted will therefore consist in explaining . . . the absolute necessity of the choice of . . . a generalissimo.”
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When Lafayette learned that de Broglie was sending officers to fight in America, he and his friends Noailles and Ségur eagerly volunteered—without the slightest notion that they had stumbled onto a fragile, complex plot to replace the American military command with a French military junta. De Broglie did not want loose-tongued young idealists undermining his scheme and tried discouraging them. “I witnessed your father’s death at the Battle of Minden,” he told Lafayette, “and I will not be accessory to the ruin of the only remaining branch of your family.”
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Lafayette protested, however, and, rather than risk Lafayette’s exposing the expedition, de Broglie sent the young men with Kalb to see Deane. Deane’s aide, William Charmichael, greeted them—the first American Lafayette had ever met. Both Charmichael and Deane seemed taken aback by their youth and inexperience, but they identified themselves as brother Masons, and Lafayette convinced him of the advantages of enlisting members of such illustrious families. “I spoke more of my ardour in the cause than of my experience,” Lafayette recalled in his memoirs, “and I dwelt much upon the effect my departure would excite in France.”
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Although all three boys were minors, only Noailles and Ségur needed family permission to enlist. The orphan Lafayette had no family, and, with an annual income of now nearly 150,000 livres from his estates—about $1.5 million in today’s currency—he was free financially to do as he pleased. On December 7, 1776, Deane amended the list of de Broglie’s officers to include “M. de la Fayette, Major-general,
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who signed the enlistment papers with this addendum of conditions:

On the conditions here explained I offer myself, and promise to depart when and how Mr. Deane shall judge proper, to serve the United States with all possible zeal, without any pension or particular allowance, reserving to myself the liberty of returning to Europe when my family or my king shall recall me.

Done at Paris this 7th day of December, 1776.

The Marquis de la Fayette.
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Although elated, Deane feared Congress would question the enlistment of a nineteen-year-old major general who had yet to fire a shot in battle and could not even speak English to the troops he would command. He sent Congress a lengthy explanation: “The desire which the Marquis de la Fayette shows of serving among the troops of the United States of North America, and the interest which he takes in the justice of their cause, make him wish to distinguish himself in this war, and to render himself as useful as he possibly can. . . . His high birth, his alliances, the great dignities which his family hold at this court, his considerable estates in this realm, his personal merit, his reputation, his disinterestedness, and, above all, his zeal for the liberty of our provinces, are such as have only been able to engage me to promise him the rank of major-general in the name of the United States.”
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Kalb and de Broglie’s other officers were at the port of Le Havre boarding their frigates for America when Noailles and Ségur asked their families for permission to go to America—and unwittingly set off an international scandal that all but undermined foreign minister Vergennes’s efforts to avoid provoking war with Britain. It was one thing for obscure soldiers of fortune such as Kalb to seek adventure across the sea, but quite another matter for three king’s musketeers—three noblemen from France’s oldest, most powerful families—to enlist in a rebellion against a fellow monarch with whom France was at peace. Although many young knights and their ladies applauded their daring, the British ambassador lodged a strong protest, threatening to break diplomatic relations and send the British fleet to blockade French ports.

Vergennes was furious at Lafayette’s impetuous, impolitic plan; the prime minister, comte de Maurepas, called it “a hostile act that would most assuredly be against the wishes of the king”
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and moved to appease Britain by closing French ports to American ships and banning the sale of war materiel to America. Vergennes forbade the departure of de Broglie’s ships, and the minister of war ordered the arrest “with plenty of publicity and severity” of any French soldiers who claimed that the French government had ordered them to go to America. Unconvinced of French sincerity, the British blockaded French ports to curtail shipments to America. De Broglie recalled Kalb and his officers to Paris, and Vergennes ended the clandestine French aid to America. Deane feared he would have to return to America in disgrace.

On the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, the duc d’Ayen was outraged by the embarrassment his sons-in-law had caused the family; he was particularly furious at Lafayette for considering abandoning his responsibilities as husband and as father of a newborn. To calm the duc’s rage, Lafayette agreed to go to London with his cousin for a three-week visit to the marquis de Noailles, the duc d’Ayen’s uncle, who had just assumed the ambassadorship to Britain.

Lafayette remained obsessed with his American quest, however, and met secretly with de Broglie to propose buying his own ship and financing the expedition to America himself. Ambitious for Washington’s job, de Broglie gleefully agreed and sent an army procurement officer to purchase a cargo ship in Bordeaux, in southwestern France, far from the prying eyes of British spies at Le Havre. “Our young Marquis does not despair,” de Broglie told Kalb. “He still has the greatest desire to go.”
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Lafayette rushed to Deane’s quarters on the place Louis XV (now place de la Concorde) to break the news: “Until now, sir,” declared America’s youngest major general, “you have only seen my zeal for your cause. I shall now purchase a ship to carry your officers; we must feel confidence in the future, and it is especially in the hour of danger that I wish to share your fortune.”
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Carnival Week in February found Adrienne de La Fayette pregnant with her second child, and the demands of family and palace life seemed to capture Lafayette’s every waking moment. He made a show of joining the throng of young nobles who trailed Queen Marie-Antoinette to an endless succession of costume balls, dinners, and dances that seldom ended before dawn. On Shrove Tuesday, February 11, Lafayette learned that de Broglie’s envoy in Bordeaux had purchased a cargo ship, the
Victoire
, with a crew of thirty and two cannons on deck. That afternoon, Lafayette signed a note to cover the deposit and went off to celebrate the climactic event of Carnival Week—the Queen’s Ball, where the queen would lead revelers in dance until sunrise the next morning.
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The following Sunday, February 17, 1777, Lafayette left for London, unable to speak a word of English, but, as the French ambassador’s great-nephew by marriage and a member of the powerful Noailles family, he nonetheless became the center of attention in the highest ranks of London society. Ambassador Noailles presented him to King George III; he was guest of honor at a ball given by Lord George Germaine, British Secretary for the Colonies; and he chatted nonchalantly at the opera with General Sir Henry Clinton, one of the commanders in the epic British victories at Bunker Hill and Long Island.

Lafayette recalled his impudence in his memoirs: “A youth of nineteen may be, perhaps, too fond of playing a trick upon the king he is going to fight with. But, while I concealed my intentions, I openly avowed my sentiments; I often defended the Americans; I rejoiced at their success at Trenton; and my spirit of opposition obtained for me an invitation to breakfast with Lord Shelbourne
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[leader of parliamentary opposition to British policy in the American colonies].”
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