Lafayette (74 page)

In the Chamber of Deputies, Lafayette moved that French troops support Belgian independence. He organized a committee to help Polish rebels, and he induced Louis-Philippe to finance the rebellion in Spain—much to the annoyance of Europe’s other monarchs, who sent ministers to a London conference to restore the 1815 military coalition against France and stop the disease of French revolution from spreading through Europe again. “When the masses rise up, provoked by troublemakers like Lafayette,” wrote an Austrian minister to the retired Talleyrand, “who can stop them?”
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Americans, on the other hand, hailed his every move, with delegations from every major city in the United States flocking to Paris to pay tribute. “This evening,” he said at a dinner for a delegation of Philadelphians and French army officers, “I find all the sentiments of my life fused here, the
grandsons of my companions in America, the sons of my comrades of ’89 and my new brothers in arms of the Revolution of 1830.” He then asked the guests to fill their glasses and stand:

“To the memory of Washington!”
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In the Chamber of Deputies, however, conservatives held a majority, and they acted to protect their own interests: they restored protective tariffs and banned certain imports to prevent foreign competition; they banned all worker organizations to prevent strikes; and they restricted voting to taxpaying property owners—about two hundred thousand men, in a nation whose population had mushroomed to thirty-five million.

Lafayette’s continuing demands for reform and freedom—elsewhere in Europe as well as in France—not only provoked the enmity of Europe’s other monarchs, they gradually alienated Louis-Philippe by relegating him to the shadows of the French political stage, while Lafayette stood front and center in the limelight. Other European monarchs mocked Louis-Philippe as a puppet-king manipulated by the dangerous revolutionary, Lafayette, while French conservatives called Lafayette the unelected “Mayor of the Palace” and joined cartoonists in unmerciful mockery of the king as “a pear”—
une poire
—a double entendre that reflected the shape of his body—a bulbous torso and an undersized head—as well as his brain (“pear” being a synonym in French slang for
simpleton
).

On Christmas Eve, the Chamber’s conservative majority staged a political coup d’état to rid the government of republican influences. It stripped Lafayette of all authority by abolishing the post of Commander of the National Guard of the Realm and converted the National Guard into a national police force under the minister of the interior. As a sop to republicans, the president of the chamber proposed naming Lafayette Honorary Commander, but Lafayette refused, saying that “such nominal titles do not befit a free people or me.”
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The upper echelon of Lafayette’s officers immediately resigned in anger, and liberals in the Chamber denounced the dismissal with equal fury. Only Lafayette himself seemed calm—indeed, he seemed relieved by his ouster. When one of his generals asked him to organize resistance to the Chamber’s actions, Lafayette replied, “No, no . . . I know where I stand. It is time for me to retire. I know I hover over the Palais-Royal like a nightmare; not for the king and his family . . . but those around him. Do you think I did not hear [Minister] Viennet tell the king when he saw me enter, ‘Here comes the mayor of the palace?’ There is no doubt I was useful in bringing him to power . . . on his promise to support the
Programme de l’Hôtel de Ville
. Everyone seems to have forgotten that promise, but I still insist strongly on holding him to it—and that is what the court cannot forgive. . . . From all this I conclude that I have become a bother . . . but I cannot change my convictions.”
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In the days that followed, Louis-Philippe issued a proclamation regretting Lafayette’s retirement, and Lafayette said his farewells to fellow officers in the Paris National Guard and the National Guard of the Realm. In a thinly veiled rebuke to the Chamber of Deputies, however, he announced that his retirement from the military did not mean retirement from politics. Indeed, he converted his seat in the Chamber into the most visible pulpit of ultraliberal ideas in Europe and a rallying point for parliamentary opposition to the increasingly conservative French government. He spoke eloquently on what he called the source of all divisions in Europe—the conflict between two guiding principles: the sovereign rights of peoples and the divine right of kings; between liberty and equality on the one hand and despotism and privilege on the other. He openly encouraged revolution, independence, and human rights in Ireland, Greece, Poland, Italy, and the colonies of South America. In England and the United States, liberal voices echoed his cries for liberty.

By early spring, the anti-French coalition of European monarchs convinced Louis-Philippe that Lafayette’s inflammatory rhetoric risked igniting another general war. Conservatives at home warned the king that street demonstrations in Paris for rebels in other lands could easily metamorphose into rebellion and elevate Lafayette to power. Already seething with anger over the proliferation of “pear” and “puppet” posters—and Lafayette’s daily accusations that the king had broken his pledge to support the
Programme de l’Hôtel de Ville
—Louis-Philippe broke with Lafayette. He denied he had ever discussed the
Programme
and all but accused Lafayette of lying. To placate his fellow monarchs, he moved out of his home and into the royal Palais des Tuileries and made overtures for closer court-to-court relations—a move that brought immediate praise from the anti-French coalition and an increase in French foreign trade. After a futile protest to the king, Lafayette left the royal Palais des Tuileries for the last time.

“Adieu l’Amérique,”
sneered one of the king’s aides as he watched the old knight leave.
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Lafayette returned to tend his estate at La Grange for the summer. His neighbors not only reelected him to the Chamber of Deputies, they voted him mayor of the village at La Grange and elected him to the General Council of the
département
, or county—two posts he had not sought. By the time he returned to the Chamber in the autumn, the Russians had crushed the Polish revolution. He nevertheless renewed his calls for French subsidies for revolutions against other despots, for the abolition of slavery, for the abolition of the Chamber of Peers, and for the abolition of property rights as a voting qualification. Conservatives had heard it all before and had tired of him, but they could not ignore him. He remained the unquestioned—and apparently eternal—leader of the opposition and the almost universal hero
of the young. They had read of his legendary exploits in their history texts, knew him as the living symbol of liberty in America, and saw his heroic life as proof that they could realize their own ideals. There he stood beside them, returned to life from the past, from America, to lead them into the future. What they
could
not understand, however, and what he
would
not understand, is that the future in France would only repeat the past.

Late in 1831, the untitled bourgeois barons of business who ruled France in the Chamber of Deputies veered onto the path of their aristocratic predecessors. After silk workers in Lyons won a guarantee of a minimum wage from the city’s chief administrator, or prefect, factory owners refused to pay it. The workers rioted and seized the plants and the city’s public buildings. The Paris government dismissed the prefect and ordered regular army troops to crush the worker revolt and impose martial law, including a ban on singing “La Marseillaise.” Lafayette protested in vain. The following year, he proposed laws to provide political asylum for refugees fleeing despotic regimes. The Chamber rejected his proposal.

In early 1832, a cholera epidemic that had started in India and swept through Asia Minor and eastern Europe reached France. A month later, more than a thousand Parisians and many times that number elsewhere in France were dead. Lafayette sent George back to La Grange to help Anastasie and Virginie cope with the needs of the family and the villagers, while he remained in Paris to help the government deal with the emergency.

In mid-May, the disease killed the prime minister, who also held dual powers as minister of the interior, with control of the French national police force. Despite Lafayette’s cries of outrage, Louis-Philippe assumed the two posts himself, thus accumulating sweeping new powers not granted him under the Constitutional Charter. Two weeks later, he used his police powers with frightening enthusiasm after the epidemic claimed General Maximilien Lamarque, a revered hero of the Napoleonic Wars and an outspoken liberal in the Chamber of Deputies.

One hundred thousand soldiers and veterans from all parts of France engulfed the church of the Madeleine in Paris to escort their dead leader to the cemetery. The cortège stretched for two miles through the narrow streets, with Lafayette and other former maréchals de camp as pallbearers. They stopped at the Place de la Bastille for eulogies, and, one after the other, the solemn voices droned on, until Lafayette rose to recount his vivid memories of the two revolutions of 1789 and 1830. Cries of
“Vive la République!”
and
“Vive Lafayette!”
interrupted him. He tried in vain to recapture the crowd’s attention. “Do not spoil this day,” he shouted. But red Jacobin flags sprouted, one by one; the crowd swayed, rustled, and finally dissolved into whirlpools of turmoil, seized anew by the French disease of riot and revolution. Police on horseback charged from nearby alleyways, driving their terrified
animals into the melee, their sabers flashing, slashing and beating at the swell of humanity about them. The swirl of savagery sucked men, boys, and women to the ground in pools of blood, many trampled to death by fleeing celebrants. Barricades rose at the openings of the alleys and streets off the square. George managed to hustle his father from the fracas, and they made their way safely through back streets to the calm of the little rue d’Anjou.

The battle at the Bastille raged for two days and two nights, until Louis-Philippe ordered the artillery to blast the barricades with cannon fire. The king himself mounted his horse and led troops down the rue Saint-Antoine in the heart of the workers’ district, to beat back the crowds. After two days of fighting, the troops backed the last of the insurrectionists into the Saint-Merry monastery, in the shadow of the Hôtel de Ville. At the citizen-king’s order, cannons leveled the walls, annihilated its defenders, and ended the insurrection.

The Lamarque funeral riots left Lafayette in despair—aghast at the inability of either French leaders or the French people to govern themselves under a republican constitution. Conservatives and liberals blamed him for the insurrection and its outcome: the former charged that his inflammatory oratory had provoked the uprising, the latter that he fled the fighting instead of leading the insurrection and overthrowing Louis-Philippe. The king blamed everyone. He dissolved the assembly and imposed martial law.

Exhausted and suffering increasingly from joint pains, Lafayette returned to La Grange for the summer to tend his prize livestock and orchards. He resigned as mayor of the village and from the general council, saying that his differences with the king might have harsh economic repercussions on his neighbors. “Today,” he explained, “arbitrary government has replaced the engagements of the Charter for what can, without opposition, last fifteen days, fifteen months or fifteen years, as in the two preceding régimes.”
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In contrast to the horrors of epidemic and insurrection in Paris, La Grange was a utopia for him, as he was surrounded by his huge, loving family—Anastasie, Virginie, and George, their spouses, thirteen grandchildren, and an expanding brood of great-grandchildren. Along with a few in-laws and their children, they numbered more than thirty at the long table for each meal— and often many more if visitors from America or some other country arrived. The gentle summer sun and constant laughter of children rejuvenated the old knight; his beautiful animals won four blue ribbons at the annual livestock show, while his apple and pear orchards yielded record crops for the local villagers to press into cider and eau de vie before the huge harvest celebration that Lafayette sponsored for them on the château grounds.

“I have become, within the limits of our canton, a pretty good agriculturist,” he still boasted, “and lame though I am, I gather my strength where walking is concerned, and manage well enough to do and oversee what is essential.”
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In November, he returned to the Chamber of Deputies in Paris to continue his futile attacks on the government. As he had done during the Empire and the Restoration, he politely refused all invitations to the Palais des Tuileries and gleefully accepted invitations by Masonic lodges or visiting Americans to dinners in his honor, where he could preach the gospel of liberty to the converted. James Fenimore Cooper gave just such a dinner and presented Lafayette with tributes from the New York National Guard and from the state of North Carolina.
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