Lafayette, We Come! / The Story of How a Young Frenchman Fought for Liberty in America and How America Now Fights for Liberty in France

by Rupert Sargent Holland

Some Jacobins now petitioned the Assembly to dethrone the King, and a great meeting was held in the Champs de Mars on the seventeenth of July. As usual the meeting got out of hand and the mob turned to murder and pillage. Lafayette and Bailly rode to the field with some of their soldiers; Bailly proclaimed martial law and ordered the crowd to disperse. Jeers and threats followed, and at last Lafayette had to give his men the command to fire. A dozen of the mob were killed, and the rest took to flight.

This seemed to bring peace again, but it was only the quiet that precedes the thunder-storm. The Assembly finished its work on the new constitution for France and the King signed it. Then Lafayette, tired with his constant labors, resigned his commission and stated his intention of retiring to private life. Paris voted him a medal and a marble statue of Washington, and the National Guards presented him with a sword forged from the bolts of the Bastille. At last he rode back to his country home at Chavaniac, looking forward to rest there as Washington looked for rest at his beloved Mount Vernon.

To friends at his home in Auvergne the General said, “You see me restored to the place of my birth; I shall leave it only to defend or consolidate our common liberty, if attacked, and I hope to remain here for long.” He believed that the new constitution would bring liberty and peace to his country. But the French Revolution had only begun its course, and he was destined soon to be called back to its turmoil.

He had several months of rest in his home in the mountains, happy months for his wife, who for two years had hardly ever seen her husband leave their house in Paris without fearing that he might not return. She had been a wonderful helpmate for the General during the turbulent course of events since his return from America and had loyally entertained the guests of every varying shade of political opinion who had flocked to his house in the capital. But she liked to have her husband away from the alarms of Paris and safe in the quiet of his country home at Chavaniac. There he had more time to spend with her and their three children, Anastasie, George Washington, and Virginia, who had been named after the State where her father had won his military laurels.

The Legislative Assembly of France, which was trying to govern the country under the new constitution, was finding the making of laws which should satisfy every one a very difficult task. There were countless cliques and parties, and each had its own pet scheme for making the land a Utopia. The court party hoped that the more reckless element would lose all hold on the people through its very extravagance, and so actually encouraged many wildly absurd projects. The royalists were always expecting that a counter-revolution would bring them back into power, and the nobles who had left the country filled the border-towns and plotted and conspired and used their influence to induce foreign sovereigns to interfere and restore the old order in France. Naturally enough news of these plots and conspiracies did not tend to make King Louis or his nobles any more popular with the lawgivers in Paris.

In August, 1791, the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria met the Count d’Artois and the Marquis de Bouillé at the town of Pilnitz and formed an alliance against France, making the cause of Louis XVI. their own. The royalists who had emigrated were delighted, and filled Europe with statements of what they meant to do to the revolutionary leaders when they won back their power. The revolutionists grew more and more angry, and as they saw foreign troops gathering on the French frontiers they decided that it was high time to oppose force with force. Narbonne, the Minister of War, announced that the King and government meant to form three armies of fifty thousand men each, and that the country had chosen as commanding generals Rochambeau, Luckner, and Lafayette.

Lafayette at once returned to Paris from Chavaniac, paid his respects to the King, and going to the Assembly thanked the members for his new appointment and declared his unalterable devotion to the maintenance and defense of the constitution. The president of the Assembly answered that “the French people, which has sworn to conquer or to die in the cause of liberty, will always confidently present to nations and to tyrants the constitution and Lafayette.”

In view of what happened afterward it is important to remember that Lafayette accepted his appointment under the constitution of France and that he felt himself bound to support and obey it under all circumstances.

Then he departed from Paris for the frontier, the cheers of the people and the National Guards ringing in his ears. He was popular with all parties except those of the two extremes, the friends of the King considering him a rebel and the Jacobins calling him a courtier.