Marquis de Lafayette

• 1. Introduction

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  The Marquis de Lafayette lies buried in Picpus Cemetery in Paris, beneath soil carried across the Atlantic from Bunker Hill in Massachusetts. He gathered that earth himself, intending it for his grave. Americans call him simply Lafayette. Both nations know him by a title that fits the soil: "The Hero of the Two Worlds." His full name was Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette. He was born to wealth in south-central France, a country where he would one day be hunted by the very revolution he helped lead. How did a rich French teenager end up fighting beside George Washington? Why was a man cheered in two nations nearly destroyed in his own? And what did it take to outlast kings, mobs and an emperor?

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• 2. Orphaned Heir

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  Gilbert de Lafayette III, a Marshal of France, fought alongside Joan of Arc's army at the siege of Orléans in 1429. That ancestor set the tone for a family famous for courage and for contempt of danger. Legend credits another forebear with acquiring the crown of thorns during the Sixth Crusade.

  Lafayette was born on the 6th of September 1757 at the Château de Chavaniac, near Le Puy-en-Velay in the province of Auvergne. His father, Michel, held the title of marquis because an uncle, Jacques-Roch, had died fighting the Austrians at Milan on the 18th of January 1734. The family's luck did not improve. On the 1st of August 1759, a cannonball struck Michel at the Battle of Minden in Westphalia. The infant became marquis and Lord of Chavaniac, but the estate itself passed to his mother. She moved to Paris to live with her father and grandfather. A paternal grandmother, Mme de Chavaniac, raised the boy at the château, which her dowry had brought into the family.

  In 1768, when Lafayette was 11, he was summoned to Paris and settled in the Luxembourg Palace apartments of his great-grandfather, the Comte de La Rivière. The comte commanded the Mousquetaires du Roi, called the "Black Musketeers," who served as King Louis XV's personal horse guard. The boy attended the Collège du Plessis, part of the University of Paris. The comte also enrolled him in a program that trained future Musketeers.

  In April 1770, his mother died on the 3rd and his grandfather on the 24th. Together these deaths left Lafayette an income of 25,000 livres. When an uncle died, the 12-year-old inherited a yearly income of 120,000 livres. In May 1771, not yet 14, he was commissioned a sous-lieutenant in the Musketeers. His duties, such as marching in parades and presenting himself to King Louis, were mostly ceremonial. His studies went on as usual.

  Meanwhile, Jean-Paul-François de Noailles, the Duc d'Ayen, was looking for husbands for some of his five daughters. Lafayette, aged 14, seemed a good match for the duke's 12-year-old daughter Adrienne. The duchess, Henriette Anne Louise d'Aguesseau, objected that the pair, and especially her daughter, were too young. The compromise was two years of silence on the subject, while the couple met in casual settings. The plan worked, and the two fell in love. They married in 1774, beginning a partnership that would carry them through revolution and prison.

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• 3. Escape to America

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  At Metz in 1775, during his unit's annual training, Lafayette dined with Charles François de Broglie, the Marquis of Ruffec, who commanded the Army of the East. Over that meal the two men discussed the revolt against British rule in the Thirteen Colonies. Historian Marc Leepson notes that Lafayette had "grown up loathing the British for killing his father." Another historian points out that he had recently become a Freemason. Reports of Americans as "people fighting for liberty" stirred his chivalric and Masonic imagination.

  A second dinner pushed him further. The Duke of Gloucester, brother of King George III, complained about the American Patriots and mocked their belief in equality and self-rule. Lafayette later called that evening a turning point. It was also when he learned that Washington was seeking recruits for the Continental Army.

  When he turned 18 in September 1775, Lafayette returned to Paris and received the captaincy in the Dragoons that he had been promised as a wedding present. In December his first child, Henriette, was born. In those months he became convinced that the American cause matched his own beliefs. "My heart was dedicated," he said.

  The year 1776 brought delicate talks between American agents, including Silas Deane, and Louis XVI with his foreign minister, the Count of Vergennes. The king and Vergennes hoped that arms and officers for the Americans might restore French influence in North America. They also wanted revenge for France's defeat in the Seven Years' War. When Lafayette heard that French officers were bound for America, he demanded a place among them. He met Deane, and on the 7th of December 1776, Deane enlisted him as a major general despite his youth.

  The scheme collapsed when the British government learned of it and threatened war. Lafayette's father-in-law, de Noailles, scolded him and sent him to London to visit the Marquis de Noailles, the French ambassador and Lafayette's uncle by marriage. He went in February 1777, was presented to George III, and stayed three weeks. Back in France, he hid from his father-in-law, who was also his superior officer, and wrote that he meant to sail for America. De Noailles was furious and persuaded Louis to issue a decree forbidding French officers to serve there. The decree named Lafayette. Vergennes may have urged the king to order his arrest, though that is uncertain.

  Congress lacked the funds for his voyage, so Lafayette bought a ship, the Victoire, with his own money. The price was 112,000 pounds. At Bordeaux, letters from his wife and relatives threw him into emotional turmoil. Soon after sailing he ordered the ship turned back, to the frustration of the officers traveling with him. The army commander there ordered him to report to his father-in-law's regiment in Marseille. De Broglie, who hoped for a military and political role in America himself, met him in Bordeaux. He claimed that the government secretly wanted Lafayette to go. That was untrue, but Lafayette wanted to believe it. He pretended to obey, traveled a few kilometres east, and doubled back to his ship.

  The Victoire left Pauillac on the Gironde on the 25th of March 1777 without him, since he wished to avoid British spies and the French Crown. She moored at Pasaia on the Basque coast, where she took on 5,000 rifles and ammunition from the factories of Gipuzkoa. Lafayette boarded and sailed on the 26th of April 1777. The two-month crossing brought seasickness and boredom. Captain Lebourcier meant to stop in the West Indies to sell cargo, but Lafayette feared arrest and bought the cargo himself to avoid docking. He landed on North Island near Georgetown, South Carolina, on the 13th of June 1777, with Philadelphia and its Congress still ahead.

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• 4. Washington's General

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  The Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, was swamped by French officers recruited by Silas Deane. Many of them spoke no English or had no military experience. Lafayette had picked up some English on the voyage and became fluent within a year. His Masonic membership opened doors, and he offered to serve without pay. Congress commissioned him a major general on the 31st of July 1777. Benjamin Franklin, newly arrived as envoy in France, urged Congress by letter to accommodate the young Frenchman.

  On the 5th of August 1777, at a dinner in Philadelphia, Lafayette met General George Washington. According to Leepson, "the two men bonded almost immediately." Washington was impressed by the young man's enthusiasm and inclined to think well of a fellow Mason. Lafayette was simply in awe. Washington showed him the army's camp and expressed embarrassment at its state and that of the troops. Lafayette answered, "I am here to learn, not to teach." He joined Washington's staff, though his status stayed unclear. Congress treated his commission as honorary, while he expected a division once Washington judged him ready. Washington explained that a foreign-born officer could not have one. He offered instead to hold Lafayette in confidence as "friend and father."

  Lafayette first saw combat at Brandywine, near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, on the 11th of September 1777. After the British outflanked the Americans, Washington sent him to join General John Sullivan. Lafayette tried to rally the Third Pennsylvania Brigade, but British and Hessian numbers told, and a shot struck his leg. During the retreat he rallied the troops, which allowed a more orderly pullback. Washington cited his "bravery and military ardour" and recommended him for a division. After two months of recovery in the Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, Lafayette took over the division once led by Major General Adam Stephen. On the 24th of November 1777, with 300 soldiers, he beat a larger Hessian force at Gloucester.

  Lafayette spent the winter of 1777-1778 at Valley Forge, sharing the hardship of his troops. The Board of War, led by Horatio Gates, asked him to prepare an invasion of Quebec from Albany, New York. He found too few men there and wrote to Washington about it. Before leaving, he recruited the Oneida tribe to the American side. The Oneida called him Kayewla, meaning fearsome horseman.

  On the 18th of May 1778, Washington sent Lafayette and 2,200 men to scout near Barren Hill, Pennsylvania. The British sent 5,000 men to capture him, and General Howe led 6,000 more on the 20th. To feign greater strength, Lafayette had men appear from the woods on an outcropping and fire at intervals. His troops slipped away along a sunken road and crossed Matson's Ford.

  That summer, a French fleet under Admiral Charles Henri Hector, Count of Estaing, reached Delaware Bay. Lafayette and Nathanael Greene took 3,000 men to Newport, Rhode Island, to join an attack. Estaing refused to anchor in Narragansett Bay, and a storm scattered both fleets. When the French sailed for Boston, angry crowds there called it desertion. John Hancock and Lafayette were sent to calm the city. Congress cited Lafayette for "gallantry, skill, and prudence," and he sailed home on leave in January 1779.

  In Paris in February 1779, Lafayette was placed under house arrest for eight days for defying the king. This was a face-saving gesture by Louis XVI, and soon the king invited him to hunt. Franklin's grandson, William Temple Franklin, presented him with the gold-encrusted sword that Congress had commissioned. With Franklin's help, Lafayette secured a promise of 6,000 French soldiers under General Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau. In March 1780 he sailed from Rochefort aboard the frigate Hermione and reached Boston on the 27th of April.

  On the 10th of May 1780, Lafayette had a joyful reunion with Washington at Morristown, New Jersey. Washington had him write to state officials for troops and supplies, with Alexander Hamilton correcting his spelling. The French force that arrived was smaller than promised, and Rochambeau chose to wait for reinforcements. Lafayette's grand schemes irritated him so much that Rochambeau briefly refused to receive him until he apologized. Washington counseled patience. In November, after a summer of little action, Washington disbanded Lafayette's division.

  In early 1781, Washington ordered Lafayette south to Virginia to link up with Baron von Steuben. Lafayette believed he was being abandoned in a backwater. He did not know that Washington, fearing a captured letter, could not reveal a plan to trap Lord Cornwallis. Lafayette wrote to the French ambassador about his ill-supplied troops. The ambassador forwarded the letter to France with a recommendation of massive aid, and the king approved it. In Virginia, Lafayette evaded Cornwallis and harassed his column with small squads that created the impression of a larger force.

  On the 6th of July 1781, Lafayette sent General "Mad" Anthony Wayne against British troops near the James River. Wayne had roughly 800 men and found himself outnumbered. Instead of retreating, he led a bayonet charge. The Battle of Green Spring was a British victory, but the display of courage lifted American spirits. By August, Cornwallis had settled at Yorktown, and Lafayette posted artillery around him from Malvern Hill. When the French fleet won the Battle of the Virginia Capes, the British lost their naval cover.

  Washington's forces joined Lafayette's on the 14th of September 1781, and the siege of Yorktown began on the 28th. On the 14th of October, Lafayette's 400 men took Redoubt 9, while Hamilton's troops charged Redoubt 10 in hand-to-hand combat. Those two redoubts were key to breaking the British defenses. Cornwallis surrendered on the 19th of October 1781.

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• 5. Citizen of Two Countries

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  On the 18th of December 1781, Lafayette left Boston for France. Washington felt he would be more useful lobbying for naval support than leading expeditions against the remaining British ports. Congress made him advisor to its envoys in Europe: Franklin in Paris, John Jay in Madrid and John Adams in The Hague. It instructed them "to communicate and agree on everything with him." He was received at Versailles on the 22nd of January 1782. That year his daughter was born, and he named her Marie-Antoinette Virginie on Thomas Jefferson's recommendation. He was promoted to maréchal de camp, skipping many ranks, and became a Knight of the Order of Saint Louis. He also helped plan a joint French and Spanish expedition against the British West Indies. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 made it unnecessary, and Lafayette took part in those negotiations. With Jefferson he worked on trade agreements meant to reduce America's debt to France.

  In 1783, Lafayette wrote to Washington urging the emancipation of enslaved people and their settlement as tenant farmers. Washington, himself a slave owner, declined to free his slaves but showed interest in the idea. Lafayette bought a plantation in the French colony of Cayenne to house the project. He also joined the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, a French abolitionist group. It campaigned to end France's role in the Atlantic slave trade and to win equal rights for free people of color.

  Lafayette toured America again in 1784-1785, visiting all the states. He called at Mount Vernon on the 17th of August. Before the Virginia House of Delegates he called for the "liberty of all mankind" and urged abolition. He urged Pennsylvania's legislature to help form a federal union, since the states were then bound only by the Articles of Confederation. In New York's Mohawk Valley he joined peace negotiations with the Iroquois, some of whom he had met in 1778. Harvard gave him an honorary degree, Boston a portrait of Washington and Virginia a bust.

  Maryland's legislature declared Lafayette and his male heirs "natural born Citizens" of the state. After the Constitution was ratified in 1789, that made him a natural-born citizen of the United States. Connecticut, Massachusetts and Virginia also granted him citizenship. Lafayette later boasted that he had become an American citizen before the concept of French citizenship existed.

  In Paris, the Hôtel de La Fayette on the rue de Bourbon became a meeting place for Americans. Every Monday, Franklin, John and Sarah Jay, and John and Abigail Adams dined there with Lafayette's family and liberal nobles. Clermont-Tonnerre and Madame de Staël were among the guests. At home, Lafayette pressed to lower trade barriers against American goods. He also sought to right the injustices Huguenots had suffered since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes a century earlier.

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• 6. Revolution in Paris

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  On the 29th of December 1786, King Louis XVI summoned an Assembly of Notables in response to France's fiscal crisis. He appointed Lafayette to it, and it convened on the 22nd of February 1787. Lafayette denounced courtiers who had profited from advance knowledge of government land purchases. He called for a "truly national assembly" that represented all of France. The king instead summoned an Estates General for 1789, and Lafayette was elected to it as a nobleman from Riom.

  The Estates General convened on the 5th of May 1789, and debate began at once over how to vote. Voting by Estate would let the clergy and nobility outvote the far larger commons. Voting by head would let the Third Estate dominate. As a member of the Committee of Thirty, Lafayette pushed for voting by head. He could not win a majority of his own Estate, but the clergy was willing to join the commons. On the 17th of May, they declared themselves the National Assembly. Loyalists locked the group out, which led to the Tennis Court Oath, a vow not to separate until France had a constitution. On the 11th of July, Lafayette presented the Assembly with a draft Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, written in consultation with Jefferson. The next day, the dismissal of the reformist finance minister Jacques Necker brought out Camille Desmoulins and between 700 and 1,000 armed insurgents. On the 14th of July, they stormed the Bastille.

  The next day, the 15th of July, Lafayette was acclaimed commander-in-chief of the Parisian National Guard. The Guard answered to the Assembly and handled policing, traffic, lighting and sanitation. Lafayette proposed its name and its symbol, a blue, white and red cockade. It joined the red and blue of Paris with the royal white and became the origin of the French tricolor. The job was thankless. The king and loyalists thought Lafayette little better than a revolutionary, while many commoners believed he was helping the king keep power.

  The Assembly approved the Declaration on the 26th of August, but the king rejected it on the 2nd of October. Three days later, a Parisian crowd led by women fishmongers marched to Versailles over the scarcity of bread. The National Guard followed, with Lafayette reluctantly in command. The king accepted the Declaration, but the crowd broke into the palace at dawn and insisted that the royal family move to Paris. Lafayette brought the family onto the balcony. Marie Antoinette appeared with her children, was told to send them back in, and returned alone. People shouted for her to be shot, yet she stood her ground and no one fired. Lafayette kissed her hand, and the crowd cheered.

  On the 12th of May 1790, Lafayette and Paris's mayor, Jean Sylvain Bailly, founded the Society of 1789 to balance the radical Jacobins. On the 14th of July 1790, at the Fête de la Fédération on the Champ de Mars, Lafayette led the National Guard and the king in a civic oath. They vowed to be "ever faithful to the nation, to the law, and to the king." Royalists thought the gathering was a dangerous risk for the king. Jacobins saw in it proof of Lafayette's royalist leanings.

  On the 28th of February 1791, Lafayette took part of the Guard to Vincennes to handle a conflict. Hundreds of armed nobles arrived at the Tuileries to defend the king in his absence. Rumors spread that they meant to carry the king off to lead a counter-revolution. Lafayette hurried back and disarmed them after a brief standoff. The episode became known as the Day of Daggers and raised his popularity. Even so, the royal family were increasingly prisoners in their palace. On the 18th of April, the Guard disobeyed Lafayette and stopped the king from leaving for Saint-Cloud to attend Mass.

  On the 20th of June 1791, the king and queen escaped from the Tuileries while Lafayette and the Guard were responsible for them. Lafayette sent the Guard out in every direction to find them. Five days later, he led the royal carriage back into Paris through a mob that shouted for the monarchs' heads and his own. Georges Danton told him, "You swore that the king would not leave." He added, "France can be free without you." Maximilien Robespierre called him a traitor to the people.

  On the 17th of July 1791, the radical Cordeliers gathered signatures on the Champ de Mars for a petition to abolish the monarchy or submit its fate to a referendum. Estimates of the crowd range from 10,000 to 50,000. The protesters found two men hiding under an altar, suspected them of spying or planting explosives, and hanged them from lampposts. Lafayette rode in at the head of his troops, and stones met them. A gunman aimed at Lafayette at close range, but his pistol misfired. The soldiers first fired above the crowd, which provoked retaliation and the deaths of two volunteer chasseurs. The Guard then fired into the crowd. People close to Lafayette put the dead at around ten. Other accounts say 54, and the newspaper publisher Jean-Paul Marat claimed over 400. Martial law followed, and Danton and Marat went into hiding. The press, including Révolutions de Paris, condemned the killing, and a mob attacked Lafayette's home and tried to harm his wife. The Assembly finalized a constitution in September, and Lafayette resigned from the National Guard in early October. He then went home to Auvergne.

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• 7. Prisoner of Kings

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  France declared war on Austria on the 20th of April 1792, and Lafayette, a lieutenant general since the 30th of June 1791, commanded the Army of the Centre at Metz. He had held that command since the 14th of December 1791. Many of his troops were Jacobin sympathizers who hated their officers. Robespierre demanded on the 23rd of April that he step down. In June, Lafayette wrote to the Assembly from his field post and called for the radical parties to be "closed down by force." His timing was poor, because the radicals controlled Paris. On the 28th of June, he delivered a fiery speech there against the Jacobins and was accused of deserting his troops. When only a few volunteers answered his call, he left the city hastily. Robespierre called him a traitor, and a mob burned him in effigy.

  Lafayette was moved to command the Army of the North on the 12th of July. The Brunswick Manifesto of the 25th of July warned that Austrians and Prussians would destroy Paris if the king were harmed. A mob attacked the Tuileries on the 10th of August, and the monarchy was abolished. On the 14th of August, the minister of justice, Danton, issued a warrant for Lafayette's arrest. Hoping to reach the United States, Lafayette entered the Austrian Netherlands.

  Austrian troops captured him near Rochefort after another former French officer, Jean-Xavier Bureau de Pusy, asked for transit rights for a group of officers. The request was granted at first, then revoked when the famous Lafayette was recognized. Frederick William II of Prussia, who had once received him, now saw him as a dangerous fomenter of rebellion. Lafayette was held at Nivelles, then in Luxembourg, where a military tribunal declared him and three others prisoners of state. The tribunal ordered them held until a restored French king could judge them. On the 12th of September 1792, they were handed to Prussian custody.

  At Wesel, from the 19th of September to the 22nd of December 1792, the prisoners sat in verminous individual cells in the citadel. The advance of French revolutionary troops sent them to the citadel at Magdeburg, where they spent the entire year from the 4th of January 1793 to the 4th of January 1794. Frederick William then decided that the war against France offered little, and that Poland offered easier gains. He made peace with the French and returned the prisoners to Austria. After a stop at Neisse, they were taken across the Austrian border on the 17th of May 1794. The next day, they reached a barracks-prison in the fortress-city of Olmütz in Moravia, a former Jesuit college.

  Lafayette tried to use his American citizenship to win release and contacted William Short, the United States minister at The Hague. Short and other envoys wanted to help, but they knew that his status as a French officer outweighed any American claim. President Washington had told them to avoid European entanglements, and the United States had no diplomatic relations with Prussia or Austria. They did send money for him and for Adrienne, whom the French had imprisoned. Secretary of State Jefferson found a loophole to pay Lafayette, with interest, for his service as a major general from 1777 to 1783. Congress rushed through an act, and Washington signed it. The funds bought both Lafayettes some privileges in captivity.

  A more direct rescue came from Angelica Schuyler Church, sister-in-law of Alexander Hamilton, and her husband John Barker Church. He was a British Member of Parliament who had served in the Continental Army. They hired a young Hanoverian physician, Justus Erich Bollmann, as their agent. Bollmann found an assistant in Francis Kinloch Huger, a South Carolinian medical student and the son of Benjamin Huger, who had sheltered Lafayette on his first arrival in America. Lafayette escaped from an escorted carriage drive in the countryside outside Olmütz. He lost his way and was recaptured.

  When Adrienne was released in France, she obtained passports for herself and her daughters from Connecticut, which had granted the whole family citizenship. She did so with the help of James Monroe, the American minister to France. Her son Georges Washington had been smuggled out of France to the United States. Adrienne and her two daughters went to Vienna and won an audience with Emperor Francis, who allowed them to live with Lafayette in captivity. Lafayette had endured harsh solitary confinement for a year since his escape attempt. On the 15th of October 1795, he was astonished when soldiers opened his door and ushered in his wife and daughters. The family spent the next two years in confinement together.

  Sympathizers on both sides of the Atlantic kept up pressure through diplomacy, the press and personal appeals. A young, victorious general, Napoleon Bonaparte, negotiated the release of the Olmütz prisoners as part of the Treaty of Campo Formio. The Lafayettes and their comrades left Olmütz under Austrian escort early on the 19th of September 1797. They were handed over to the American consul in Hamburg on the 4th of October. From Hamburg, Lafayette sent Bonaparte a note of thanks. After more than five years, his captivity was over, but the French Directory would not let him return unless he swore allegiance. He refused, believing it had seized power unconstitutionally. In revenge, the Directory sold his remaining properties and left him a pauper. The family recovered on a property near Hamburg that belonged to Adrienne's aunt, and Georges Washington soon rejoined them.

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• 8. Napoleon's Shadow and Beyond

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  After Bonaparte's coup of 18 Brumaire, the 9th of November 1799, Lafayette used the confusion to slip into France on a passport in the name of "Motier." Bonaparte expressed rage, but Adrienne suspected he was only posing. She proposed that Lafayette pledge support and then retire to La Grange, a property she had reclaimed. Bonaparte allowed him to stay, though at first without citizenship and subject to arrest if he engaged in politics. When Bonaparte held a Paris memorial service for Washington, who had died in December 1799, Lafayette was not invited, though he had expected to give the eulogy.

  On the 1st of March 1800, Bonaparte restored Lafayette's citizenship. After Marengo, the First Consul offered him the post of French minister to the United States. Lafayette declined, saying he was too attached to America to deal with it as a foreign envoy. In 1802, he was among the tiny minority that voted no on making Bonaparte consul for life. He repeatedly refused a Senate seat and the Legion of Honour, adding that he would gladly take such honours from a democratic government. After the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson asked whether he wanted the governorship. Lafayette declined, citing personal problems and his wish to work for liberty in France.

  During a trip to Auvergne in 1807, Adrienne fell ill from complications of her time in prison. She became delirious but recovered enough on Christmas Eve to gather the family at her bedside. She told Lafayette, "Je suis toute à vous," meaning "I am all yours." She died the next day. Lafayette lived on quietly at La Grange, wrote letters to Jefferson, and received many visitors, especially Americans.

  In 1814, the coalition against Napoleon restored the monarchy under Louis XVIII. The republican Lafayette objected to a restrictive franchise that gave the vote to only 90,000 men in a nation of 25 million. When Napoleon landed at Cannes on the 1st of March 1815, Lafayette refused his call to serve but accepted election to the new Chamber of Representatives. After Waterloo, he called for the emperor's abdication. Lucien Bonaparte accused the nation of lacking perseverance in his brother's cause. Lafayette replied that the nation had followed Napoleon "in fifty battles, in his defeats and in his victories," and that this had cost the blood of three million Frenchmen. Napoleon abdicated on the 22nd of June 1815. Lafayette arranged for his passage to America, but the British prevented it, and Napoleon ended his days on Saint Helena.

  Lafayette's homes in Paris and at La Grange stayed open to Americans and many others. In 1818, the Irish novelist Sydney, Lady Morgan, spent a month at La Grange. At the table she met the Dutch painter Ary Scheffer and the historian Augustin Thierry, seated alongside American tourists. Jeremy Bentham, George Ticknor and Fanny Wright also visited. In those years Lafayette backed several conspiracies, including the Charbonnier plots. He agreed to go to Belfort to take a role in a revolutionary government, but turned back when warned that the royal government knew. He had more success supporting the Greek Revolution from 1821 and urging American officials by letter to ally with the Greeks. New plural voting rules helped defeat his bid for re-election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1823.

  In 1824, President James Monroe and Congress invited him to visit the United States, partly to mark the nation's coming 50th anniversary. Monroe wanted him to travel on a warship, but Lafayette thought that undemocratic and booked passage on a merchant packet. Louis XVIII disapproved and had troops disperse the crowd at Le Havre. Lafayette arrived in New York on the 15th of August 1824 with his son Georges Washington and his secretary Auguste Levasseur. Revolutionary War veterans who had fought beside him met the ship. New York celebrated for four continuous days and nights.

  He set off for what he expected to be a restful trip to Boston, but cheering citizens lined the route. Biographer Unger wrote, "It was a mystical experience they would relate to their heirs through generations to come." Philadelphia renovated the Old State House, now Independence Hall, to hold a reception for him. Until then, American towns had rarely built monuments. His visit set off a wave of construction, often with Lafayette laying the cornerstone as a mason. Cities commissioned portraits, and his likeness appeared on countless souvenirs.

  He had planned to see only the original 13 states in four months. The visit stretched to 16 months and took him to all 24 states. Fayetteville, North Carolina, became the first city named in his honor. He was surprised by President Monroe's plain clothes and the absence of guards at the White House. At Mount Vernon he now saw Washington's grave. He stood at Yorktown on the 19th of October 1824, the anniversary of Cornwallis's surrender. At Monticello he met Jefferson and James Madison, who arrived unexpectedly, and near Boston he dined with the 89-year-old John Adams. He spent the winter in Washington City and watched the House of Representatives choose John Quincy Adams as president on the 9th of February 1825. That evening he saw runner-up Andrew Jackson shake hands with Adams. Later he visited Jackson at the Hermitage in Tennessee.

  On the Ohio River, his steamboat sank beneath him. His son and secretary put him in a lifeboat, and another steamboat took him to the Kentucky shore. Its captain insisted on turning around to carry him to Louisville. In June 1825, after an oration by Daniel Webster, he laid the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument. He celebrated his 68th birthday on the 6th of September at the White House with John Quincy Adams and left the next day. Congress had voted him $200,000 and a large tract of public land in Florida. He sailed home on a ship renamed the USS Brandywine in honor of the battle where he had shed his blood.

  By 1827, Charles X was king and intended to restore absolute monarchy. The 70-year-old Lafayette won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies. Charles dissolved the Chamber and called a new election, and Lafayette won again. He spoke out against restrictions on civil liberties and against new press censorship, praising American-style representative government. During the July Revolution of 1830, he declined an offer to become dictator of France. He backed Louis-Philippe as king instead, then turned against him when the monarch grew autocratic. Lafayette died on the 20th of May 1834.

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