The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC you good afternoon everyone and coming to our books and beyond program today I'm Kaila Molenaar from the center for the book and we're co-sponsoring this program today with the manuscript division if you don't know about the center we're a small division of the Library of Congress that promotes books reading libraries and literacy and we administer to other parts of the library which is a young readers Center which is a fairly new center in the library in the Jefferson building that's for kids 16 and under and we also oversee the poetry and literature Center which just named a new poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera additionally we administer the Library of Congress literacy awards and we'll be announcing the winners of those awards this fall we carry out our mission nationwide and we do that with the assistance of affiliated centers for the book we have 52 of those one in every state one in DC and we even have one most recently in the US Virgin Islands so I urge you to go to the US Virgin Islands on your next vacation and there's at the center for the book we also have a partnership with 80 like-minded organizations that promote literacy nationwide and we play an important role in the National Book Festival which this year is Saturday September 5th at the Washington Convention Center we have more than 150 authors coming this year and if you go to our website at loc.gov slash book fest you can see all the great authors who are coming this year before we get started could you please turn off all your electronic devices and I need to let you know that we're recording this event so if you ask a question you will become a part of the webcast those webcasts by the way are available on our website which is Reed gov and you can find more than 200 discussions there from authors covering all genres of writing today's authors book is for sale over there on the at the end of our room there and it will be sold at a discount and the author will be there signing the book as well so it's another chance to talk to the author and ask her any questions you might have the chief criterion that we have for this books and Beyond series is that the book has to have a strong connection to the Library of Congress and in most cases that means that the writer did research today today's author researched her book and the manuscript division as I said they're co-sponsoring today and with us from the manuscript division as Laura Kells who is the senior archives specialists in the preparation section of the division currently she is working on organizing the papers of Lee Strasberg if you don't know that name he was the founder of the Actors Studio which worked with such notable actors as Marlon Brando Marilyn Monroe and James Dean so could you please welcome Laura Kells who will introduce our speaker I'm so pleased to have the opportunity to introduce Laura Riccio who was returned to the Library of Congress to speak to us about her new book the Marquis Lafayette reconsidered the story of why I'm doing the introduction begins almost 60 years ago in 1956 a front-page story in The New York Times announced that a cache of papers belonging to the Marquis de Lafayette had just been discovered by his descendant the count Rene de chambre after he acquired La Grande Lafayette 15th century château locate located 30 miles east of Paris 40 years later in 1995 the librarian of Congress James Billington signed an agreement with the Count de schonbrunn to microfilm these papers and make them available for research in the reading room in the library's manuscript division between July 1995 and February 1996 small groups of library staff made four trips to France to oversee the micro filming of these papers on site in the Chateau I was part of this project and spent 10 weeks working at La Ronge I'm a processing artist who usually works behind the scenes and rarely get to see people doing research in the collections so I was thrilled when in about 2010 I was substituting for a reference librarian in the reading room and noticed a woman working diligently at the microfilm and she was using the lafayette microfilm when my shift was over she was still there so I thought I'd I'd stop by and mention that I work on the project and say I was glad she was using the microfilm and to check to see if there was anything I could possibly help her with so I went up to her and I said excuse me and she threw her arms up in the air and she said what am I doing wrong I quickly reassured her and she said her reaction was the result of a recent research trip to France she told me she was working on a biography of Lafayette and it turned out that she was interested in talking with me so that's how I met Laura Ricci oh I learned that she's a specialist in 18th century French history and art who received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her PhD from Columbia University her background in art strongly influences her work as a biographer Shearer is currently dean of undergraduate studies in the new school in New York I caught up with Laura when she returned to the library on subsequent research trips and was thrilled when she made a trip to La Grande so we could compare notes there are very few people with whom I can discuss Lafayette's desk chair Laura worked for spent 7 years working on this biography and here it is the the Marquis lafayette reconsidered is an engrossing and richly Illustrated portrait of Lafayette's life and his role in both American history and French history she begins by pondering why Lafayette is such an admired figure in America but not in France and then proceeds to explain how and why this came to pass so please welcome Laura Ricci Oh thank you that's a microfilm I don't know what that is Oh nor that okay thank you thank you all for coming thank you so much Laura and I have to say I'm glad that Laura told that story rather than me because it is from the more embarrassing moments of my life but but I I have I I have done most of my research in France and in French archives in the bibliothèque nationale and I have to say that on a daily basis I would generally wake up and wonder what I was going to do wrong that day and so I have to say that Laura Laura and her colleagues here at the Library of Congress actually persuaded me through their simple generosity and kindness that I should actually henceforth work only on American topics or at least topics or at least on topics that can be that can be researched here at the Library of Congress because it was an incomparable experience so so thank you Laura I also just want to take a moment to to honor the memory of Karen Stewart who is one of Laura's colleagues who also went with her to LeGrande she also we also spoke several times she shared postcards that she had with me she collected some postcards of lagron jand to do with lafayette and she shared those pictures with me we had lunch a couple of times here and she sadly passed away not too long before the book came out I don't think so I was very sorry not to be able to share the completed book with her because she too was extremely lovely and helpful to work with so thank you all so as Laura said um my book begins and I'm gonna start in the same way that I started the book my book began two little anecdote which took place in April of 2009 and as an art historian when I start working on a project what I usually do is I start looking at the visual and material culture of that topic whatever it is and so it was natural that um when I started working on Lafayette that I wanted to go and see the various busts and sculptures and caricatures and paintings and many many items of material culture that we have about Lafayette so I made an appointment at Versailles to go to see this bus which is actually a very important bus by an important French neoclassical sculptor named John on Tuan doll and so I made an appointment at Versailles and I went to Versailles and I was speaking with the curator of sculpture and I had to make an appointment to see this work because it wasn't on view well when I got to the curators office what I discovered was that he wasn't overjoyed to see me in fact um he seemed sort of annoyed because I had to take him it turned out in order to see this bus we had to leave the main building we had to walk through the rain across cobblestones to find a small room that I clearly not been used in much of a while and he was carrying a very large ring of antique keys and you're sort of muttering as he was walking he's trying to figure out which key was the one that's gonna open this door so finally we got there and he opened the door and flipped on the light and there's a fine film of dust over over everything and um I was admiring this bust and all of a sudden he said why should we have a bust of Lafayette now he said it in French so I thought that I had perhaps misunderstood so I said pardon and he repeated the question louder and slower so I said yes I understand and I started to tell him naively perhaps I started to explain to him that Lafayette had been only 19 years old when he had volunteered to serve in George Washington's army that he had come over here and he had frozen with the troops at Valley Forge and he had been very influential in persuading the French government to come out in open support of the American cause and these are some of the reasons why we have a bust of Lafayette and he was distinctly not impressed and he gestured towards a halo pup sorry I am a dog person he gestured towards a towards a plaque that was installed a few feet away and this was a bronze plaque that was commemorating the thousands of French soldiers and sailors who had come to fight in the American Revolution many of whom had lost their lives and he said well you Americans you insist on worshipping Lafayette but you don't know the names of any of these other people who died and he said moreover it wasn't Lafayette it was Rochambeau who led the French forces and you know some Americans know Rochambeau but you're not crazy about Rochambeau the way you are about Lafayette and and he said and it was louis xvi in fact bankrupted his country for for your revolution he got his thanks on the guillotine and nobody has any sculptures of him and and so I sort of had to admit that the man had a point um that this was an interesting question of why is it that we have a bust of Lafayette and then I became interested in a second question which is why don't they have busts of Lafayette and friends or really why is he not such a hero in France as he is here and just to give you a sort of a preview of an answer this is one of the kind of caricatures of Lafayette from the period of the French Revolution and it describes him as you can see it's quite literally two-faced on the one hand a man of the people and on the other hand a man of the court and the reason for this is that Lafayette belonged to a group of liberal nobility who believed that what France needed was a constitutional monarchy he did not believe that France could or should sustain an american-style Republic and he did not believe that the monarchy should remain as it as it had been as an absolute monarchy instead he wanted a reformed monarchy and in the process of of really adhering to this middle-of-the-road position he ultimately lost the faith of both sides which is part of the reason why there is in fact no my Lafayette is not so widely heroin's in France today so to begin to enter the curators question then why do we have a bust of Lafayette well in part we have a bust of Lafayette partially because Lafayette wanted us to his American reputation is I'm going to discuss today was actually one of the things that he cherished the most and that he went out of his way to burnish constantly and the other part is that he in fact came to America like many of my ancestors at least in part to reinvent himself he came here in part to become a new person now it might seem strange I'm showing you here on the right hand side you see an image of the hotels in Hawaii which is where he was living when he came to America now it might seem strange that a person who was living in such a place would want to leave and reinvent himself and so I'm just gonna discuss that very briefly but so this is a hotel in Hawaii no longer exists but you can see on the left where it stood in Paris that's the general vicinity it stood very near the toiler E's Palace which is no longer there the Twitter is garden is there and actually I'll just point over here it's here this hotel the hotel to know I was very very close to the Royal Palaces because the know.i family was very very close to the court they were very influential at the court of Louie the 15th now Lafayette had not been born into this family he hadn't married into this family and that made all the difference because the place where he came from was a very different place the place he came from was here and as you can see this is the over Nia which is it's several hundred miles south of several hundred miles south of Paris and what you're seeing on the top on the top is the Chateau shavon yak where he was born and raised and on the bottom is a photo that I took just showing the surroundings of his of his Chateau the in this area his family was pretty much the sum total of the local elite he remembers telling he tells stories and his memoirs about how people would travel for miles and miles and miles across this very craggy terrain to consult with his grandmother and he also talks about then I opening moment when he went to Paris for the first time and he was surprised to see that the men he passed along the route did not remove their hats and deference to him so in the / Nia he he had been sort of the cream of the crop but to give you a sense of what this place was like today has anybody ever been to Co verunya it's it's it's very how to describe it rustic rustic mountainous beautiful so today we appreciate the rustic beauty of this mountainous area but in the 18th century the rusticity was less widely appreciated I think it's a good way to put it so just to give you an example I have a wonderful little quote from an English agronomist named Arthur Young who travelled through the area in 1789 now as an English agronomist he disliked much of what he saw in France but he particularly reserved particular disdain for the Oh Vera and for its capital so just to give you a little flavor he he Arthur Young wrote of Claire Mall that it is quote in the midst of a most curious country all volcanic and is built and paved with lava much of it forms one of the worst built dirtiest and most stinking places I have met with but he wasn't done there are heat there are he wrote many streets that can for blackness dirt and ill scent only be represented by narrow channels cut in a night dunghill so needless to say this is a place that Lafayette loved dearly but it was not a fashionable place to call home and had all gone according to plan he would have lived out his life in and around this area except for when he went to war and he might well have been killed on a battlefield as his father had been before him his father had died before he was 2 years old before Lafayette was 2 years old his father had died killed by an English cannonball at the Battle of Minden in the Seven Years War but we call here the French and Indian War but through a series of happenstances of good marriages and early deaths in his family he found himself rather abruptly in a very different situation and in 1774 he was an orphan he was 17 years old and he was one of France's wealthiest men outside of the princes of the blood and he was presented in 1774 the court of Versailles what you see at the bottom and he was married to the 15 year old Adrian - no I whose family was very very closely connected to court so as you can see on the top of shavon yonk and on the bottom is Versailles Lafayette's prestigio Vanya did not count for very much at all at Versailles in fact there he was rather an outsider he was an awkward provincial he didn't have the right accent he just himself wrote in his memoirs that what did he say he said that the ghost of my manners which without being out of place on any important occasion never yielded to the graces of the court or the charms of supper in the capital in other words Versailles was a place where there were very particular rules of etiquette there are very particular precise things that one did and didn't do and said and didn't say in Lafayette didn't know what they were because he wasn't from there he was from a very very different world and apparently it was not false modesty that he was describing in his memoirs we have the memoirs of a Belgian nobleman who was a friend of Marie Antoinette a man named the Comte de la Marck who spoke of Lafayette and he described and these are damning traits and I'm about to describe he said that Lafayette quote danced without grace and sat badly on his horse so these were these were things that one did not do if one were a member of this particular society and in fact there was one apparently a terribly embarrassing moment for Lafayette when he was invited to one of the dances that Marie Antoinette sponsored regularly and he proved himself to be so melodramatic so he was clearly unsuited to the life of a courtier and he in fact his in-laws nonetheless persisted in trying to get him a place at court they wanted to get him a place in the entourage of king of the brother of the king and he then proceeded to insult the brother of the king which he said he did intentionally in order to spare himself in Inglourious life because the life that he envisioned for himself was a life of military glory and things would have gone according to plan had it not been that in the spring of 1776 the French army was actually undergoing a major reform because they had lost very very badly to the English in the Seven Years War and so there was a new new broom with sweeping clean within the army and they were removing all of the men men who like Lafayette had risen through the ranks through wealth and connections but had never actually stepped foot on a battlefield and so Lafayette in June of 1776 found himself suddenly in the Army Reserves he was removed from active duty so he was casting about with not much to do in Paris into this mix in the summer of 1776 happened to arrive a group of Americans of Franklin I'm fudging a little Franklin came a couple of months later but Silas Dean and other Americans followed by Franklin arrived in Paris and suddenly America was all the rage in the summer of 1776 everybody who's anybody in Parisian society wanted to have something to do with America I'm showing you this portrait of Franklin because many museums and historical societies and even individuals I've met around the country have versions of this and the reason there are so many versions of this is because everybody in Paris wanted Franklin above their mantelpiece so that this artists duplicity actually made something of a cottage industry of portraits of Franklin and the American cause was so popular that Marie Antoinette won in Narragansett horses for her stables if she won't have a sort of American flair the French haute Society renamed the English card game whist they named it the busting in in honor of in honor it's true I know it's true it doesn't sound it but it is so so and meanwhile Silas Dean who was a Connecticut merchant who'd been sent to Paris and he'd been sent there really in order to to bring back several engineers because the army here needed engineers they may also been asked to help with some armaments and so forth what he ended up finding was that there were scores and scores of French officers who'd been removed from the military who wanted to sail for America because they were all yearning to to get at the British so to be honest the French government was looking the other way while a lot of these men were coming the French government was not yet ready to break its truths with England they do not want to come out and open support but they were perfectly happy for people to come over and start sort of helping helping relieve Britain of her colonies I shall we say but Lafayette was so closely connected to court through his family that the King did not want him to come because it was going to be too big a deal if he came and it was going to be evident that the King had sort of condoned this so he was forbidden to come however he was as I mentioned an orphan and extremely wealthy and frankly he had nothing to lose really and so what he did was he purchased his own ship and he came now when he arrived to be completely honest George Washington was not entirely certain what to do with him he was 19 years old and he had been given the rank of major-general and he had never fought a day in battle and George Washington writes this wonderful letter to Congress in which he says what the intentions of Congress are with regard to the Marquis de Lafayette I know no more than the child unborn he says Washington says there seems to be a difference of opinion here Washington believes that Lafayette title was meant to be merely honorary because how could it be otherwise but Lafayette was young and eager and enthusiastic and he fully expected to be placed in command so he was just ready to be you know placed in command and sent out to do something glorious and um Washington was really not certain about this so a letter arrives from in in late in August a letter arrives from Benjamin Franklin that says basically to Washington this and this is what he wants he says Franklin says Lafayette is very very wealthy and his family is very well-connected what he wants says Franklin is he wants an opportunity to win a bit of glory so please do me a favor find an opportunity for him to be hazarded not much but where he can win a bit of glory so Washington has such an opportunity at hand so the Battle of Brandywine is coming up the British are marching towards Philadelphia which they will eventually take and on September 11th of 1777 the Battle of Bret this is the Brandywine River that you see here and well you can tell the British er in red and the Americans are in blue and as you can see it at the bottom there's the direct route to Philadelphia at an area that's called Chadds Ford and that's where sort of near where Washington has placed himself and his troops down there and what Washington imagined was that he fully expected that since that's the most direct route to Philadelphia that's where the British would attack so he placed himself there and he was engaged for about half the day with with with what turned out to be half the British forces what he did was he sent laughing in the upper right hand side knife it was up there with general Sullivan so kind of as far away as he could be from where Washington expected the brunt of the action to happen still on the battlefield but sort of where he thought that he would be relatively safe well as you can see from the red boxes on the right that actually Washington was surprised and the other half of the British army came down there and Lafayette instead of being out of harm's way was instead in the thick of the action so Lafayette was actually wounded at the Battle of Brandywine he was wounded in the leg he was wounded apparently he says this himself and by everything I've read it seems to be true he was wounded while trying to rally the troops who were retreating and he was telling them no no no we can do this let's get back out there and he got shot in the leg so he was 19 right and he he was 19 and he just had all of the enthusiasm and faith of a 19 year old so he was wounded and Washington still imagined that this was all that he wanted it's not a dire wound but enough to merit the attentions of Washington's personal surgeon and Washington then ended up writing a dispatch that went in to all of the Patriot papers which indicated that the Battle of Brandywine had been lost and it mentioned only two names and one of them was Lafayette and saying that the Marquis de Lafayette had been wounded so Lafayette's name was introduced to the American public as the French Marquis who had shed blood on behalf of the American cause now again Washington Franklin everybody expected that Lafayette would sort of take this moment and then go home but he didn't instead what he did was he decided that okay if he was wounded and had to spend some time in recovery he was going to make himself useful in whatever other way he could find because he was determined that this was going to be his contribution to the world really so he was recovering with the moravian brethren in Bethlehem Pennsylvania and he starts writing letters to both sides to both the French and the Americans he starts writing to the French saying don't believe anything you hear about the Americans losing it's not true they're gonna they're gonna come right back don't you fear don't lose faith he's writing to all the Americans saying the French are gonna be here any moment they're gonna come out open support don't you worry and he's writing to both sides and he makes himself into the really the prime sort of emissary or go-between representative between France and America and he becomes the sort of living embodiment of the French American alliance which had which had yet to become an actual thing but Lafayette sort of forced it into being served through his own sheer will so when he recovered and it turned out he wasn't planning to go back to France Washington was actually seriously impressed and Washington really took him under his wing and Washington had been as I'm sure many of you know Washington had no biological children his own and Lafayette had been a had been orphaned at a very young age and they developed a relationship that has very rightly been called a Sur father-son relationship and Washington eventually did reward Lafayette within a couple of months with wit with his own command and he takes him under his wing and he really starts mentoring him and if you start read they'll if you read the letters if you read the orders that Lafayette that Washington gives mostly his orders tend to be very clipped as military orders are want to be but in the case of Lafayette he writes these very long descriptive explanations about what he wants him to do and why he wants him to do it he's really tutoring him as he goes along and Lafayette really starts to learn so Luffy it becomes actually a very valued member of Washington's military family until it turns out that news arrives finally that in fact the French are going to join the American cause when the Treaty of Amity and commerce assigned and at that point Lafayette decides that what he's gonna do is he's gonna go back to France and what he wants to do is he wants to go back to France and he wants to return from France as a French soldier he wants to come back in fact not just as a French soldier he wants to come back at the head of the French forces now again he's had a couple of months under his belt now but but the the French are not necessarily looking to place him in in such an exalted role but Lafayette strongest argument for coming back at the head of the French forces is his close friendship with Washington and what I'm showing you here is a portrait of Washington that that Lafayette saw at John Hancock's house in Boston Lafayette then had copies made and he brought he had copies made both here and again in France and he brought them with him and really made sort of a big deal about them when he got back to France so for example the painting on the Left which is a version a painting loosely based on the Peale original describes Lafayette decides that he's going to bring this with him to a 4th of July party that Benjamin Franklin is having and then he writes to the come to version and in the French Minister and he says you know if you're interested in knowing what my friend looks like come to my house and see his picture so he's really emphasizing how close he is to Washington and he has on the right is a print which says of Washington which says on the bottom that it's made after an original that belongs to the Marquis de Lafayette and this is sold throughout Paris and Lafayette's name and Washington's become very very in twined well as it happens of course the French government decides that they are not going to put in Lafayette in command and said as my curator friend mentioned they're going to place Rochambeau who is my much more experienced in command but they do agree that they'll send Lafayette back to be the one to carry the news and so this is the ship this is a recreation of the ship on which Lafayette returns to carry the news in 1780 this is the aramean this was this was the area and while she was still in the process of being reconstructed a trust fall in in France and this is the ship that was just here in DC last week this week no it's in Annapolis now she's making her way up I was I was on her in Yorktown and she's making her way up to Castine mean and she's stopping all the way up at many many many many stops so you can still catch her at Annapolis and then Baltimore which is also not too far and then Philadelphia New York green port Newport Boston Castine I think that's it so Lafayette returns on the ship the army on and carries with him the news that that the French are coming out in open support and they're sending troops and they're sending ships and they're sending money and they're sending arms are sending clothing they're sending all the things that that the Americans very very very badly need at this point in the war so Lafayette returned in the service of General Washington he plays actually a very important role in the Virginia campaign the siege of Yorktown which is the final major hostilities of the American Revolution and when he returns to France he returns as Washington's friend and he returns as the man who really embodied French American friendship and really embodied the French American alliance and in Paris when all these other men as my curator friend mentioned all these other men came here fought they went back to Everett careers I had but Lafayette did not really have a career to reprise and instead he really turned America into not just his career but his identity America became the very center of who he was so what I'm showing you here on the right hand side so this is a little fudge but it's it's it's it's pretty close I hope you'll forgive me it's not the it's not the house at Lafayette bought in 1784 which no longer stands it's the house that was built next door to that one by the same developer on the same plan in the same year so it's more or less the same house and it's what you can see is it's a quite lovely place but it's nothing compared to the hotel - no I it's it's a much more modest abode and I'm also showing you here in the map on the left you see on the upper left this is where the hotel - no I was in the first step on DeSimone near the Louvre near the twillerbees Lafayette's home is on the lower right in an area that in this mid-century mid 18th century map was still largely undeveloped there's a lot of haystacks in though in that picture so Lafayette essentially creates this new home for himself in the sort of new sort of uncharted still-developing part of Paris and in this home he really turns this home into a seat of all things American in his study which is the room that you can see like right off the terrace that with the double doors on the second floor in his study he hangs a Declaration of Independence engraved in gold he plants on his Terrace and he returns to the US and 1784 for a visit he comes back with with plans from the new world which he has planted on his Terrace he comes back actually with a young Native American man who serves as a favored servant so his home becomes a center of all things American and regularly he has Jefferson and Adams and Franklin and later governor Morris and any of the other visiting Americans become regular visitors to Lafayette home and Cornell University at the library there they actually have these invitation cards that he had engraved in English that say you were in the Marquis and Marquis de Lafayette to invite you to dinner on Monday the blank for for dinner and and these American dinners apparently the language of choice was English and we're told by the met by the memoirs and letters written by all the Americans who went that Lafayette children entertained the the entertained the guests with American songs and his children were named George Washington Lafayette sorry yes his son was named George Washington Lafayette his daughter was named Virginia Lafayette and Virginie but when she was born Benjamin Franklin wrote him a little quip that he that he Franklin was so proud of that he then had a place in all the French papers where he said that he hoped that the Lafayette's would have 13 children so they could name one I can name well you get it kid anyway so okay so Lafayette Lafayette becomes and just to summarize how closely affiliated with with America Lafayette was the American Explorer John Ledyard wrote that Lafayette has planted a tree in America and sits under its shade at Versailles so he he was he really had made America into his identity and so it made sense that when friends started moving towards its own revolution it seemed logical that Lafayette would be the person who had become the French Washington who would be the person who would be able to lead his country to a new era of freedom and liberty and at first this seemed possible and so I'm showing you just this is just one of the more optimistic images from 1789 showing Lafayette helping France and slaying the Hydra of despotism and in John July 14 1789 when the best deal was stormed in Paris it was to Lafayette that the city of Paris turned and Lafayette on the morning of the 15th was named the commander of what became known as a French National Guard and we're I'm showing you here is just two objects depicting related to the storming the best deal on the left is just a painting of it both of these are objects that were made in multiples Lafayette own versions of them the one on the right is just one of my favorite objects of all time it's in the music carnival a and we know Lafayette owned one of these it's a sculpture of the best deal made from a stone of the best deal by someone who is liberated from the best deal who sort of made there as you can see there a lot of stones available so so this fellow sort of generated a lot of these sculptures and sold them all throughout France and we know that Lafayette owned one so Lafayette was placed in command and he believed that he was helping France to move towards a constitutional monarchy and this is what Thomas Jefferson also believed Jefferson actually wrote to Lafayette and said if you're looking for a new constitution for your country you can do no better than to look across the channel so this was something that people just imagined was going to happen France was not gonna have a republic nobody thought that at the time or maybe there were five people who did but really for the most part the constitutional monarchy was what was expected but events quickly spiraled out of control so what I'm showing you here is an image from 1789 as well depicting one of the one of the first crises at Lafayette had to deal with it was the morning of October 5th 1789 and shortly before dawn market women women who we know worked as sellers of fish and other staples were growing very very frustrated because they couldn't feed their families as I'm sure you know France had had terrible harvests and people were starving the price of bread was exorbitant and market women started showing up at Lafayette's office basically which was City Hall and they were bringing weapons they were bringing any weapons they could find they were bringing cannon they were bringing sighs they were bringing knives they were paying pikes whatever they could find and they were joined within hours the MA the crowd grew and they were joined by their by their brothers and their husbands and their cousins and their sons and by the time Lafayette arrived at City Hall the crowd was so numerous and the crowd was so insistent that they wanted to go to Versailles they didn't just want to go to Versailles but they said they were going to go they had no they couldn't they had no bread for their families they said so they were going to go to Versailles and they were gonna bring back the Baker and his wife meaning meaning the king and the queen and by the time Lafayette arrived the National Guard had basically agreed that they were going to go with the crowd so Lafayette had really no choice and he went along with the crowd to Versailles a rainy pouring night muddy roads hours and hours of a trek to Versailles by the time Lafayette arrived the heads of two royal bodyguards were already making their way back separate from the bodies of those royal bodyguards but Lafayette managed to broker a deal and he said on that day he basically promised the king and queen that if they would come back to Paris with him that he would protect them now this of course again he was young he was naive if he was optimistic it actually proved to be a promise that he could not keep but he nonetheless brought them back with him to the Tuileries palace now on that day he really lost the faith of those who supported the absolute monarchy so just to give you a sense of the flavor of the kinds of reception that la fayette got one newspaper from the time from October of 1789 a monarchist newspaper wrote why citizens have Lafayette and the leaders of the commune left you wanting for bread imbecile residents of Paris these villains think that you have too much life in you and then the author went on to say that anyone would be a fool to believe that their lives were more secure quote in the hands of the traitor Lafayette the scoundrel this vampire than in those of your good King so Lafayette on October 17 I really lost the support of the monarchists he retained the support of the people from of the year actually almost another two years but I'm showing you here on the left hand on the left hand side is a painting of Lafayette's moment of greatest triumph 1790 it was a festival of Feder Federation on the Shum DeMars in Paris where the Eiffel Tower stands today and Lafayette led the nation swearing an oath of allegiance to the nation the law and the king assuming that and he imagined that this was the pinnacle the end of the revolution that they were going to have the constitutional monarchy and was all going to be done on the right hand side though you see a little caricature suggesting that Lafayette shines only among the people the implication was that he was sort of fomenting these events of whatever kind for his own glory and for a while Lafayette persisted as being as a hero of the people but that only lasted one more year and on July 17th of 1791 just one year later same place Shum DeMars the monarchy the king and queen had attempted to flee the country they had been brought back ignominiously to Paris and on July 17th there was a group gathered on the Shan DeMars jostling to sign a petition declaring the monarchy advocated a riot broke out a martial law was declared Lafayette's National Guard were patrolling the perimeter what exactly happened we don't know exactly precisely but what we do know is that rocks were thrown shots were fired and anywhere between 8 and 100 people were killed we still don't know to this day and the blame was placed squarely on the shoulders of Lafayette because he was in command to the National Guard who opened fire on the people so on that day he absolutely lost the faith of the people and so one one journalist who is on the radical side said road of Lafayette that he saw quote nothing but the most dangerous enemy of Liberty in you in whom we placed all of our confidence and who should have been Liberty strongest supporter so Lafayette was preceded then to become really lambasted and word and image by members of every possible political strife and this is the image that I think sums it up it says prayers probably was 1791 it's called Lafayette treated as he deserves by the Democrats and the aristocrats which is to say that the people who wanted at this point who wanted a republic and the people who wanted an absolute monarchy agreed on nothing at all except they both wanted Lafayette dead and that was the one thing on which they would potentially collaborate so finally in 1792 with the monarchy abolished and the Radical rubs Pierre ascendant a warrant went out for Lafayette's arrest and had he not fled across the Belgian border on August 19th of 1792 he would surely have been executed as an enemy of the revolution as it was he was turned over to Austrian authorities and he was held for treason as an enemy of the king so just to clarify he fled the country because he would have been arrested as an enemy of the revolution and he was instead arrested in Belgium as an enemy of the king because he was blamed for having started this whole thing to begin with so he was kept in prison for five years returned to France in 1799 returned to French politics but really never regained the popularity that he had had in France but in America things were different he returns the United States for a triumphal tour in 1824 twenty-five it was in that period thirteen to fourteen months he was here went to every state in the Union feted everywhere he went there were balls there were that go performances fireworks musical celebrations parades dancing in the streets you name it it would happen and it was in this period that every place not every place that most of the places that are named Lafayette were named Lafayette Lafayette College was named at this time for example and what I'm showing you here is just some of the items of material culture that we have again every Museum and Historical Society in this country has these things because they were sold at every price point on the upper right is an image of a plate that was actually made in England a transferware plate made in England for sale in the American market depicting Lafayette the tomb of Washington the lower left is whenever women went to the balls and event they saved whatever they wore and they gave them to historical societies and you can see that this woman wore a glove a white glove with a portrait of Lafayette on it and she carried she carried it also had a portrait of Lafayette on it Lafayette College has I was there not too long ago they have these little pink leather baby shoes with Lafayette's face on them that were sold at this time I've seen at the New York Historical Society I saw a bread dish that when you baked your bread in it when he turned it out it came out with the word Lafayette across it so Lafayette was a tremendous celebrity here and he was hailed not only for what he had done for the American Revolution but also 18 24 25 we were about to celebrate our 50th anniversary of the signing of Declaration of Independence and Lafayette was one of the last able-bodied living members of that generation who could go out and about and be celebrated and so he was so um when Lafayette died in 1834 in the United States we observed National Day of Mourning but in Paris he was actually barely missed and we have a letter from a visiting American named Isaiah Townsend from Albany and he wrote to his mother that quote a month has scarcely elapsed since the death of the general yet in Paris his memory would seem almost forgotten and so it was that in 1917 when Lafayette Chateau it was sort of really falling on on bad times it was a group of Americans who purchased it to restore it Siobhan Yaak and they decided that they were going to make it into a French Mount Vernon which was very very apt I just want to you'll note that I'm showing you a different angle um then you saw at the start of shavon yacht that's because what I showed you originally was was shamanaka as it looked in Lafayette's time this turret was actually added by the Americans who thought it made it look more medieval they didn't think it looked sufficiently medieval at the time and and so even today it's an American flag that flies over Lafayette's grave and as you can see on the left that the grave was restored by the Benjamin Franklin chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution so so little does France still love Lafayette at the monumental critical dictionary of the French Revolution from 1988 states flatly that quote the man has drawn few eulogies now that's patently untrue they might not like him but he's actually drawn quite a number of eulogies John Quincy Adams famously gave a three-hour eulogy and he didn't even like Lafayette actually personally he disliked him but it didn't matter because Lafayette had come so fully to embody the idea of French American friendship without which we would not have won the war that it didn't matter whether you liked him personally or not that he was someone who everybody eulogized all the time so finally to end where we began with my curator friend with this question why should we have a bust of Lafayette it's what I've discovered in my research is that actually it's not because he was an unsullied hero he was not he was a human being he took on some of the most challenging issues of his time he stuck to his principles until they were all that he had left and when he failed his memory was denigrated really terribly I mean I showed you the pg-rated images only there are some images that are very much not PG from the era of the French Revolution when he when he failed he was absolutely denigrated his name slandered for four centuries to come in his own country but when he succeeded he earned eternal gratitude and the bus stands is just one of those very small markers that we have of the debt that we owe to him so thank you questions I think I think we have thank you I think we have a little bit of time if anybody has any questions yes sir was the hearty laugh in the front thank you I hope you enjoy it welcome it wasn't so he he did not start so couple things he did not start studying English until he was on the ship coming over here no seasick he was teasing most of the time and studying English I don't know if they had any connection to each other but he um but he actually had a flair for languages and um Latin was actually his best subject in school he excelled at Latin but when he got here he also he had you know I don't know I mean I Spit I speak French but I'm always as you could tell from Laura's story I'm always afraid I'm gonna make a mistake in just in general in life and so because of him and so because of that I'm often hesitant to sort of try out my French which is terrible because you don't actually learn that way Lafayette had no hesitation and he actually had no problem you know speaking in English writing in English jokey in English even if it wasn't perfect English it didn't bother him you know he did however originally when he first came he did work with interpreters in fact early on Alexander Hamilton was one of his interpreters because Alexander Hamilton spoke French fluently because which is the whole long story but but and they were quite good friends and they were both in Washington's entourage and they're both about the same age they're very young and but Lafayette really did pick up English very very quickly it's an excellent question yes sir they definitely complement each other the one issue with and these two can't descended through his family the the manuscripts that are here also descended through his family so what I'm about to say is that the family letters are always sort of expert ated and that's true of both the I think of both the manuscript collection and of the publisher and the publisher volume or expurgated than others what I found personally to be most useful and most interesting the about the volumes that were published are our letters and what I personally found most useful in these collections were actually the things that are not letters but things like receipts so things like letters that are not to anybody important but are to like from his wife to the architect who's renovating the chateau these were the kinds of things that for me or letters to and from random American farmers with whom he exchanged plows these kinds of things to me are the details that brought him to life and as a human being and and in ways that that the letters that are published in those volumes don't also this this collection also contains letters and other things by hit the rest of his family so one of the things I remember being really struck by that I just I really remember vividly was his a letter from his wife when she expected that she was going to be executed and she had every reason to expect because her mother sister and mother-in-law were all work mother sister and grandmother were all executed I'm sure they French Revolution and so the collection here has her wills her she rewrote her will several times and letters that she wrote to her son this is one of the most moving things the letter that she wrote to her son when she fully expected that she would be executed telling him not to lose his faith in God other things like the other letters when I say receipts things like the Library of Congress had receipts for thousands and thousands of books that Lafayette purchased and books that he sold and we know how he kept them organized in his library now just because you purchased a book doesn't mean that you read it I mean I know this from my own experience but it does at least tell us what visitors to his library would have seen when they came or tells us what books he thought he should buy for whatever reason even if he didn't read them so those are the kinds of things that are not published anywhere and again I think that's where you know Laura mentioned my background in visual material culture I think that these kinds of visual material culture things one of the other things I still haven't quite figured out but one of the things that has struck me the most it's just I don't know why it's just like these little things that you come across was shortly before he fled the country he had every lock in his house changed yes exactly exactly I think that's right I think that's right and that's the other thing about his debts for example is some of the more humorous things in this collection you know we have there's a myth that Lafayette went broke because of the American Revolution that's not entirely true he went broke partly because he lived beyond his means like a lot of other 18th century French nobility and because that was what you did I mean there was a there's a whole elaborate system of credit and there was a notion that you know if you in order to be perform or to perform nobility you couldn't be caring about pinching pennies and we had this wonderful letter which is in this so they have his account books it was wonderful letter from his basically from his household accountant who says to him you know Monsieur in order to arrive at that happy state where when a man dies he has something to leave to his children you really must cut back on your expenses and what we find was at Lafayette's own household expenses dwarfed the expenses the rest of his household he's spending money on all kinds of things so yeah go ahead sorry no you look like you were going to say something I'm sorry yeah exactly because one was not supposed to concern oneself with these with these matters and la fête did not he also spent a great deal of money in the French Revolution that's exactly right and then he lost everything in the French Revolution because when he fled the country he was he was declared in exile and emigres that's correct that's exactly right and actually his wife was very instrumental in getting most of it back as far as I can see she was the one who really I think had a good to business sense yes yes yeah yeah yeah absolutely managed to oh sure I'm sorry there was a lady in the back thank you for that there's lady in the back I think did you ever hand race or did I make that up I made that up I'm sorry yes sir yes yes he was Lafayette was had been elected to the second estate so we're talking about the estates-general which which was called by the king and an attempt in an attempt to how do I put this in an attempt to sort of start moving the country there was a financial crisis and and they were trying to figure out sort of what they were going to move forward were they going to loving new taxes for example how they're going to balance the budget Lafayette was elected by the nobility and was representing the nobility now he had a dilemma which actually this is very complicated but Jefferson actually wrote to him about this laughs I had a dilemma which is that there was a big issue about how they were going to vote there were three estates there were the nobility the clergy and the Third Estate uh-huh and the Third Estate was everybody else basically so the vast majority of the people what you're referring to I think might be the fact that at a certain there had been a tradition where you vote by a state so in other words the nobility and the clergy would each get one vote and the people would get one vote in other words then right so right so so the people therefore would always be out voted by the nobility in the clergy even though they were largely so there was a movement afoot that they should vote by by by person not by not by a state Lafayette had been given orders by the nobility where who elected him saying that he should vote by a state he wrote to Jefferson said he didn't know what to do Jefferson wrote back to him and said I think that you should go with the people because your heart is with the people your orders are against the people and and although the people will accept you at a later date they'll do so only sort of skeptically and you actually should go over now and he he didn't where was he that day he was not at the tennis court he was not part of the Tennis Court Oath he was not part of that he he he definitely he dragged his feet on that yes it's a really interesting question so Lafayette of course always believed that we should be more closely allied with the French but what's interesting is that even those even those who Federalists and others who actually believe that we should be more closely allied with the English they they exempt in Lafayette from that so that they would they would always you would actually it's really interesting actually because you would see and I as one does I've read the newspapers from the 1790s and and you can actually see that that they sometimes will gang up on each other if they feel as though if somebody has slandered Lafayette in them among the among the anti French statements if there hasn't been an exemption made for Lafayette somebody will write in and say but you what about Lafayette and so sorry right no he's fine so so in in in fact during the during the Qin the klase war was sort of starting so when France and the United States were on the brink of going to word never happened but things weren't going so well between France the United States in the late 1790s it's a good way to put it and Lafayette had just been released from prison and he actually wanted nothing more than to come to the United States and he wrote to Washington and said you know I'm coming to United States I want a passport Washington did not want him to come and in fact Washington and the others in in power at the time actively told Lafayette we don't want you here because they thought that he would actually exacerbate matters between between the front to the United States that they just didn't want to get involved but Lafayette said no no I can help I can help and they were like no we've seen your help before thank you thank you appreciate it don't don't come but it's actually it was actually a really tragic in reading those letters it's it's it's kind of a really moving story because he actually wants nothing better than to come here and he's writing to all of his friends having them search out on land near Mount Vernon having a search out land near Albany near any place where he knows anybody and he writes to his wife and says if I have to take a hot-air balloon hot air balloons were all the rage if I have take a hot-air balloon I'm gonna get to America and the Americans don't will not give him a passport yes sir not very good so so he returned to France sort of against Napoleon's better judgment well served without Napoleon's knowledge really in 1799 he took the opportunity of Napoleon's coup d'etat while things are a bit chaotic to slip back into the country and then his wife ends up brokering a deal with Napoleon his wife is the is really the level-headed character in this whole story his wife ends up broken brokering a deal with Napoleon in which he's allowed to remain in France Lafayette is but he has to stay at lagron can't come within 30 miles of Paris and so for 15 years he ends up really living largely in political retirement at l'orange he does during the hundred days he actually ends up on Napoleon side briefly which is a long and complicated story but he went he defends Napoleon against what he sees as the incursions of the rest of Europe on France but for the most part he's very anti Napoleon and Napoleon very anti him so they're sort of mutual in that respect there's a lady over here yes a King Charles Spaniel they got along better than you might think I mean he had affairs as one died as one did in that period and this was fine by her apparently and but they actually apparently she was very very devoted to him and in fact when she was in when he was in prison I actually firmly believes that she did more to get him out than anybody else because what she did was after she was released from prison after her family was executed after the reign of terror ended and there was no more sort of price on her head she arrives at the door of his prison with her two daughters and says if you're gonna keep my husband you have to keep us too so now the Austrian government finds himself in this rather awkward position it's one thing if you're going to hold Lafayette does an enemy of the monarchy but now you're holding three innocent women and madame de Lafayette really made the most of this and this became a cause celeb throughout the world so there were even there even speeches on the floor of the house of parliament arguing that the Austrian should release Lafayette and his family because it was such an injustice that she and her daughters were being held there she in fact really never recovered from the illnesses that she that she contracted while in prison she died much much earlier than he did about ten years after the out of prison she she became very ill in prison and she never recovered he was very I mean he owed a great deal to her I think and she was she was extremely devoted so thank you this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

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Id: N0N3BEWxQFo

Length: 66min 10sec (3970 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2016