Lafayette (56 page)

Ten years to the day after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, two splendid carriages overflowing with flowers struggled up the hill to the Château de Chavaniac. Lafayette was home. After fourteen years of revolution in two worlds, he had returned to his birthplace as a private citizen—to the cheers of his neighbors and childhood playmates and the tears of his aging aunt Charlotte. He and Adrienne pulled into the castle gates in the lead carriage; their two daughters, fourteen-year-old Anastasie and nine-year-old Virginie, followed in the second vehicle with their governess. Their ten-day trip from Paris had seemed an eternity. Cheering crowds stopped them in every town and village, crowding about their carriages, good-naturedly refusing to let them pass until he stepped out to address them; until he introduced his wife and daughters; until the mayor had filled their arms with flowers and given them keys to the city and other municipal mementos. The excitement delighted the girls, but Adrienne was exhausted after the frightening events in Paris and remained fraught with anxiety until a few days later, when Félix Frestel arrived safely with eleven-year-old George-Washington in tow. Frestel was principal of the Collège de Plessis, Lafayette’s old secondary school, and the Lafayettes had retained him to tutor their son privately until the boy was old enough to enroll in class. A month after George arrived, Adrienne’s mother, the duchesse d’Ayen, came to Chavaniac to add still more gaiety to the family reunion.

Lafayette seemed content to settle into the quiet life of a country gentleman—the George Washington of Chavaniac. “After fifteen years of
revolution,” he wrote to the American President, “I am profiting from a new and agreeable life of calm in the mountains where I was born. I have a fine plantation here, a former feudal estate transformed into a farm and directed by an English gardener I brought over to teach me agriculture. I am happy living among neighbors who are no longer vassals, and I have given my family the first peaceful weeks they have enjoyed for a long time.”
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And in another letter, he added, “I rejoice in this total change. I love my aunt . . . I was so happy to see her again; she is very well and did not think I would ever come back to Chavaniac until she saw me here, settled into the house. . . . I have as much pleasure in complete rest as I ever did in the fifteen years of action . . . and success. I am left with but one last role— as a farmer.”
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In Paris, Jacobins rejoiced almost as much as Lafayette in his new role— and took full advantage of his absence to further roil the already turbulent political waters of national politics. It was not long, however, before ripples from the political maelstrom in Paris lapped at the edges of Lafayette’s fields at Chavaniac. To Adrienne’s consternation, a delegation from nearby Brioude, the capital city of southern Auvergne, arrived at Chavaniac to announce that moderates in the departmental assembly had blocked an attempted Jacobin takeover by electing Lafayette president. As Adrienne held her breath anxiously, her husband thanked his fellow Auvergnats, but declined the honor. No sooner had the Brioude delegates left, however, than another delegation arrived—this one from Paris; Bailly had resigned as mayor, discouraged by Jacobin street riots and overwhelmed by the double burden of administering the city and commanding Lafayette’s National Guard.

Without Lafayette’s strong presence, Paris constitutionalists seemed helpless to prevent Jacobin infiltration into every area of public life. Gangs of Jacobin thugs menaced newly elected moderates as they entered and left the National Assembly. Despite a two-thirds majority, the gentlemanly constitutionalists sat paralyzed with fear, unable to cope with the bedlam the Jacobin minority created about them, pounding fists, stamping feet, shouting insults, or chanting them in unison. The Jacobins ignored national bankruptcy and famine to extend their power into the lives and thoughts of every man, woman, and child in France. Their first official act struck the words
Sire (Sieur), Madam (Madame
), and
Majesty (Majesté
) from the French language. The new law required people to address each other as
citoyen
and
citoyenne
(“citizen” and “citizenness”) instead of
Monsieur
and
Madame
—or face denunciation and arrest as enemies of the state. Moderate political leaders desperately sought Lafayette’s return to Paris to run for mayor, but he declined. Zealous friends entered his name in absentia, without his consent, and although Adrienne was delighted when he lost, the Jacobins seized the reins of government, and within weeks a “Committee of Insurrection,” headed
by the savage Danton, took control of the National Guard, which policed the city.

Jacobin control in Paris emboldened revolutionaries and brigands elsewhere in France to sack chateaux, churches, and rectories. Aristocrats fled in panic—westward to London, north to Brussels, and eastward to the Rhine— especially to Coblenz, where the king’s brothers had established a pseudo French court as an emigré capital and center for counterrevolutionary activities. Bloodied clerical
refusés
and their parishioners went into hiding. In Paris, mobs plundered shops and food convoys. Violence became an integral part of daily life—a vocation for some, an avocation for others. Jacobins encouraged
le petit peuple
—the ordinary “little people”—to join in the daily slaughter by distributing more than ten thousand pikes to those without guns. “The pike has become a sacred symbol,” Robespierre chortled contentedly.
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In Avignon, the grisly Jourdan Coupe-Tête resurfaced and led a band of cutthroats on an arson spree that gutted the area’s châteaux and turned thousands of acres of church-owned lands into an inferno just before the grain and grape harvests. Not content with his handiwork, Coupe-Tête and his men broke into Avignon’s grim Prison de la Glacière—the “ice-house” prison—and, during two unimaginably bloody days on October 16 and 17, 1791, systematically butchered dozens of imprisoned Catholic priests and parishioners in their cells—many of them women and children jailed for refusing to foresake their oaths to the Roman Catholic Church. In Paris, the Jacobins intimidated the National Assembly to grant full amnesty to Coupe-Tête and make preaching by
refusés
priests an act of treason, subject to summary execution.

“Their new Constitution is good for nothing,” Morris raged to Washington in one of his first reports as the new American ambassador to France. “The truth is that instead of seeking the public good by doing what was right, each sought his own advantage. . . . The Assembly . . . commits every day new follies, and if this unhappy country be not plunged anew into the horrors of despotism it is not their fault. . . . They have lately made a master stroke to that effect. They have resolved to attack their neighbors. . . . America in the worst of times was much better because at least the criminal law was executed, not to mention the mildness of our manners.”
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With the economy in shambles and hunger and anarchy engulfing the nation, war did, indeed, seem a logical answer to the nation’s problems by channeling popular furor and energy in a struggle against imagined enemies beyond the nation’s borders. Early in 1792, the Assembly warned Austria that France would declare war if the Austrians did not disperse the French emigré regiments in Coblenz and elsewhere in its territory. The Assembly ordered three armies of 50,000 men each to mass along the northern and eastern frontiers, with the sixty-seven-year-old Rochambeau in command of
the Army of the North on the left flank, and General Nicolas Luckner on the right flank commanding the Army of the Rhine. Aware that Lafayette had captured one-third of the votes in the Paris election without even showing his face, Lafayette’s enemies forced the Assembly to appoint him commander of the Army of the Center—not to honor him, but to send him to war and keep him too busy to meddle in French politics. To his family’s deep distress, Lafayette had no choice but ride out of the gates of Chavaniac on Christmas Day, 1791. It would be years before any of them would ever see him again.

Like the other two French armies, Lafayette’s army was in total disarray. One-third of its officers—all of them noblemen—had fled across the border to join the emigrés. Jacobins had infiltrated the rank and file and encouraged disobedience, anarchy, and desertion. Instead of 50,000 troops, Lafayette found fewer than 25,000—many of them peasant volunteers for whom military service offered prospects of food and plunder. “Their army is undisciplined to a degree you can hardly conceive,” Morris reported to Washington. “Already great numbers desert. . . . Their
Gardes Nationales
who have turned out as volunteers are in many instances . . . corrupted scum . . . [with] every vice and every disease which can render them the scourge of their friends and the scoff of their foes.”
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Lafayette, however, tried to remain optimistic: “Do not believe, my dear general, the exaggerated reports you may receive, above all those that come from England. Liberty and equality will be saved in France, that is certain. . . .”
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As Lafayette would soon learn, Morris had a far better grasp of French affairs than he.

On April 28, France declared war against Austria and Prussia and sent Rochambeau and Lafayette, the heroes of Yorktown, northward to seize Belgium from the Austrians. The invasion was disastrous: facing disciplined lines of more than 150,000 Austrian, Prussian, and Hessian troops and 20,000 French emigrés, the French troops fled in panic. When French general Théobald Dillon ordered his fleeing soldiers to turn and face the enemy, they slaughtered him and kept running. Old Rochambeau quit in disgust and was arrested and imprisoned as a traitor. His aide since Yorktown, Lafayette’s brother-in-law the vicomte de Noailles, fled to England in the belief that his wife, Adrienne’s sister Louise, was safely in Switzerland with their three children and the rest of the Noailles family. After the Army of the North surrendered to the Austrians, the king of Prussia ordered the allied armies to march on Paris to rescue the royal family. The National Assembly declared an emergency, stripped the nation of voting rights, and declared itself an absolute ruling body in perpetuity, with members to serve indefinitely and no longer subject to popular vote. It ordered the deportation of all
refusé
priests, French-born or not. In the first—and last—courageous act of his reign, the king used his constitutional right to veto the decrees.

When Lafayette heard of the king’s stand, he decided the time had come to act against the Jacobins with a strong declaration of support for the king: “Continue, Sire, to exercise the authority that the national will has delegated to you to defend constitutional principles against all enemies. . . . In so doing, you will find that all the friends of liberty and all good Frenchmen will rally around your throne to defend it against rebel plots and factions. And I, Sire, will continue zealously to serve the cause to which I have devoted my entire life, with loyalty to the oath I took to the nation, the law and the king.”
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At the same time, he sent a long, scathing address to the Assembly denouncing Jacobin intrigues:

In the belief that . . . the Constitution is the law governing the legislature, I blame you, Gentlemen, for the powerful efforts to divert you from the course you have promised to follow. I will let nothing deprive me of the right as a free man to perform my duty as a citizen . . . I have great respect for the representatives of the people, but I have greater respect for the people, for whom the Constitution is the ultimate declaration of their will. . . . Can you deny that . . . the Jacobin faction is causing all the disorder? I accuse them openly. Organized like a separate empire in the city, with branches across the country; directed by a handful of leaders blinded by ambition, this sect has formed a separate nation amidst the French people, usurping their powers and subjugating their representatives, eulogizing the crimes of Jourdan [Coupe-Tête]. . . . I denounce them. . . . They would overturn our laws; they rejoice in disorder; they rise up against public authority that the people have established.

Lafayette demanded that the Assembly crush the Jacobins, calling it “a sect that has usurped the people’s sovereignty, tyrannized citizens . . . I implore the National Assembly to arrest and punish the leaders of violence for high treason against the nation.” If the Assembly failed to restore constitutional law, he threatened to march into Paris with his army to do the job for them.
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His declaration came too late, however. The Jacobins already ruled Paris, and they now moved swiftly and mercilessly to destroy Lafayette and the last semblances of constitutional law.
“A bas Lafayette!”
(“Down with Lafayette!”), they roared in the Assembly; “Lafayette is a scoundrel!” Desmoulins cried out. Danton leaped to his feet and shouted, “Lafayette has left no doubt that he is behind the coalition of European tyrants.” Finally Robespierre stood and signaled for silence: “Lafayette is the most dangerous enemy of France,” he declared. “Smite Lafayette, and the nation is saved!”
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