Lafayette (60 page)

My health is fair . . . they pull me out of my hole an hour each day to let me breath fresh air; I have some books, and, although my ability to read fast has now become a disadvantage, I have found materials in English, French, and Latin that I can use in imaginary discussions with the dead— inasmuch as they have sequestered me from the living. . . . That is about all the news from the underground prison that I am allowed to disclose to you.

Adieu, my sweetheart; I beg you all not to succumb to torment over me, but to think only of our reunion. I find it impossible to believe that my star will extinguish as long as my poor old aunt has miraculously survived these latest shocks. From the bottom of my heart, I send all my love to her, as well as Anastasie, George, Virginie and Monsieur Frestel, who is now a member of our family as well.

Adieu, Adieu, I embrace you and love you with all my heart and soul.
⁵⁷

The bloody conversion from constitutional monarchy to republic required a new constitution, but, with enemy armies and counterrevolutionaries threatening, Robespierre cut short the Convention debate by sending a mob of eighty thousand Jacobin thugs to surround the meeting hall and drag twenty-nine recalcitrant Girondin delegates to prison. The remaining delegates immediately approved a constitution that Robespierre had written, creating a “people’s republic” with universal suffrage. Its preamble bore Lafayette’s title—
Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen
(“Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”)—but left no doubt about the identity of its new author, which appeared in bold-faced capitals under the title and on the signature line at the bottom. He even claimed it as his own literary property in fine type elsewhere.

After a mock referendum sustained the new constitution by 1.8 million votes to 3,000 (5 million abstained), Robespierre suspended it for the duration of the Revolution and seized all powers for a Jacobin triumvirate: Danton, Marat, and, of course, himself. They, in turn, delegated administrative authority to two twelve-member committees: an administrative Committee for Public Safety and a Committee for General Security, a precursor of the twentieth-century Soviet Comintern, with a network of armed “vigilance committees” in every town and city to remove and arrest officials who veered from the Robespierre party line.

The counterrevolutionaries did not retreat, however. In mid-July, royalist Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat to death in his habitual lair—the bathtub. The assassination infuriated Robespierre and Danton, who turned to terror to destroy their enemies. Jacobin thugs burst into the queen’s cell at the Temple Prison and tore her shrieking eight-year-old boy-king from her
arms. It was the last time his mother or anyone other than his abductors would ever see him, alive or dead.
¹

The Convention facilitated the spread of the Terror by redefining the word “suspect” so broadly that police could arrest anyone for any reason. They herded hundreds of thousands of “suspects” into prisons to languish until revolutionary tribunals condemned them to death in mock trials that barred cross-examination or defense responses.

“Suspects,” Robespierre shouted, “must be run to earth in their burrows by day and by night.”
²

Accordingly, the Committee of Public Safety in Paris ordered the 136 remaining Girondin deputies of the Convention imprisoned, tried, and executed, while vigilance committees elsewhere in France imprisoned almost 500,000 men, women, and children suspected of opposing the Revolution. The committees executed more than 40,000—17,000 on the guillotine and the rest with bullets, knives, nooses, or garrotes in their streets, shops, homes, and beds—dumping their victims in nameless mass graves.

Inevitably, the excesses of the Jacobin Revolution produced revulsion in the United States and turned public opinion against France. As harsh as they once had seemed, the English appeared quite civilized next to the French Jacobins. “The people of this country are deceived,” editor Noah Webster warned in the weekly New York
Herald
. “They believe the French to be fighting for liberty. This opinion is not well founded. They began the revolution with honest views of acquiring their rights, but they have overleaped this limit and are contending for plunder and empire.”
³

Appalled by French ambassador Genêt’s attempt to foment a Jacobin revolution in America, Congress and the president demanded that France recall him. Fearful the Americans might abrogate their treaty and join the British war against France, Robespierre dispatched a new ambassador with orders to arrest Genêt and return him for trial and execution in France. Ironically, Genêt appealed for mercy to the man he had defamed, George Washington, who granted the Frenchman political asylum.
⁴

Although Genêt escaped the guillotine, few in high places were as fortunate. Queen Marie-Antoinette went to her death in October. As her horrified sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth, looked on helplessly, Jacobin soldiers led the beautiful queen from her cell, out the prison gate, to a cart and the jeers of an angry crowd. She held her head high, looked ahead implacably, almost beatifically, as the cart worked its way through the shrieking mob to the instrument of death. The queen’s head fell on October 16, 1793; as they had done with her husband nine months earlier, the attendants threw her head and corpse into a cart with other guillotine victims and carried it to the huge burying pit in the Madeleine Cemetery to rot anonymously with thousands of other innocents.

A few days after the queen’s death, the guillotine left the duc d’Orléans “shortened by a head,”
⁵
as his executioner quipped, despite his having embraced the revolution by changing his name to Philippe Egalité—“Philip the Equal”—and voting enthusiastically in the Convention earlier in the year to execute his cousin, Louis XVI. On October 31, the guillotine claimed twenty liberal deputies of the Convention, and ten days later, the last of the great Paris Fayettistes, former mayor Jean Sylvain Bailly, paid his last respects to the bloody blade.

Early in November, the vigilance committee from the nearby city of Brioude arrived at Chavaniac and, as Adrienne watched in horror, burned all papers, documents, and other materials “in any way tainted with the spirit of feudalism,” including precious deeds, baptismal certificates, and portraits of Lafayette’s forebears—all evidence that an aristocracy had ever existed or owned the château and lands. The next morning, as her children sobbed hysterically, a cart took Adrienne and the village priest away to prison in Brioude, to await transfer to Paris and the guillotine. Almost at the same moment, another cart in Paris was carrying a group of women to prison in the Palais du Luxembourg to await execution. Among them were Adrienne’s grandmother, mother, and sister—the old duchesse de Noailles; the duchesse d’Ayen; and Louise, the vicomtesse de Noailles. They had all come to Paris from their haven in Switzerland to tend to the dying old duc de Noailles. After his death, the Jacobins had refused to allow them to return to Switzerland.

With vigilance committees controlling most of France, resistance to the revolution collapsed. Regular army troops crushed the counterrevolutions in most of western France, and Colonel Napoléon Bonaparte’s artillery pushed the British out to sea at Toulon and ended the counterrevolution in the south. Robespierre exacted retribution in the fanatically stubborn, devoutly Catholic Vendée province in western France by ordering a mass slaughter of thousands—men, women, and children. “One saw nothing but cadavers everywhere,” a survivor reported, “among them women whom the soldiers had stripped, raped and killed.”
⁶
Although severely crippled, the Vendéens continued guerrilla activities for another decade.

As the internal rebellion subsided, the French army returned to the nation’s borders to repel external enemies. Within weeks, they recaptured and reannexed Belgium, overran Holland, retook and reannexed Savoy, and pushed the Spaniards beyond the Pyrenées, seizing Catalonia in eastern Spain and San Sebastiàn in the west.

In contrast to French prisons, Lafayette’s dungeon cell in Magdeburg at least provided sanctuary from the guillotine, if not unending monotony and solitude. He described himself “encircled by ditches, ramparts, guards, double sentries and palisades . . . in a quadruple gated, barred, chained, locked,
grated, narrow, moist, subterranean dungeon . . . doomed to moral and bodily decay.”
⁷

By early 1794, the French armies neared the German border, and the Prussians moved him to Neisse, deep in Prussia near Poland, five hundred miles from France. Lafayette believed his captors were planning his secret execution—that he would simply disappear and no one would know where or when. He found a sliver of wood, moistened it, and dipped it in soot to write his last words: “Adieu, then, my dear wife, my children, my aunt . . . whom I shall cherish to my last breath.”
⁸

The dungeon at Neisse was but a temporary stop, however. Lafayette had become an embarrassment to the Prussian king, Frederick William II, who, like his uncle, Frederick the Great, was eager to appear an enlightened despot and had even promulgated a new code of laws that left suspects innocent until proved guilty. The Prussian courts had never charged Lafayette with a crime; the government had simply held him and the other French officers as a courtesy to its Austrian ally, and Frederick William insisted that the Austrians take responsibility for the prisoners. In the spring, the Austrians took the French officers to Olmütz, Moravia, now the western part of the Czech Republic.

In comparison to Prussian prison cells, the cells at Olmütz were chambers of horrors. The prison was in a part of the city wall over the Morawa River, which carried the city sewerage and filled the prison above it with a suffocating stench and swarms of disease-carrying mosquitoes and flies. Lafayette, La Tour-Maubourg, and Bureaux de Pusy were each chained in solitary confinement, unaware of the other’s presence, forbidden to talk, in rags, and with no personal possessions. Identified by numbers and never hearing their names, they ate with their fingers from filth-encrusted pots, breathed the foul fumes of their own wastes, and were not allowed to bathe.

As Lafayette arrived at Olmütz, a similar vehicle was taking Adrienne—“
la femme Lafayette,”
as the Jacobins called her
—
to prison in Paris. Her guards spared her the discomfort of riding in chains. Frestel barely had time to bring the children to wave tearful good-byes and give their mother her last glimpse of her babies.
“Trouvez votre père! Trouvez votre père!,”
she cried out to them. “Find your father; go to your father.”
⁹
Frestel rushed the children back to the château and the care of their great-aunt, then hurried back to the Paris road to follow Adrienne’s cart and track her whereabouts. A few days later, her cart lumbered down the rue Saint-Antoine in the east end of Paris and into a small street to the Hôtel de La Force, once the palatial mansion of her friends, the duc and duchesse de La Force. Thick iron grills encased its windows; Jacobins had stripped its wall paneling, gilded ceilings, parquet floors, and sumptuous tapestries. Its splendid furnishings and paintings had vanished; only naked stone encased the rooms where Europe’s aristocracy had once sat enthralled by the incredible pianistic skills of the little Austrian boy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

After Adrienne entered the Hôtel de La Force prison, Frestel went to see American ambassador Morris, who immediately limped over to the Tuileries Palace to demand her release. He met a cold reception. His earlier protests of French treaty violations against America and his outspoken criticisms of Jacobin excesses had infuriated the leaders of the revolution and left him unwelcome. Undaunted, he stormed through the palace, excoriating the government for imprisoning Adrienne without formal charges and
leaving no doubt about America’s attachment to the family of General Lafayette; the execution of Adrienne Lafayette, Morris warned, would turn Americans against France. Morris’s unrelenting criticisms led the government to declare him persona non grata but left Robespierre well aware of Lafayette’s exalted status as “Friend of Washington.” To avoid creating a martyr who might add the United States to the long list of nations warring against France, Robespierre ordered the tribunal to leave Adrienne in prison, but omit her name from the daily lists of those sent to the tribunal for condemnation to death.