The British killed his father before he could walk. He spent the rest of his life making them pay for it. He never called it revenge. He called it liberty. The distinction mattered to him enormously. Whether it was a distinction is a different question.
Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette was born on the sixth of September 1757 at the Chateau de Chavaniac in Auvergne, the son of a colonel of grenadiers who was killed by a British cannonball at the Battle of Minden on the first of August 1759. Lafayette was not yet two years old. He had no memory of his father. He had only the shape of the absence, which is a different kind of wound from grief because it cannot be healed, only carried.
His mother went to Paris. He stayed in Auvergne with his grandmother in a house full of portraits of dead soldiers and understood very early what the family required of him. His mother died when he was twelve. His grandfather died the same year. He was twelve years old and alone with a fortune so vast it made him one of the richest men in France, and the only thing he wanted was a war.
France was not at war. He married Adrienne de Noailles at sixteen, she was fourteen, it was a dynastic arrangement, nobody asked either of them. He was placed at the centre of the most glittering court in Europe, and he found it entirely insufficient. Then in 1775 the American colonies declared independence from Britain and Lafayette, not yet nineteen, heard the news at a dinner in Metz and made a decision in the time it takes to set down a glass.
Louis XVI forbade him to go. Lafayette bought his own ship and sailed in April 1777 and arrived in South Carolina in a country fighting for its life with an army that had no shoes, no money, and no reason to trust a French teenager with a title he couldn't pronounce. He asked for no salary. He paid for the crossing himself. He was nineteen years old and he had found his war.
On the fifth of August 1777 he met George Washington for the first time, and what happened between them in the years that followed is one of the stranger things in the history of two nations. Washington was forty-five and had no children. Lafayette was nineteen and had no father. The war gave each of them the other with the specific generosity that catastrophe occasionally produces, and both of them accepted it without embarrassment and without irony, which is the most remarkable thing about it.
Washington called him his adoptive son. Lafayette called Washington his general, his father, the patriarch of liberty, and meant all three simultaneously for the rest of his life, which was another fifty-seven years. He was wounded at Brandywine in September 1777 and refused to leave the field. He endured Valley Forge. He was given command that he had not earned by rank or experience and earned it instead by the specific currency available to him, which was the willingness to be exactly where the danger was.
Yorktown came in October 1781. The British general who surrendered was Cornwallis, commanding the remnant of the army that had killed Lafayette's father at Minden twenty-two years before. Lafayette was twenty-three years old. He stood on the ground where the British gave up the continent they had taken from his family and he said nothing about what it meant to him, or nothing that was written down, and the silence is its own kind of answer.
He returned to France in 1782 a hero of two continents and a man with a mission that America had only begun. The Enlightenment ideals that had sent him to Virginia were not confined to Virginia. He helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and commanded the Paris National Guard as the Revolution he had helped inspire gathered itself into something neither he nor anyone else had intended.
He tried to hold the moderate centre between the king and the mob with the specific optimism of a man who had watched a revolution succeed and believed the lessons were transferable. He had not understood that the American Revolution had succeeded in part because Washington was Washington, and that France had no Washington, and that without one the centre does not hold. By 1792 Robespierre had issued a warrant for his arrest. He fled toward Holland and was arrested at the Austrian border.
He was thirty-four. He would be a prisoner for the next five years.
They moved him between Prussian fortresses and removed his name and gave him a number, and eventually transferred him to a cell in Olmütz in Moravia built above a river used for sewage, where he lived in solitary confinement without books, without letters, without the right to speak unless spoken to first. He ate from filthy pots with his fingers. He had fought for the liberty of two nations. In France, while he sat in Olmütz, Adrienne was arrested. Her mother, her grandmother, and her sister were guillotined.
The name Lafayette was not a protection in the France of 1794. It was an accusation.
In America, George Washington was sending money and writing letters that went unanswered because they were intercepted, and caring for Lafayette's fifteen-year-old son, who had arrived at Mount Vernon with no country left to return to. The boy's name was Georges Washington Lafayette. His father had given him that name at birth, in 1779, fifteen years before Washington knew the child existed, because he understood what the name would mean and who it would honour, and because naming his son after a man was the closest he could come to saying what the man was to him without saying it directly.
Washington treated the boy as a son. The boy was the son of the man Washington called his son. He did not find this complicated.
Adrienne obtained a false American passport and crossed Germany to tell the Austrian Emperor that she wished to share her husband's imprisonment. He agreed. She and her daughters entered Olmütz in October 1795 and remained until Lafayette was freed. The prison cost her health permanently. She walked with a cane for the rest of her life and did not speak about it, and Lafayette had the specific guilt of men who are loved more completely than they have any right to expect.
He was released in September 1797, written into Napoleon's peace treaty with Austria as a condition, because America had never stopped claiming him as its own even when France had not. He walked out of Olmütz penniless, his estates confiscated, his country still closed to him, and made his way to Holland.
Washington died on the fourteenth of December 1799. Lafayette was still in exile. He had last seen him in 1784. He wrote to Hamilton that the loss was lamentable to mankind and to him as Washington's adoptive and loving son, and the letter has the quality of a man reaching for a word large enough for what he is feeling and finding that the available language is not sufficient.
He returned to America in August 1824, sixty-seven years old, the last surviving major general of the Continental Army, and the welcome he received had no precedent in the history of the republic. He travelled six thousand miles across twenty-four states. Veterans in their seventies walked miles on damaged legs to stand in a field and see him pass. Crowds of a hundred thousand gathered in cities that had not existed when he first sailed.
He wept throughout, which everyone present recorded and nobody found diminished him, because there are things large enough that a man of seventy is permitted to weep at them, and Lafayette's life was full of exactly those things.
He went to Mount Vernon. The tomb was opened. He descended the steps alone and pressed his face against the lead casing that held what remained of the man who had been his general and his father and the fixed point around which the meaning of his life had organised itself for fifty years. What he said was not recorded. He was alone with it and he kept it.
He went home to France and died on the twentieth of May 1834, seventy-six years old, and they buried him under soil from Bunker Hill that an American admirer had sent him years before, because he had asked to be, because he had slept beside that soil for the last years of his life so that wherever he lay he would be lying on American ground.
The British killed his father before he could walk. He spent the rest of his life making them pay for it. He is still there, in Paris, under American soil, which is either the most romantic ending in the history of two nations or simply the only ending that was ever possible for a man like that.
Probably both.
