Motier Theodore Lafayette (402)

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette

(6 September 1757–20 May 1834) was a soldier, statesman, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1781. Born in Chevaniac, France, Lafayette began his studies at the Collège du Plessis in Paris. Though orphaned in 1770, his inheritance made him a rich marquis. In 1774, he married into a powerful family and became a dragoon captain.

Impressed by the revolutionary effort in America, Lafayette strove to get to American soil and join the fight against Great Britain. Arriving in 1777, he requested to serve as an unpaid volunteer under George Washington after learning his initial commission was invalid. That fall, a musket ball to the leg at the Battle of Brandywine failed to stop him from taking command of a division of Virginians by December. The following year, he fought in Canada, Barren Hill, Monmouth Courthouse, and Rhode Island. He spent 1779 in France securing aid for the Americans and preparing an invasion of England. Returning to America in 1780, Lafayette led Continental forces against Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, forcing the English General’s surrender alongside Washington in 1781. As peace set in, he joined the growing number of American figures of note as a member of the APS upon his election of that same year. In 1783, Lafayette returned to France, where he worked closely with Thomas Jefferson to advocate for American interests abroad.

Inspired by the American triumph, he then shifted focus to the revolution brewing in his homeland: he joined the Estates General and presented “The First European Declaration of Rights” (1787), and served as commandant of the new Paris National Guard after the fall of the Bastille (1789-1791). To prevent a resurgence of the monarchy, he kept King Louis XVI in chains, and maintained public order until the constitution was approved in 1791, at which point he resigned. The following year he served as a commander in the war with Austria and Prussia. Upon attempting to free King Louis, the revolutionary government impeached Lafayette and the Austrians captured him after his escape from France. He spent the next five years imprisoned in Austria before release and resumption of his crusade against monarchy. He publicly opposed Napoleon, and then the Bourbons during the Restoration (1815-1830).

The Bourbon Restoration begun, Lafayette enjoyed a break from the tumult in the now thriving and comparably serene United States per the invitation of President James Monroe (1824-1825). Arriving in New York, he then journeyed to Boston, visited historical settlements elsewhere in Massachusetts, and met with John Adams before going to Portsmouth and then returning to New York. After some time exploring the Hudson river area and the significant sites therein, the Marquis traveled to Trenton before arriving in Philadelphia. Grand celebrations welcomed the Marquis in every city he visited, but perhaps no stop on his tour proved more significant than his reunion with the APS on the first of October, arriving at a Philosophical Hall packed with the most illustrious members of the Society, all eager to meet or reunite with the General. Jefferson, former president of the Society, even considered making the trip to see Lafayette at eighty-one years of age but waited until the Marquis’ visit to Monticello the following month to catch up with his colleague and friend. Lafayette also visited Baltimore and a newly inaugurated President John Quincy Adams. Lafayette returned to France leaving behind him a grateful nation now peppered with towns and locations bearing his and his estate, La Grange’s, name. Perhaps hopeful that his mother-country could follow in the United States’ footsteps, once back in France he backed the house of Orleans in the French Revolution of 1830, under the pretense that they would establish a constitutional monarchy. When that did not occur, Lafayette opposed them as he did many former French regimes. Home at Château La Grange, he died but a few years later, an unrelenting obstacle to tyrannies around the world until his very last breath. (ANB, et al.)

The below does not represent everything associated with Lafayette as one of his publications. Many are outside the bounds of this bibliography (speeches, letters, and political and military directives as a central figure in the French Revolution) which we do not treat. Given his import to the early Society and his otherwise substantial productivity, we point researchers to Stuart W. Jackson, La Fayette: a Bibliography (Burt Franklin: New York, [1930] 1968).

Addresses: pp. 86–87
Discours: pp. 110–117
Letters de La Fayette: pp. 142–145
Opinion: pp. 154–155
See also p. 135 for additional direction to smaller subheadings.