For seven years immediately after this loss he took no active part in public affairs; partly because of his private sorrow, partly because of his opposition to the emperor. He had been disappointed in Napoleon and the latter distrusted him. "All the world is reformed," Napoleon grumbled, "with one exception. That is Lafayette. He has not receded from his position by so much as a hair's breadth. He is quiet now, but I tell you he is ready to begin all over again." George and Lafayette's son-in-law suffered from this displeasure in their army careers. "These Lafayettes cross my path everywhere!" Napoleon is said to have exclaimed when he found the names of the young men on an army list submitted for promotion, and promptly scratched them off.
Then fortune began to go against the emperor and invading armies came marching into France. Lafayette offered his sword and his experience to his country, but the advice he gave appeared too dangerous and revolutionary. What he desired was to force the abdication of Napoleon at that time. He was in Paris on March 31, 1814, when foreign soldiers entered the city. Powerless to do anything except grieve, he shut himself up in his room. Napoleon retired to Elba and the brother of Louis XVI was summoned to take the title of Louis XVIII. This was the prince Lafayette had intentionally offended when he was scarcely more than a boy.
After he was made king, however, Lafayette wrote him a note of congratulation and appeared in uniform at his first royal audience wearing the white cockade. That certainly seemed like a change of front, but Lafayette thought it a necessity. "It had to be Napoleon or the Bourbons," he wrote Jefferson. "These are the only possible alternatives in a country where the idea of republican executive power is regarded as a synonym for excesses committed in its name." He accepted the government of Louis XVIII as more liberal than that of the emperor. Time and again after this he aided in the overthrow of one man or party, only to turn against the new power he had helped create. He even tried to work with Napoleon again after Louis XVIII fled to Ghent and Bonaparte returned from Elba to found his "new democratic empire," known as the Hundred Days. Waterloo came at the end of it; then Lafayette voiced the demand for the emperor's abdication and pressed it hard.
"What!" he cried in answer to Lucien Bonaparte's appeal to the Chamber of Deputies not to desert his brother, because that would be a violation of national honor, "you accuse us of failing in duty toward honor, toward Napoleon! Do you forget all we have done for him? The bones of our brothers and of our children cry aloud from the sands of Africa, from the banks of the Guadalquivir and the Tagus, from the shores of the Vistula and the glacial deserts of Russia. During more than ten years three million Frenchmen have perished for this man who wants to-day to fight all Europe. We have done enough for him. Our duty now is to save our country!"
Lafayette was one of the deputation sent by the Chamber to thank the ex-emperor after his abdication, and admired Napoleon's self-possession during that trying scene. He thought Napoleon "played grandly the role necessity forced upon him." Lafayette was also one of the commission sent to negotiate with the victorious allies. It was there that he gave his spirited answer to the demand that Napoleon be given up. "I am astonished you should choose a prisoner of Olmütz as the person to whom to make that shameful proposal."
Louis XVIII returned to power and soon Lafayette was opposing him. So it went on for years. He said of himself that he was a man of institutions, not of dynasties; and that he valued first principles so much that he was very willing to compromise on matters of secondary importance. He cared nothing for apparent consistency and did whatever his erratic republican conscience dictated, without a thought of how it might look to others. He was a born optimist, but a poor judge of men; and in spite of repeated disappointments believed the promises of each new ruler who came along. Liberal representative government was of supreme importance in his eyes. If France was not yet ready for a president, she could have it under a king. Each administration that promised a step in this direction received his support, each lapse from it his censure. That appears to be the key to the many shifting changes of his later life.
His popularity among the people waxed and waned. Usually it kept him his seat in the Chamber of Deputies. From 1818 to 1824 he represented the Sarthe; from 1825 to the close of his life the district of Meaux. It was in the interval between that he made his visit to America. He returned to find Charles X king. As that monarch lost popularity his own influence gained. Charles's ministers thought their sovereign showed ill-placed confidence and esteem when he freely acknowledged that this liberal leader had rendered services to his family that no true man could forget. "I know him well," Charles said. "We were born in the same year. We learned to mount a horse together at the riding academy at Versailles. He was a member of my division in the Assembly of Notables. The fact is neither of us has changed—he no more than I." That was just the point. Neither had changed. Charles X was a Bourbon to the bone, and Lafayette had come back from America with renewed health, replenished means, and all the revolutionary impetuosity of youth. He had not one atom of that willingness to put up with "things as they are" which grows upon many reformers as their hair turns gray. John Quincy Adams divined this and advised Lafayette to have nothing more to do with revolutions. "He is sixty-eight years old, but there is fire beneath the cinders," the President of the United States confided to his diary in August, 1825.
The cinders glowed each time Charles X emphasized his Bourbonism; and caught fire again when the king made the Prince de Polignac prime minister in defiance of all liberal Frenchmen. That happened in 1829. Lafayette took occasion to visit Auvergne, the province of his birth, in company with his son, and was received with an enthusiasm rivaling his most popular days in America. The journey was prolonged farther than strict necessity required and did much to unite opposition to the king, for leaders of the liberal party profited by banquets and receptions in Lafayette's honor to spread their doctrines. More than one official who permitted such gatherings lost his job in consequence. Lafayette returned to La Grange; but in the following July, when the storm broke, he called for his horses and hurried to Paris. The Chamber of Deputies was not in session; he thought it ought to be; and he started as soon as he had read a copy of the Royal Ordinances which limited the freedom of the press and otherwise threatened the rights of the people.
Before he reached Paris blood had been shed and barricades had been thrown across the streets. Alighting from his carriage, he told the guards his name, dragged his stiff leg over the obstructions, and joined the little group of legislators who were striving to give this revolt the sanction of law. Having had more experience in revolutions than they—this was his fourth—he became their leader, and on July 29, 1830, found himself in the exact position he had occupied forty years before, commander of the National Guard and practically dictator of France. An unwillingly admiring biographer says that he had learned no wisdom in the interval; that he "pursued the same course with the same want of success." This time he held the balance of power for only two days, but it was actual concentrated power while it lasted. It was he who sent back to Charles the stern answer that his offers of compromise came too late, that the royal family had ceased to reign. And it was he who had to choose the next form of government for France.
It was a dramatic choice. He was frankly ambitious; and quite within his reach lay the honor he would have preferred above all others. The choice lay between becoming himself President of France or, making a new king. It was put to him fairly and squarely: "If we have a republic you will be president. If a monarchy, the Duc d'Orléans will be king. Will you take the responsibility of a republic?" A man with "a canine appetite for fame" and nothing more could have found but one answer, and that not the answer Lafayette gave. In his few hours of power he had talked with men from all parts of France. These confirmed his belief that the country was not yet ready for the change to a republic. It would be better to have a king for a while longer, provided he was a liberal king, pledged to support a constitution. The Duc d'Orléans gave promise of being just such a king. He was son of the duke Lafayette had banished from Paris after the mob attacked Versailles in 1789; but he had fought on the liberal side. The people knew him as Philippe Égalité—"Equality Philip"—and during recent years he had given evidence of being far more democratic than any other member of his family. To choose him would please liberals and conservatives alike, because he was next in line of succession after the sons of the deposed king.