Lafayette (59 page)

“In this abyss of misery, the thought of owing to the United States and to Washington the life and liberty of La Fayette causes a ray of hope to shine in my heart. I expect everything from the kindness of the people in whose land he helped to form a model of that liberty of which he is now the victim.”
⁴³
She begged Washington to use his influence to obtain Lafayette’s release, then sealed the envelope and gave it to Frestel. “My mother refused to see my brother again,” Virginie wrote later, “for fear she would not have the strength to separate herself from him and let him go.”
⁴⁴
Within a few days, however, Frestel reappeared at Chavaniac after midnight, saying he had been unable to obtain the necessary papers to travel to the Bordeaux fair. Frestel and George returned to Chavaniac for the winter.

On September 20, the ragtag army of undisciplined French Jacobins charged like madmen into the Prussian lines at Valmy, about forty miles west of Verdun, howling
“Vive la Nation!”
hysterically, leaping over the bodies of their fallen comrades into the steady hail of musket balls and bayonet thrusts. Ignoring death, they materialized from every direction; peasants with picks charged from every farmhouse and village door to join them— some behind the Prussian lines, many on their flanks. Unlike the disciplined, well-fed, uniformed armies of Louis XIV, the French revolutionary armies of 1792 mixed professionals with ill-clothed irregulars, untrained peasants, and workers—all of them ravenous for food, drink, and plunder. Jacobin agents had infiltrated every hamlet, town, and city, pledging a policy of
La guerre aux châteaux; la paix aux chaumières
—“War on castles; peace with cottages.”
⁴⁵
The Jacobins invited the poor, the disaffected, and the homeless to crusade against the aristocracy and the Roman Catholic clergy—and they did, with a fury that had accumulated during centuries of deprivation. The French army became the world’s largest pirate army since the French crusades.

Rather than risk slaughter for a king and cause not their own, Prussian regulars pulled back from the insanity to the natural defenses of the Rhine River. The retreat sacrificed the unprotected plains of the western Rhineland to marauding French hordes. Within a month the French had recaptured northern and eastern France and overrun the German Palatinate, including the historic cathedral cities of Mainz and Worms, on the west bank of the Rhine. In the south and southeast, they swept through Savoy, seizing the capital city of Chambéry and the Mediterranean port of Nice.

In Paris, some moderates in the new Convention united with radicals in self-congratulatory embraces and arrogant pronouncements of French invincibility. The moderates were led by Girondin merchants from the Bordeaux region along the huge Gironde estuary in southwestern France. Commoners all, they had profited handsomely from the Revolution by buying auctioned lands of the church and aristocracy at distress prices. Many learned the language of radicals, while the radicals stroked their egos and fed their greed for profits with promises of wealth, all the while dipping into their pockets and assuring them that radicalism in the name of France was the highest form of patriotism—that “one cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
⁴⁶
On the opening day of the Convention, moderate Girondins eagerly jumped into the revolutionary frying pan and voted with Robespierre radicals to decree “royalty abolished in France” and proclaim France “a republic.”
⁴⁷

As French forces piled victory upon victory, thousands of hungry, unemployed peasant volunteers joined the army to profit from plunder in foreign territory. The French treasury also profited. As they had done in France, French Jacobins seized the assets of the aristocracy and church treasuries in conquered lands, melted gold and silver relics into bullion, and sold lands at auction. Far from bankrupting France as some moderates had feared, the war was solving the nation’s fiscal as well as social crises.

After the army overran Monaco and Belgium, the Convention proclaimed the unity of all French-speaking peoples in Europe and called for worldwide revolution, pledging “fraternity and aid to all peoples seeking to recover their liberty. . . . We will not be satisfied until Europe—all Europe— is afire.”
⁴⁸
In December 1792, French forces massed along the northern Belgian border with Holland, while the French navy sailed into Naples harbor to begin conquest of the Italian peninsula, the Vatican, and the Mediterranean world. The Convention proclaimed that “all of Europe, including Moscow, will become Gallicized, Jacobinized, communized.”
⁴⁹
Declaring a new French era for the world, the Convention decreed a new “republican calendar” to replace the Christian calendar: what had been September 22, 1792 anno Domini retroactively became Day One of mankind’s “Year I of Equality.”
⁵⁰

The French military victories came at a steep price for King Louis XVI and his family, who lost their value as hostages. With his forces retreating, the duke of Brunswick could no longer demand their release in exchange for sparing Paris. Indeed, their continued existence became a dangerous symbol of resistance to Jacobin rule. On December 3, Robespierre demanded the trial and execution of the king for high political crimes. Assuming that Lafayette still held some symbolic value for French revolutionaries, Prussian authorities retaliated—chaining him and his friends, La Tour-Maubourg and Bureaux de Pusy, in an open peasant’s cart for transport deep into Prussian-held Saxony through crowds of taunting villagers. On December 31, 1792, Prussian soldiers marched them into a subterranean dungeon in the fortress at Magdeburg, three hundred miles from the French border. The guards led the prisoners to separate cells, each “three paces wide by five and one-half.”
⁵¹
Only a thin gray beam of light pierced the thick, wet outer wall, through a slit too high and narrow to imagine that a sky or world might lay beyond. The only hint of life on earth tumbled meaninglessly through the iron grating in the ceiling of his cell, in unintelligible, mumbled German whispers from two guards who kept a constant watch on him from above.

Adrienne’s sister Louise, the vicomtesse de Noailles, was in Paris caring for her ailing grandfather and appealed to Ambassador Morris for help in ameliorating Lafayette’s prison conditions. The Jacobins had confiscated the family’s assets; they had no money to send to the prison to pay for Lafayette’s food, and he was evidently dying from the verminous gruel that the prison served without charge and the harsh conditions. Morris acted swiftly, using his own funds to establish open-ended credit at a Dutch bank “to supply the sums needful for him . . . no moment is to be lost in administering relief.”
⁵²
After he learned that Adrienne Lafayette and the children were also without funds, Morris placed 100,000 livres of his own money in another Dutch account, impervious to Jacobins, for her to pay Lafayette’s outstanding debts and her family’s expenses. Adrienne appealed to Washington, who contributed 2,000 livres of his own to the Dutch account, pretending that it was a repayment of some personal debt to Lafayette when he had visited America.

“If I ever see and am reunited with my husband again, it will be thanks only to your goodness and that of the United States,” Adrienne answered Washington. “I can do nothing for him; I can neither receive a word from him nor write to him. That is the situation I now suffer.”
⁵³
Washington was as helpless as Adrienne. As president of the United States, he could not take any public action to free Lafayette without risking diplomatic conflict with France, which remained a United States ally, and he had no influence whatever with either Austria or Prussia, which had no diplomatic ties to the United States.

As cruel and undeserved as it was, Lafayette’s confinement far from France actually saved his life by sparing him a cart ride to the guillotine. The king was not as fortunate. On January 15, 1793, the French Convention voted 707 to 0 that the king was guilty of conspiring against public liberty. The next day, moderates tried to replace the lid of civilization on the Revolution, but failed. The Convention condemned the king to death, 361 to 360. Moderates tried, but failed again, to reverse the vote. Some urged holding him in prison for trial after the war; others suggested sending the royal family to exile in America. In this second group was Tom Paine, whose tracts titled
The Rights of Man
had won him honorary French citizenship and a seat in the revolutionary Convention. Robespierre silenced them all. He sent Paine to prison and threatened other dissenters with the same fate or worse. On the morning of January 21, Louis XVI climbed the steps to the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution, now the Place de la Concorde. The blade fell at 10:22.

“The late King of this Country has been publicly executed,” American ambassador Morris reported to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. “He died in a manner becoming his Dignity. Mounting the scaffold he express’d anew his forgiveness of those who persecuted him and a prayer that his deluded people might be benefited by his death. On the scaffold he attempted to speak but the commanding officer . . . ordered the drums to beat.”
⁵⁴

After displaying the king’s head to the frenzied cheers of the mob, the executioner and his assistants tossed the king’s head and then his body into a corpse-filled cart, and guardsmen made a path for it through the crowd toward the Madeleine Cemetery about a half-mile away, where a gaping trench, its floor lined with the previous day’s grisly deposits, awaited the new arrivals.
⁵⁵

The beheading of the king outraged the civilized world. In Germany, the French king’s brothers proclaimed Louis’s still-imprisoned seven-year-old son, Louis-Charles de France, the new king. By the end of March 1793, a huge European coalition had formed to crush the French revolution and prevent its spread into neighboring countries. In Europe, only Turkey, Scandinavia, Russia, and Switzerland did not take up arms against France. England, Holland, Spain, the Italian states, and the Papacy’s Swiss Guards joined the Austrians and Prussians. Foreign armies poured into France: the Spanish along the Mediterranean in the southwest, the Prussians across the Rhineland in the east, and the Austrians from the north. Far more threatening, the powerful British army landed in Toulon and was preparing to cross the Channel and invade Normandy and Brittany to support royalist counterrevolutionaries. France had but one ally left in the world: the United States. President Washington, however, issued a proclamation of neutrality, declaring that the United States was at peace with Great Britain and France. With America’s wounds from its own revolution still healing, the United States could not afford any distraction on the road to economic recovery.

Jacobin leaders were furious. Early in April, they dispatched a new ambassador, “Citizen” Edmond Charles Genêt, to the United States with instructions to foment a Jacobin uprising in America. “French agents,” explained Noah Webster, the editor of the New York newspaper
American Minerva
, “spread pamphlets and other papers tending to alienate the minds of people from the government of their country and . . . labored zealously to effect a revolution in the United States and overthrow the government.”
⁵⁶

While his agents provoked street riots, Genêt commissioned privateers to prey on British and Spanish vessels along the U.S. coast and organized American militias in Georgia and Louisiana to attack the Spanish. President Washington denounced him for infringing on U.S. sovereignty, but the cheering mobs convinced Genêt that a Jacobin uprising was in his grasp, and he sailed to New York to lead American Jacobins in seizing the capital and overthrowing the president.

As Genêt sailed for New York, invading armies in France sent French revolutionary forces reeling, and, by early June, counterrevolutions against the Jacobins had erupted in more than sixty departments. The Revolution was in danger, and, with the Coalition growing more confident of victory, the king of Prussia eased the cruel conditions in Lafayette’s prison. He permitted the transfer of American funds in Holland to the Magdeburg prison to buy Lafayette books and better food. One of the guards took Lafayette for an hour’s walk in the prison garden each day, and his health and spirit improved—especially after Thomas Pinckney induced the Prussian ambassador in London to forward a portion of a letter from Adrienne that said she and the children were alive and well at Chavaniac. With the letter came a pen, ink, and paper for a brief reply under the watchful eyes of Prussian decoding experts.

“It was more than I dared hope, my sweetheart, that the five dearest people in my life would still be together in the safety of Chavaniac,” Lafayette wrote:

I had envisioned you in far more difficult, far sadder circumstances, but I know that you will find solace in knowing that your tenderness and love are the happiest memories of my life, my consolations in solitary confinement and the wellspring of my everlasting joy in the future, if I am allowed to return to my family.