Book Review: ‘The Marquis’ by Laura Auricchio

Book Review: ‘The Marquis’ by Laura Auricchio

Lafayette saw in Washington the image of Cato and other classical republican heroes, as well as his own father.

By Frederick Brown in the Wall Street Journal

In 1824, at President James Monroe ’s invitation, Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, took a triumphal tour of America. In New York, 6,000 guests walked through a Roman arch at Manhattan’s Castle Garden to assemble in his honor under a canopy decorated with the flags of the world and surmounted by a bust of George Washington. More galas awaited him in other cities. Every town paraded for the general; artillery salutes punctuated his journey; musicians composed adulatory songs; eulogists wrote odes. The 67-year-old reveled in his enshrinement, as he had every reason to do.

Lafayette’s reputation at home had been subject to more vicissitudes. During the French Revolution, he had championed constitutional monarchy and in due course found himself obliged to flee the Terror. Despised as an aristocrat by regicides loyal to Robespierre and as a traitor to his class by aristocrats loyal to the Bourbon dynasty, he was more often caricatured in hostile journals than idealized in civic sculpture. Laura Auricchio deals admirably with this trans-Atlantic career in her well-written, well-furnished biography, “The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered.” Her subject straddled not only two continents but two centuries. Born in 1757, at the end of Louis XV ’s reign, he died in 1834, four years after the July Revolution, which brought a constitutional monarch to power in France.

The family seat was a 14th-century castle ensconced in the mountainous Auvergne in south-central France—hundreds of miles from Versailles, to which so many nobles of ancient lineage had migrated under Louis XIV, abandoning their feudal domains for court life. Lafayette’s birthplace did not redound to his social advantage. Indeed, a mover and shaker coming out of “la France profonde” was an eagle hatched in a crow’s nest. Lafayette made much of this anomaly in his posthumously published memoirs, as if to portray himself as a self-made man rather than a child of privilege. He had been “born poor,” he wrote, and was descended from ancestors who left the province “only to wage war,” playing no role at court.

Childhood in an 18-room fortress may not suggest poverty to most people, but during the Seven Years’ War, Lafayette père, a colonel responsible for outfitting his regiment, had indeed impoverished his family. The war also cost the colonel his life. Lafayette was just 2 years old when his father was killed. His mother moved to Paris, leaving him behind to be raised by his paternal grandmother. Images of Paris glittered in his head like fairy dust sprinkled on homespun. His life already bridged disparate worlds.

Paris became real for Lafayette in 1767, when his mother summoned him to be groomed for public office. Lafayette later wrote that his earliest ambition had been to win renown on the field of honor, but at the Collège du Plessis on the Rue Saint-Jacques, where he spent four years, the curriculum spoke to ideals of the Enlightenment rather than to those of the old military class. “Although the study of Latin did not immediately yield the laurels that Lafayette craved, it may well have been the single most important undertaking of his young life,” writes Ms. Auricchio, a professor of art history at the New School. “Latin gave the excitable lad a potent means of focusing his youthful enthusiasms—through the language, history, and philosophy of the ancient Roman republic and the classical world.” Cicero, Virgil, Horace and Plutarch “shaped the outlines of his life.”

His education suited him better for the company of philosophers than of courtiers. He was also a rich orphan, having inherited immense fortunes from his mother’s family. Before long, guardians concerned with anchoring him in high society introduced him to Adrienne de Noailles, a girl of 12 whose parents occupied their own palace near the Tuileries and mingled familiarly with members of the royal family. Lafayette ascended to another world. A consciousness of being rough-hewn led the otherwise spirited marquis to shield his pride in aloofness. “The gaucheness of my manners . . . never yielded to the graces of the court or to the charms of supper in the capital,” he wrote. Gauche or not, in 1774, at 16, he married the barely nubile de Noailles daughter.

What took place during the next few years that transformed Lafayette from a maladroit courtier at Versailles to a friend of George Washington and a major general in the Continental Army? This is the subject of several absorbing chapters in Ms. Auricchio’s biography. Lafayette was not the only high-ranking French aristocrat sympathetic to American colonists fighting for an independent republic. But the paradox was far more vividly embodied in him than in anyone else. Schooled in the literature of classical antiquity, the young man beheld George Washington as a hero in the mold of Cato and Fabius. And from high on his pedestal, Washington cast the shadow of Lafayette’s father, who had been killed in a war with England that had cost France most of its North American territories. For Lafayette, the American Revolution presented an opportunity to avenge both France and father, to keep faith with ideals bred into him at an early age, to prove his mettle and to transcend his provincialism on a world stage.

At age 19, in 1776, he purchased a merchant vessel, equipped it with six cannons and sailed for America with 45 volunteers, much to the dismay of his ducal in-laws. From shipboard he wrote to Adrienne, pregnant with their second child: “I hope on my account you will become a good American. It is a sentiment suitable to virtuous hearts. The welfare of America is bound closely to the welfare of all humanity. She is to become the honored and safe asylum of liberty.” He need not have read Voltaire and the philosophes to be intoxicated by liberty, for by 1776 the “insurgents,” as the revolutionaries were called, had become all the rage in Paris’s elite circles. When Benjamin Franklin arrived in Paris, he was grandly received in the most fashionable salons.

Two years later, after seeing combat at Brandywine and Barren Hill, he was back in France urging Louis XVI to send Washington a detachment of regulars. We know what role they played during the Siege of Yorktown, marching under the command of Gen. Rochambeau.

Had Lafayette’s life been cut short by an English cannonball at Yorktown, as his father’s had been at Minden in 1759, there would still have been astonishingly rich material for a biography. But his life continued full tilt, and Ms. Auricchio gives us an excellent account of his causes and enthusiasms during the postwar period, from the abolition of slavery to Franz Mesmer ’s doctrine of “animal magnetism.” The latter was a pseudo-scientific theory predicated on the belief that such wonders of the age as electricity and magnetism could transform human nature and that salvation for mankind lay in the capture and exploitation of occult forces. “[It] posited the existence of an invisible but manipulable fluid contained within and around every object in the universe,” writes Ms. Auricchio. “Mesmer held that universal harmony—a worldwide state of perfect physical and moral health in which man and nature would coexist in ideal balance—could be achieved through similar means.”

The practical application of this theory took the form of a tub filled with magnetized water, which sent currents of electricity through participants who sat around it grasping iron bars that protruded from the apparatus. Not unlike Wilhelm Reich ’s orgone box more than a century later, it was almost certainly experienced as a font of erotic vigor, but devotees assigned it higher purposes. Lafayette, who belonged to Mesmer’s Society of Harmony and counted himself among Mesmer’s “most enthusiastic” followers, extolled animal magnetism to George Washington as “a grand philosophical discovery.” He reiterated that belief at a convention of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, taking issue with the society’s founder, Benjamin Franklin, who doubted that the grand, philosophical discovery was grand, philosophical or a discovery. “Sciences and letters are frighted away By the Hand of despotism,” Lafayette chided him, implying that animal magnetism was part of the movement to free humanity from political constraints.

Elected to the National Assembly in 1789, Lafayette embarked upon his parliamentary career as a reformer faithful to Mesmer’s creed. In the legislature he had prominent company, notably Jacques Brissot, a provincial lawyer who, like himself, had felt the cutting edge of Parisian snobbery. Among Mesmerians, a particular contempt for officialdom was fueled by the humiliation to which their mentor had been subjected by a royal commission that labeled animal magnetism a figment of the imagination and Mesmer himself a charlatan. Academic decrees, in their view, only served to subvert a doctrine whose fundamental egalitarianism posed a threat to the powers-that-be. “Don’t you [academicians] see, for example, that mesmerism is a way to bring social classes closer together, to make the rich more humane, to make them into real fathers of the poor?” Brissot protested. “Wouldn’t you be edified at seeing men of high estate . . . attending to the health of their servants, spending hours together mesmerizing them?” Officialdom was not moved by his plea. Nor were the powers-that-be in power any longer when Brissot mounted the scaffold in 1793.

Ms. Auricchio tells us that Lafayette was famously naïve. But by 1793, at the height of the Jacobin Terror, with gazettes competing for the most scurrilous caricatures of him, it would have taken invincible naïvéte to sustain belief in Mesmer’s Society of Harmony. A great historical fault had opened, separating the ancien régime and the new. Lafayette had long since come to realize that there was no ear in French political life for his 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, and no room for his person. He who had been made Commander of the National Guard after the fall of the Bastille in July 1789 became an enemy of the people only three years later, after the dethronement of Louis XVI. On Aug. 19, 1792, he fled to the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium today), officially accused of “plotting against liberty and of treason against the nation.” Austria and Prussia, delighted to have an illustrious revolutionary in their grasp, thereupon shuttled him from one prison fortress to another. Washington, torn between gratitude to a courageous veteran of America’s Revolutionary War and fear of European embroilments, did nothing to honor Lafayette’s petition for asylum. And so he languished in solitary confinement until 1795, when Adrienne de Lafayette, having narrowly escaped the guillotine (unlike her grandmother, mother and sister), insisted on joining him in prison. His wife’s superb gift of self may have done more than anything else to rescue Lafayette from oblivion. Poems were written about it. Images were engraved. Sympathy was universal. Washington asked Emperor Franz II to free Lafayette in the name of humanity.

It was 1797 before the marquis and his wife regained their freedom. He had reached the age of 40 and would live another 37 years. The second half of his life, which Ms. Auricchio summarizes in one chapter, proved as unremarkable as the first half had been momentous. Careful not to detract from Napoleon’s imperium, he spent his days as a gentleman-farmer, preoccupied with agricultural experiments and land management. Adrienne, devoutly Catholic all her life, died in 1807. After the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, Lafayette was elected to the Chamber of Deputies and served in it, advocating liberal causes until Charles X abolished the legislature. Back to the farm he went. During the Revolution of 1830, Paris beckoned. Like Cincinnatus leaving his plow, he became once again, at 73, Commander of the National Guard. His brief association with King Louis-Philippe resulted in another disillusioned withdrawal from public life.

A provincial first and last, bereft of his mother in childhood and of his wife in old age, Lafayette died on May 20, 1834. His casket was carried by pallbearers representing the army, the legislature, the National Guard, insurgent Poland and the United States. France hardly mourned his loss, according to Ms. Auricchio, but “in America,” she writes, “Lafayette’s death reignited the outpouring of affection that had greeted the living man ten years earlier. President Jackson declared a national state of mourning, flags flew at half-mast, government buildings were draped with crepe,” and at a joint session of Congress, ex-president John Quincy Adams delivered a funeral oration that lasted three hours.

—Mr. Brown is the author, most recently, of “The Embrace of Unreason.”