Lafayette (73 page)

“My dear fellow citizens and brave comrades,” he told the crowd below, “the confidence of the people of Paris calls me once more to command public forces. I have accepted with devotion and with joy the powers confided to me, and, as in 1789, I feel strengthened by the approbation of my honorable colleagues assembled today in Paris. I will make no profession of faith.
My sentiments are known. The conduct of the people of Paris during these last few days renders me prouder than ever to lead them. . . . Liberty shall triumph or we will perish together.
“Vive la liberté! Vive la patrie!”
⁶

On October 29, 1830, France invested Lafayette “with a veritable moral and political dictatorship, the title to which was written in no decree,” according to one deputy, “but was imposed upon him in such a way that no one dreamed of contesting it.”
⁷
At seventy-three, it was the second time in his life that he had reigned in Paris—the second time in his life that he neared the completion of his quest to bring liberty and constitutional government to his native land.

His second reign would last but a day.

True to character, he refused to retain power unconstitutionally. From the moment he seized the reins of power, they seemed to slip out of his hands—as they had in 1789. As it did then, near hysteria reigned in the Grande Salle at the Hôtel de Ville. Crowds of unsolicited advisors, mostly young liberals and Charbonniers, milled about, shouting demands for reform. Couriers raced in and out with reports of emergencies: royal troops were at the top of the Champs Elysées preparing a counterattack; brigands were looting the national mint at the Hôtel de la Monnaie; mobs were stripping shops of bread and food. And outside the city hall—the constant, irritating chanting continued:
“Vive la République! Vive Lafayette! Vive la République!”

A courier arrived from the king pledging to repeal recent decrees and recall the Chamber of Deputies, but Lafayette dismissed him: “It is too late,” he said. “Reconciliation is impossible; the royal family has ceased to reign. The Bourbons are finished. The people have already revoked the king’s decrees themselves. As a delegate of the people I can have nothing to do with the representative of the fallen monarchy.”
⁸
The Charbonniers cheered, urged him to proclaim a republic, but he rejected their demand, saying that only the people could proclaim a republic, by popular referendum.

Conservative bankers, merchants, and powerful landowners in the Chamber of Deputies were already acting to forestall that possibility—to preserve their economic and political power and protect their assets. Lafayette’s republic would mean sharing political power with the unpropertied. Moreover, they argued, the establishment of a republic would violate the Peace of 1815, which had restored the Bourbon monarchy. Europe’s monarchs might invade France again if the nation abolished the monarchy and proclaimed a republic. Accordingly, the deputies restructured the executive branch of government, creating a powerful new Lieutenant General of the Realm—a
stathoudérat
(“stateholder”)—to replace the king as chief executive—but they named a royal to fill the post: the duc d’Orléans, a direct descendant of Louis XIII, whose Orléanist veins carried blood as pure as that of his Bourbon cousin, King Charles. The selection of another royal
to head the state sent shock waves across the barricades; republicans threatened renewed civil war.

At midnight on July 30, the duc d’Orléans acted to forestall such a possibility by sending a messenger to the Hôtel de Ville with a request to meet with Lafayette the following morning. Lafayette knew he would have to decide before then whether to proclaim a republic based on the American constitution or allow the duc d’Orléans to assume the throne. Either choice risked civil war. “If we establish a monarchy, the duc d’Orléans will be king,” an aide counseled him, “and if we establish a republic, you will be president. Do you want the responsibility of governing a republic?”
⁹
His thoughts turned back to 1793 and the ease with which Jacobin terrorists had seized and perverted the First French Republic. Lafayette consulted with American ambassador William C. Rives. “What will our friends in the United States say,” he asked, “if they learn that we have proclaimed the republic?” The American minced no words: “They will say that forty years of experience have been lost on the French.”
¹⁰

Although he regretted disappointing the idealistic young men he had embraced in the Charbonniers, Lafayette’s decision proved less painful than he had anticipated. He had, after all, championed constitutional monarchy under Louis XVI, after the Revolution of 1789, and the duc d’Orléans was a far more appropriate candidate as constitutional monarch—affable, dressed in modest bourgeois suits, and as comfortable speaking English as Lafayette. He had spent two years in exile in Philadelphia during the Terror and had met Washington at Mount Vernon—when young George-Washington Lafayette was there. The duke was fifty-seven and carried a comfortable paunch, but he had seen his share of military campaigns in the regular army and before that had even served in Lafayette’s National Guard. And he had suffered the cruel loss of his father to the guillotine. He had witnessed the horrors of the Terror and the beauties of American democracy. He had much in common with Lafayette, and each genuinely liked the other. Lafayette invited the duke to come to the Hôtel de Ville the following day, much as Louis XVI had done in July 1789. As then, Lafayette waited at the foot of the steps to greet the monarch, who arrived on horseback instead of in a gilded carriage and shook hands in an eager, democratic way. “Messieurs,” the duke told the crowd of onlookers, “I am simply an old National Guardsmen come to visit his former general.”
¹¹

The comment provoked a few cheerful cries of
“Vive le duc,”
as well as unpleasant shouts of
“Pas de Bourbons!”
—“No Bourbons!” Lafayette led the duke up the grand staircase to the Grande Salle, where, together with republican leaders, Lafayette had drawn up a historic seven-point
Programme de l’Hôtel de Ville
to which the duke would have to agree in order to win republican support and prevent civil war: (1) Sovereignty of the “nation”—that is, the people—over the head of state and the constitution; (2) Abolition of hereditary peerage; (3) Complete reform of the judiciary; (4) Municipal and communal elections based on widest possible public participation, with no property qualifications; (5) Popular election of lower-level judiciary; (6) Reform of privileges and monopolies that restrict industry and free commerce; (7) All the foregoing adopted provisionally and prior to submission [in a popular referendum] to the nation, which has the sole power to establish the system of government that it prefers.

“You know that I am a republican,” Lafayette told the duke, as the latter read the document, “and I see the Constitution of the United States as the most perfect document in existence.”
¹²

“I think as you do,” replied the duke. “It is impossible to have spent two years in America and not be of that opinion. But do you believe that, given the French situation and French thinking, it would be wise to adopt it in France?”
¹³

“No,” Lafayette agreed. “What the French people need today is a popular throne, wrapped in republican institutions—but entirely republican.”
¹⁴

“That is exactly what I believe,” the duke replied—and Lafayette took him at his word, shook his hand, and, as one knight to another, never questioned
the duke’s honor by asking for his signature on the historic document. Witnessing the handshake was Lafayette’s old friend the comte de Ségur.

After the duc d’Orléans expressed his concurrence, Lafayette waved the document containing the
Programme
before his political supporters, declaring that “constitutional monarchy is the best form of republic.”
¹⁵
He issued a proclamation urging regular army troops and officers to serve the new government and called on all citizens to remember that the duke was “one of the young patriots of ’89.” Outside the Hôtel de Ville, the antiroyalist cries had reached thunderous proportions. Both men had seen the
coupe-têtes
of ’89 and realized the need for quick action. Lafayette seized a large tricolor flag—the flag of the Revolution—pressed it into the duke’s hand, and led him onto the balcony, where he embraced him with both arms and kissed him on both cheeks—a gesture that writers across France described as “the republican kiss, with which the Hero of Two Worlds created a king.”
¹⁶
On August 2, Charles X abdicated and fled to exile in England. Five days later, the Chamber of Deputies elected the duc d’Orléans king, with Lafayette voting aye.

After the vote, the Chamber revised the Constitutional Charter, transferring all legislative powers from the executive to the legislature, breaking all government ties to the Roman Catholic Church, abolishing in perpetuity all censorship, and abolishing the extraordinary courts that could sentence enemies of the state without trial. The tricolor replaced the white Bourbon flag as the national emblem, and the new monarch would take the throne as “King of the French” instead of “King of France” and swear to observe the Constitutional Charter before doing so. The new king took the name Louis-Philippe I, which united the names of the Bourbon and Orléans royal houses,
¹⁷
but he called himself a “citizen king” and continued living in his own “modest” palace, the Palais-Royal, instead of moving into the royal Palais des Tuileries. He wore ordinary bourgeois clothes, with the only distinguishing element a button bearing the emblem “Live free or die.”

“It is really to you, General, that we are indebted for all this,” the new queen told Lafayette after the coronation, and the new king sent him a note that evening: “I cannot retire,
mon cher Général
, without thanking you for your good efforts today, and for the success that you have obtained.” And he signed it “Your affectionate [friend], Louis-Philippe.”
¹⁸

“There is the king we needed,” Lafayette declared in response. “There is the most republican solution that we were able to find.”
¹⁹

Lafayette’s happy pronouncement set Paris ablaze with festivities. While the worst elements of the mob slithered away into dark alleys, the rest of France hailed Lafayette as hero of the Revolution. On August 15, the City of Paris held a banquet for three hundred guests in his honor and presented him with two small cannons that remain at La Grange. The great author
Henri Beyle, who wrote under the pen name Stendhal, called Lafayette “admirable . . . the anchor of our liberty.”
²⁰
America, too, hailed Lafayette’s triumph, with President Jackson proclaiming it a triumph for American liberty. New Orleans sent its flag to the City of Paris, and Baltimore sent its flag to Lafayette, who was still a citizen of that city and the state of Maryland.

Louis-Philippe tried basking in the aura of Lafayette’s popularity: he named Lafayette Commander of the National Guard of the Realm, and his oldest son immediately enlisted and placed himself under Lafayette’s direct command. On August 29, Lafayette restaged the huge
Fête de la Fédération
of 1790, with three hundred thousand spectators lining the banks of the Champs de Mars as four squadrons of mounted guards escorted the new king across the arena to join Lafayette at a tent in front of the Ecole Militaire. The king then distributed flags to each of the battalions, and, as they had in 1790, the troops listened to Lafayette intone the oath of allegiance to the nation. Then, in one thunderous voice, the entire throng cried out, as their parents had in 1790,
“Je le jure!”
—“I so do swear.”

In the days and weeks that followed, Louis-Philippe renamed the former place de la Révolution the place de la Concorde,
²¹
to symbolize the unity and peace that would henceforth reign among the French—for a few weeks at least. A month later, the natural division between conservatives and liberals in the Chamber of Deputies widened into an unbridgeable divide. Lafayette seized the leadership of the minority liberal wing, demanding more reforms each time he spoke: abolition of the House of Peers and the peerage, abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and French military support for revolutions against autocratic rule in other nations. In September and early October 1830, the revolution in France inspired the Belgians to drive out the Dutch and declare independence; the Poles rebelled against Russian rule; Spanish rebels were in arms against the harsh rule of King Ferdinand; and Italians up and down the Italian boot were in arms against the petty tyrants who ruled the peninsula’s mosaic of autonomous duchies. Even Germans had taken to the streets with cries of
“Hoch Lafayette!”