Lafayette (75 page)

Louis-Philippe banned political meetings and reintroduced censorship of the press—in part to eradicate the infuriating pear and puppet cartoons. While ever-larger pears appeared mysteriously on every wall each morning, Lafayette and other opponents developed a simple way around the ban on political meetings: they held banquets. There was no law against a group of friends gathering to eat veal and drink wine—and make a long toast that might include an expression of hope for changes in government policies.

The regime was impervious to changes that might expand individual liberties, however. Fearful that Lafayette was plotting to overthrow the government, the king posted a squad of police at the gates of La Grange. In March 1833, it marched into the château and arrested a refugee who had served as a government minister in the short-lived Republic of Poland.
Lafayette’s protests were of no avail, as were his renewed demands for a law to grant asylum in France to political refugees. Louis-Philippe, on the other hand, granted full amnesty to all surviving Bonapartistes.

Tired and discouraged after a fruitless spring session of the Chamber, Lafayette returned for a summer’s reinvigoration at La Grange in the warmth of his huge, adoring family. He had little inclination to return to the Chamber for the autumn session. At seventy-six, his eyesight and hearing were failing, his stiff hip joint made walking painful, and all his friends were dead. To some, he remained a living legend, but he felt like a rusty relic and postponed his return to Paris until after Christmas. On January 3, 1834, he made what would be his last appearance in the Chamber’s political arena. He claimed (incorrectly) that journals were misquoting him as having said that the constitutional monarchy created in the Revolution of 1830 was the best of republics. “No, Messieurs, it would not have befitted a man who declared himself
a disciple of the American school
—a friend and associate of Washington, Franklin and Jefferson—to say that the amalgam that we fashioned and which we then thought to be in the interest and the will of the nation was
the best of republics
. . . . Above all, a republic must render justice to that part of the population that has thus far been ignored in the legislation of basic rights—to that part of the population that is suffering. . . . Messieurs, true republicanism is the sovereignty of the people; it is the natural and inalienable rights that even an entire nation has no right to violate.”
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A month later, he insisted on attending the funeral of a fallen deputy; the chill February drizzle cut through to his skin as he marched the long miles to the grave site, where he stood stoically even as tremors racked his aged body. George rushed him home, where he collapsed. Doctors treated him day and night, and, after three weeks, he recovered enough to walk about the house and resume writing letters.

“My dear friend,” he wrote to James Fenimore Cooper, who had promised to keep him abreast of American affairs after Cooper left Paris. “I have always found that distance, far from weakening, seems to reanimate all the more my feeling of American pride. You have probably learned from various French newspapers of the precarious state of liberty and tranquillity in this country. . . . A handful of malcontents took up arms in Paris last night and this morning, and they were defeated by overwhelmingly superior forces, but not without spilling some blood. . . . It seems the government is preparing new, oppressive laws.”
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On the morning of May 9, 1834, an open carriage carried him to the Bois de Boulogne under a magnificent blue sky, but by midday a thunderstorm swept in with a near-arctic gale that left him drenched, trembling from the cold, and near collapse with fever and pain when he got home. Crowds gathered outside and stood silent vigil, day and night. Lafayette’s doctor
issued daily bulletins to the press. George and other members of his family sat by his bed twenty-four hours a day. He slept most of the time, although he experienced occasional bursts of energy and abandoned his bed to sit in a chair and read a newspaper. When the doctor walked into his room one afternoon, Lafayette startled him by thrusting a Swiss newspaper into his hands and snarling,
“La Gazette de Suisse
has just killed me, and you pretend to know nothing about it? Well, then, I will tell you more: to kill me legally, they have even consulted the celebrated Doctor [name omitted], whom I hardly even know. That should give you great confidence in the newspapers.”
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When his condition failed to improve, the doctor urged calling in consultants. “What for?” Lafayette protested, and the doctor explained, “As long as there is a single possibility for ending your illness . . . we must find it . . . we are responsible to your family, your friends and all the French people. You are their father.”

“Yes,” Lafayette muttered, “I am their father so long as they do not have to heed a word that I say to them.”
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At four in the morning of May 20, 1834, United States major general Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, maréchal de camp, awakened and grasped the locket that held the portrait of young Adrienne with its inscription,
“Je suis toute à vous,”
on the frame. The great knight pressed it to his lips, closed his eyes, and died.

“General Lafayette was taken from his family and his country on May 20,” said the terse announcement on the card that George-Washington Lafayette sent to his father’s friends around the world. “In accordance with his last wishes, his coffin was placed in the Picpus Cemetery, where his lifelong partner already rests and where the same tomb will reunite them.”
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When the news reached America, the nation went into mourning. Every city in the land held memorial services, and the Lafayette Guards, with their distinctive red and black plumes, marched at half-step through Boston for one last time. In Washington, President Andrew Jackson ordered the same military honors for Lafayette that President John Adams had ordered for George Washington thirty-five years earlier. The nation lowered its flags to half-staff, and every military post and navy ship fired a twenty-four-gun salute at daybreak the next morning and a single cannon shot every half hour thereafter throughout the day until sunset. Every officer in the army and navy wore black crepe brassards for six months. Congress passed a joint resolution expressing the sorrow of its members and the people of the United States to George-Washington Lafayette and the members of his family. It ordered both chambers draped in black bunting for the remainder of the session and asked its members, as well as all Americans, to dress in mourning for thirty days. Massachusetts representative John Quincy
Adams, the former president,
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gave the official eulogy at a joint session of Congress, attended by the president and his cabinet, the members of the United States Supreme Court, and the entire diplomatic corps.

“Pronounce him one of the first men of his age,” Adams exclaimed, “and you have yet not done him justice. . . . Turn back your eyes upon the records of time; summon from the creation of the world to this day the mighty dead of every age and every clime—and where, among the race of merely mortal men, shall one be found, who, as the benefactor of his kind, shall claim to take precedence of Lafayette?”
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Newspapers across the nation reprinted his oration, and Congress voted to print fifty thousand copies for distribution to schools, libraries, and the general public throughout the United States. Hundreds of cities and towns across America that hadn’t done so during or after his visit in 1824 renamed themselves or their schools or streets Lafayette, Fayette, or Lagrange.

In France, King Louis-Philippe deemed the fallen knight as much a menace in death as he had been in life and banned all official recognition of Lafayette’s passing. With the memory still fresh of the riots at General Lamarque’s funeral, the president of the Chamber of Deputies limited his recognition to one sentence: “The name of general Lafayette will forever be celebrated in our history as one of the principal founders of the constitutional monarchy, which he greeted, along with us, with acclamation and good wishes.”
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To prevent street demonstrations, Louis-Philippe ordered a military funeral that barred public participation. A liberal newspaper mocked the “pear king” in an editorial: “Hide yourselves, Parisians! The funeral of an honest man and a true friend of liberty is passing by.”
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Lafayette’s valet walked behind the hearse carrying a velvet cushion bearing his master’s sword and epaulets. George-Washington Lafayette and the rest of the family and friends followed, then a deputation from the Chamber of Deputies, and behind them three thousand members of the disbanded National Guard, all unarmed. At every major cross-street, armed cavalrymen and artillery stood at the ready to prevent crowds from forming. “It would have taken a pitched battle to approach Lafayette’s coffin,” wrote the editor of the liberal newspaper
National
. “No one dared approach; indeed, the spirit of Lafayette must have been indignant. The true friend of the people of Paris was separated from the public by bayonets and sabers.”
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Another journalist published this description. “The French army imprisoned him in a bier the way the Austrian army imprisoned him in a state prison. The hearse was surrounded by a battalion whose bayonets still dripped with French blood and kept the people from rendering homage to their liberator. The terrifying precautions and insulting deployment of troops transformed the capital into a city at war in the midst of a public calamity. The cemetery that awaited the remains of the defender of liberty was placed in a state of siege. A mourning public faced a force of artillery larger than would be deployed against a foreign invasion. Not a single minister or government official appeared in the official escort.”
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Citizen-King Louis-Philippe did not utter a word about the death of the knight who had placed him on the throne.

The cortège crossed the place du Trône, where a guillotine had slaughtered Adrienne’s mother, grandmother, and sister forty years earlier. About
one hundred yards away lay Picpus Cemetery, where Lafayette would rejoin Adrienne, after a separation of twenty-seven years. After lowering his father beside his mother, George-Washington Lafayette covered his father’s coffin with the dirt they had carried back from Bunker Hill, thus fulfilling Lafayette’s wish to be buried in American as well as French soil.

Eighty-three years later, when General John Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force helped liberate France in 1917, he sent his aide Colonel Charles E. Stanton to the Picpus cemetery to replant the American flag above Lafayette’s grave. In a stirring ceremony on America’s July 4th Independence Day, Stanton saluted the French knight who had helped free the United States: “Lafayette, we are here.”
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The fruitful Lafayette line continued to multiply, with the number of his direct descendants now in the hundreds. None, however, can lay agnatic claim to his surname, which disappeared when George-Washington Lafayette’s two sons died without male issue. None of the descendants of Anastasie, Virginie, or George-Washington Lafayette are agnates born with the Lafayette family name, but they have not allowed his name to disappear. They have simply tacked their great ancestor’s name onto their own to produce a large current generation of hyphenated Lafayettes who adopted the pre-Revolution spelling La Fayette. These include Geneviève and Michel Aubert-La Fayette and their children, and Gilbert Bureaux de Pusy-La Fayette, who carries the great knight’s first and last names and the name of Lafayette’s aide, Bureaux de Pusy, who went to prison at Olmütz.

George-Washington Lafayette spent the years immediately following his father’s death organizing Lafayette’s letters, speeches, and papers and compiling his
Mémoires, Correspondence et Manuscrits du Général Lafayette, publiés par sa famille
, which was published in six volumes in Paris in 1837–1838, and simultaneously in two much larger volumes in Brussels. He retained his seat in the Chamber of Deputies until the summer of 1849, remaining a loyal member of the ultraliberal minority his father had organized to oppose the restrictive dicta of King Louis-Philippe. He lived to see the third French revolution of his life in 1848, when a clumsy government effort to prevent a republican rally in Paris provoked a clash between troops and demonstrators that exploded into full-scale insurrection and forced Louis-Philippe to abdicate. After moderates proclaimed the Second French Republic in February, 1848, George-Washington Lafayette won reelection to his old seat in the Chamber of Deputies, but he failed to win the following year. He died in November 1849, never having attained the celebrity of his father.