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

The lover of liberty saw anarchy in the land he had worked to set free; king, nobles and many citizens swept away by the fury of a mob that mistook violence for freedom. Few things are more bitter than for a man who has labored for a great cause to see that cause turn and destroy his ideals.

Meantime Madame Lafayette was suffering also. She was arrested at the old castle of Chavaniac and for a time imprisoned, persecuted, and even threatened with death. The state had denounced Lafayette as an émigré, or runaway, and had confiscated all his property. Yet through all these trials his wife remained calm and determined, her one purpose being to learn where her husband was and secure his release if possible. She wrote to Washington, who was then the President of the United States, begging him to intercede for her husband, and when she finally managed to find out where Lafayette was imprisoned she urged the Austrians to allow her to share his captivity.

The Emperor of Austria turned a deaf ear to all requests made on behalf of Lafayette. The United States, however, was able to do something for the man who had befriended it, and deposited two thousand florins in Prussia, subject to his order, and obtained permission of the King of Prussia that Lafayette should be informed that his wife and children were alive.

The prisoner might well have thought that his own family had shared the fate of so many of their relatives and friends. The name of Lafayette was no protection to them, rather an added menace in a land where the Jacobins held sway. On September 2, 1792, when the Reign of Terror was in full flood in Paris, Minister Roland ordered that Madame Lafayette should be arrested at Chavaniac. She was taken, with her aunt and her elder daughter, who refused to leave her, as far as the town of Puy, but there she wrote such vigorous letters of protest to Roland and other officials that she was allowed to return to her home on parole. In October of the next year she was again arrested, this time under the new law that called for the arrest of all persons who might be suspected of hostility to the government, and now she was actually put into a country prison. In June, 1794, Robespierre’s agents brought her to Paris, and she was imprisoned in the College du Plessis, where her husband had gone to school as a boy. From there her next journey, according to the custom of that time, would have been to the guillotine.

At this point, however, Gouverneur Morris, the Minister of the United States, stepped upon the scene. He had already advanced Madame Lafayette large sums of money, when her property had been confiscated; now when he heard that she was to be condemned to the guillotine by the butchers of the Revolution he immediately bearded those butchers in their den. He wrote to the authorities, the Committee of Safety, as the officials grotesquely called it, and told them that the execution of Madame Lafayette would make a very bad impression in America.

The Committee of Safety were not disposed to listen to reason from any quarter. Yet, when they heard Gouverneur Morris say, “If you kill the wife of Lafayette all the enemies of the Republic and of popular liberty will rejoice; you will make America hostile, and justify England in her slanders against you,” they hesitated and postponed ordering her execution. But, because of his protests against such violent acts of the Reign of Terror, Gouverneur Morris was sent back to America, on the ground that he had too much sympathy with the victims of “liberty!”

Madame Lafayette was brought into court, and the Committee of Safety did its best to insult her. Said the Chief Commissioner, “I have old scores against you. I detest you, your husband, and your name!”

Madame Lafayette answered him fearlessly, “I shall always defend my husband; and as for a name—there is no wrong in that.”

“You are insolent!” shouted the Commissioner, and was about to order her execution when he remembered Morris’s words and sent her back to her prison instead.

With her husband in prison in Austria, her young children left unprotected and far away from her, the plight of Madame Lafayette was hard indeed. But she was very brave, though she knew that any day might take her to the scaffold. Almost all the old nobility were brave. While Robespierre and his rabble made liberty and justice a mockery the prisoners maintained their old contempt for their jailers and held their heads as high as in the old days when they had taken their pleasure at Versailles.