The Life of La Fayette, the Knight of Liberty in Two Worlds and Two Centuries

by Lydia Hoyt Farmer

“My unwillingness to vote for the expenses of foreign affairs arises from the conviction that our diplomacy at present is an absurdity. In truth, gentlemen, the system, the agents, the language, all appear to me foreign to regenerated France; she is again subjected to doctrines that she had branded, to powers she had so often conquered, to habits contracted among her enemies, to obligations for which, on her own account at least, she has no cause to blush. In the meanwhile, Europe, aroused by us thirty years ago to liberty, checked indeed since, as it must be confessed, by the view of our excesses and the abuse of our victories, has resumed, and will preserve, notwithstanding recent misfortunes, that great march of civilization, at the head of which our French place is marked, a place in which the eyes of all people who are free, or aspiring to become so, should not seek us in vain.

“Well, gentlemen, in this division of Europe between two banners,—on the one side, despotism and aristocracy; on the other, liberty and equality,—that liberty and equality which we first proclaimed there,—where do we find the soi-disant organs of France? exempt, it is true, and I am happy to acknowledge it, from a hostile co-operation, in the aggression of the satellites of Troppau and Laybach, whom a success of little duration, as I hope, will only render more odious; they are also entitled to our thanks for not having insulted France by any positive participation in those recent declarations of the three powers, which, in order not to offend the majority in this house, I will only characterize by repeating my ardent wishes, the wishes of my life, for the emancipation of the people, the independence of nations, and the morality and dignity of the true social order. We have, nevertheless, seen the agents of the French government, in their subaltern participation in the first deliberation of these congresses, not even to raise themselves to the level, so easily attained, of liberality evinced by the British diplomatists....

“Such are not the doctrines of France. I speak not now of my personal incredulity of the doctrine of the divine right of kings; but I recall to you that already, long before ’89, the era of the European revolution, when we Soldiers of America felt honored by the name of rebels and insurgents then lavished upon us, all in virtue of social order by the English government, Louis XVI. and his ministers had expressly recognized the sovereignty of the United States, founded as it was upon the principles of their immortal declaration of independence.

“These principles, since received into the bosom of the constituent assembly, proclaimed in a degree, sworn to by the king and his august brother amidst the greatest of our patriotic solemnities, have been since acknowledged, even in the usurpations of the imperial despotism,—they were since repeated from this tribune as a protecting truth by the friends of the charter and the royal throne on the 19th of March, 1815, for then it was not said that the charter was the counter-revolution; and, indeed, in order to ascertain the share due to the revolution of the rights recognized by the charter, that share which has so often been denied, it would suffice to read again an august proclamation, dated from Verona in July, 1795. These principles, professed at this day among that people who are our natural allies, outweigh all the exploded pretensions which we have since renewed, the moment that a noble effort of the nations subjected by our arms had forced their old governments in spite of themselves to recover the independence which they had so completely, so servilely, so affectionately alienated for the benefit of their conqueror; to whom, in a recent note from Troppau, they have preserved the noblest title he ever bore, in calling him the soldier of the Revolution.

“In truth, gentlemen, the crimes and misfortunes which we deplore are no more the Revolution than the Saint Bartholomew was religion, or those you would call monarchical, the eighteen thousand judicial murders of the Duke of Alva....

“I will only make one remark as to the public instruction. The constitution of ’91 said, ‘There shall be organized a system of public instruction open to all citizens, gratuitous with respect to the indispensable parts of education, and widely disseminated.’ Your committee, on the contrary, exalting themselves to the height of the emperor of Austria’s address to the professors at Laybach, look upon gratuitous instruction as a social disorder, and are particularly desirous to suppress the amount destined for the encouragement of elementary instruction, principally because it serves to favor the Lancasterian system, which your committee does not think will harmonize with the spirit of our institutions. Now, gentlemen, the Lancasterian system is, since the invention of printing, the greatest step which has been made for the extension of prompt, easy, and popular instruction....

“The expenses of the navy department are enormous. The navy of the United States has already been cited to you; that navy, whose flag, since its establishment and during two spirited wars against the flag of Britain, has never once failed with equal, and often with inferior, force, to gain the advantage. The provisions, the pay,—everything there, as has been observed to you,—are higher than with us. Its cruisers amounted lately to two ships of the line, nine frigates and fifteen smaller vessels, protecting a commerce of more than 1,200,000 tons, without including the fisheries or the coasting trade. The expenses of their navy department were fixed last session at two and one-half millions of dollars, and half a million more to build new vessels, making sixteen millions of francs, calculated, indeed, for twelve vessels of the line and twenty frigates, etc. But what a difference between this sum and fifty millions of francs, which are said to be insufficient for our navy!...

“I shall not consider it as a departure from the question under discussion as to the general administration of the kingdom, if, by a rapid examination of the ancient régime, I shall endeavor to furnish an answer to the wishes and regrets of which it still seems the object. It was from the destruction of this régime that we saw disappear that corporation of clergy which, exercising all sorts of influences and refusing all share in the common burdens, increased continually and never alienated its immense riches, but divided them among themselves; which, rendering the law an accomplice in vows too frequently forced, covering France with monastic orders devoted to a foreign head, collected contributions both in the garb of wealth and mendicity; and which, in its secular organization, formed so considerable a portion of the idle and unproductive class that the daily ministers of the altar were the most insignificant portion of what was called the first order of the state.

“We saw disappear that corporation of sovereign courts where the privilege of judging was venal of right, and, in fact, hereditary in the nobility; when feudal judges, chosen and revocable by their seigneurs, presided; when the diversity of codes and the laws of arrests made you lose before one tribunal the cause you had gained before another.

“We saw disappear that financial corporation oppressing France beyond endurance, and by leases, whose monstrous government exceeded in expense and profit the receipts of the royal treasury, whose immense code, now here recorded, formed an occult science which its agents alone had the right or the means of interpreting, and which, in rewarding perjury and informers, exercised over all unprotected men a boundless and remorseless tyranny.