Lafayette lived to hold his great-grandchild in his arms, yet the period of his life seems very short if measured by the changes that came about while he walked the earth. It was a time when old men dreamed dreams and young men saw visions, and during Lafayette's seventy-six years some of the visions became realities, some of his dreams he saw well on the way to fulfilment.
The French regard Lafayette's American career as only an episode in his life; while Americans are apt to forget that he had a career in France. He lived in three distinct periods of history, so different that they might have been centuries apart. He saw medieval Europe; the stormy period of change, and something very like the modern world we know to-day. Peasants knelt in the dust before the nobles, after he was a grown man; yet, in his old age, railroads and republicanism were established facts. "To have made for oneself a rôle in one or another of these periods suffices for a career," says his French biographer Donoil; "very few have had a career in all."
Lafayette played an important part in all three. Not only that; it was his strange good fortune to hold familiar converse with two of the greatest figures in history—the two very greatest of his own age—Washington and Napoleon. That he seems even measurably great in such company shows his true stature. Washington was his friend, who loved him like a son. Napoleon appears to have been one of the very few men Lafayette could never quite bring himself to trust, though Napoleon rendered him an immense service and did everything in his great power to win his support.
If, as certain French historians say, Lafayette and Napoleon were dictators in turn, Lafayette's task was in a way the harder of the two; for Napoleon's turn came after the fury had spent itself and men were beginning to recover, sobered by their own excesses. It was in the mounting delirium of their fever that Lafayette's middle course brought upon him first distrust, then enmity from both sides.
If an Austrian prison had not kept him from destruction he must have perished during the Revolution, for he was never swerved by fear of personal danger. One of his eulogists asserts that he was "too noble to be shrewd." Another says that he judged men by his own feelings and was "misled by illusions honorable to himself." After his experience in America he undoubtedly expected to play a great part in the uprising in France, and, not realizing the strength of selfishness and passion, helped to let loose forces too powerful to control. One of his critics has asserted that he never made a wise or a correct decision; but critics and eulogists alike agree that he was upright and brave. They are justified in saying he was vain. His vanity took the form of believing himself right.
He was not self-seeking, and the lack of that quality caused him to be regarded with puzzled surprise by men who could not understand his willingness to step aside in favor of some one else, when he thought the cause demanded it. "It seemed so foolish," said Madame de Staël in her sympathetic portrait, "to prefer one's country to oneself... to look upon the human race, not as cards to be played for one's own profit, but as an object of sacred devotion." Chateaubriand said that forty years had to pass after Lafayette's death before people were really convinced that he had been an idealist and not a fool. The fact was brought home to them, little by little, as records scattered to the four winds during the Revolution gradually saw the light of print; here a public document, there a private letter, there again a bit of personal reminiscence. Fitting together like a puzzle, they showed at last how one single idea had inspired all Lafayette's acts, even when they seemed most erratic. "Fortunately for him," says one of his French biographers, "it was the idea of the century—political liberty."
In his lifetime he arranged his papers for publication and dictated occasional bits of comment; but these were only fragmentary, as many of his papers were lost. Besides, it was a task for which he had no great zest. He said it seemed ungracious to accuse men of persecuting him who afterward died for the very principles he upheld. He was sure history would accord to each his just deserts. Madame de Staël said that his belief in the final triumph of liberty was as strong as the belief of a pious man in a future life. He said himself that liberty was to him a love, a religion, a "geometric certainty."
To his last day he pursued this ideal of his wherever it led him. His failure to learn worldly wisdom irritated many. It was incongruous, like the contrast between his polished old-time manners and the rash utterances that fell from his lips. It must be confessed that in his latter years he was not always clear-sighted as to the means he employed. Once he descended to methods better suited to Italy in the Middle Ages than to political reformers in 1822. There were times, too, when he seemed bent on self-destruction. Those near him were convinced that he would like to lose his life provided he could thereby add to the luster of his reputation. "I have lived long," was his answer to intimate friends who gave him counsels of prudence. "It seems to me that it would be quite fitting to end my career upon the scaffold, a sacrifice to liberty."
Napoleon's estimate of him was short and severe. "Lafayette was another of the fools; he was not cut out for the great rôle he wanted to play." When some one ventured to remind the ex-emperor of Lafayette's spirited refusal to give him up on the demand of the allied powers, Napoleon answered dryly that he was not attacking Lafayette's sentiments or his good intentions, but was merely complaining of the mess he made of things. Lafayette's estimate of the former emperor was even more severe. He thought Napoleon's really glorious title had been "Soldier of the Revolution" and that the crown was for him "a degradation." American history would have been the loser if either of these men had not lived. Lafayette helped win us our country. By selling us Louisiana, Napoleon almost doubled its extent. Napoleon's heart rarely led him into trouble; personal ambition seldom led Lafayette far astray. The two can be contrasted, but not compared. There is food for thought in the fact that a statue of Lafayette, modeled by an American sculptor and given by five million American schoolchildren to France, should have been erected in the Louvre on the spot once set apart for a statue of the French emperor.
Madame de Staël thought Lafayette more like the English and Americans than like the French, even in his personal appearance. Another French estimate, that he had "a cold manner, masking concentrated enthusiasm," is quite in keeping with American character, as was his incorrigible dash of optimism. It was to America, a country of wide spaces and few inhabitants, that he followed his vision of liberty in early manhood, and there where the play and interplay of selfish interests was far less complicated than in France he saw it become a practical reality. Later he championed many noble causes in many parts of the world. Next to political freedom and as a necessary part of it, he had at heart the emancipation of the negroes. This he tried himself to put into practice. He was shocked when he returned to our country in 1824 to find how much race prejudice had increased. He remembered that black soldiers and white messed together during the American Revolution.