‘Hero of Two Worlds’ Review: Lafayette’s Crossing The freedom-loving Marquis de Lafayette tried to import the ideals of the American revolution to his native France. By Mark G. Spencer
Most readers of The Wall Street Journal will recognize Lafayette by name. One of the few non-Americans counted among the heroes of the Revolution, dozens of American towns, counties and streets are named for him. But what of the niceties of the Marquis’s eventful life, spanning 1757 to 1834? Those who take up Mike Duncan’s comprehensive, birth-to-death biography will find this French-born nobleman, soldier and statesman to be a fascinating and paradoxical character. Fusing revolutionary energy with a tendency to seek moderation, even compromise, he was as extraordinary as the times in which he lived.
Mr. Duncan—famous for his podcasts “The History of Rome” and “Revolutions”—is the bestselling author of “The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic.” Now, in the three-part doorstopper “Hero of Two Worlds” he shows how a youthful, “restlessly defiant” Lafayette evolved into an even-tempered, moderate reformer, while always keeping true to his ideals. Lafayette early embraced the American Revolution (1776-83), later helped instigate the French Revolution (1789-99) and, later yet, encouraged France’s July Revolution (1830). Given his half-century of wide-ranging, trans-Atlantic activities, it is not surprising that Lafayette’s contemporaries and modern historians alike offer widely differing assessments of a career that thwarts easy summation.
Part I (1757-86) introduces Lafayette’s French context and unpacks his formidable role in the American Revolution. Born at the Château de Chavaniac, in Auvergne, the infant aristocrat was baptized Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier. Lafayette jested: “I was baptized like a Spaniard. But it was not my fault. And without pretending to deny myself the protection of Marie, Paul, Joseph, Roch and Yves, I more often called upon Saint Gilbert.” Independence would be Lafayette’s calling card, perhaps inevitably. When he was a toddler, his father died fighting in the Seven Years’ War. Lafayette’s only sibling, a younger sister, died too. With the death of his mother, in 1770, young Gilbert was orphaned, “left emotionally and psychologically alone in the world.” Still, resilient, he was commissioned an officer when 13. Great wealth helped too. Relocating to Versailles, he married into the powerful Noailles family and pursued a military career.
Mr. Duncan admits “it is hard to pin down the precise moment Lafayette latched on to the great ideas that animated the rest of his life: liberty, equality, and the rights of man.” By age 19, Lafayette had shed any “clumsy adolescence.” Having changed his coat-of-arms motto to “Cur Non” (“Why Not?”), in 1777 he sailed across the Atlantic seeking action in America’s War for Independence. Befriended by George Washington—the two maintained a lifelong friendship—he also “hit it off” with Alexander Hamilton, and others, like John Laurens and Thomas Jefferson.
Wounded at the Battle of Brandywine (September 1777)—“a musket ball shot clean through the fleshy muscle of his lower calf,” explains Mr. Duncan—the “legend of Lafayette, ‘the Hero of Two Worlds,’ was born.” In 1779 Lafayette was back in France, lobbying the American cause but itching to rejoin the battlefield. Soon, he again commanded American troops, including at the pivotal Siege of Yorktown (1781). America’s Revolutionary War concluded, Lafayette entered a “new phase of his life,” Mr. Duncan argues.
Parts II and III chart Lafayette’s transition “from adventurous solider to liberal benefactor of humanity.” During France’s pre-Revolutionary financial and political turmoil, Lafayette championed constitutional rights and “public enlightenment.” He advocated moderate reform, not radical revolution—striving, in Mr. Duncan’s words, to “keep the flame of liberty burning just hot enough to melt the ancient chains of feudal despotism, without accidentally burning the whole kingdom down.” Addressing France’s National Assembly, Lafayette in his Declaration of the Rights of Man clearly echoed Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: “Nature made men free and equal,” the Frenchman proclaimed.
Such lofty sentiments were put to practical and perilous test when Lafayette was appointed head of Paris’s National Guard militia. He was tasked with keeping domestic peace—not easy as revolution smoldered. “His attempt to hold the center offended everyone,” maintains Mr. Duncan. “Walking the line between liberty and order became the defining challenge of Lafayette’s life.” Doing so assured him enemies to the left and to the right as Revolutionary France became untenable for moderates. Worse lay ahead.
By June 1791—in a “Flight to Varennes”—the king and his family fled Paris. Lafayette, too, fled a runaway Revolution he could no longer abide, and which could not abide him. Facing arrest during the Terror, he escaped to the Austrian Netherlands, only to suffer a five-year imprisonment in Austria and Prussia. Freed, Lafayette watched “the flickering candle of liberty in France grow dimmer” as Napoleon declared himself emperor. Bonaparte had courted his support, but Lafayette rejected the general’s dictatorial designs. By 1804, most of Lafayette’s “old friends were now in the grave.” Adrienne, his wife, died in 1807. Times remained unsettled; France’s monarchy was restored in 1814. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies and fearing the ancient régime’s return, Lafayette supported liberal reform.
Eighteen twenty-four was an action-packed year. At President Monroe’s invitation, Lafayette visited the United States. He was feted as “a living legend—a pristine icon of the most glorious days of the Revolution,” writes Mr. Duncan. During a tour of all 24 states, Lafayette celebrated his birthday—Sept. 6—at the White House. Days later, France’s Louis XVIII died, and Charles X was crowned. Amid persistent calls for reform, in 1830 Lafayette—with his “republican kiss”—endorsed Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, overthrowing the Bourbon Dynasty in the July Revolution. More tumult followed, but Lafayette “did not take part.” The Marquis died in May 1834. Buried in Paris’s Picpus Cemetery, he had arranged for soil from Bunker Hill to be poured over his coffin.
Historical judgments of Lafayette have long varied. “His political good nature,” wrote an exiled Napoleon, “make him constantly duped by many things.” Mirabeau thought him “the man of indecision, an incapable and nefarious windbag.” Danton thought worse. Not Samuel F.B. Morse. Toasting Lafayette at a Fourth of July banquet in France in 1832, the American proposed: “The winds have swept by him, the waves have dashed around him, the snows of winter have lighted upon him, but still he is there.” Distilling these and other assessments, Mr. Duncan’s “Hero of Two Worlds” offers, in readable prose, much informative description alongside measured interpretation. The author’s sympathetic yet balanced and sensible rendering, some may think, mirrors Lafayette’s eventful life in a revolutionary age.
—Mr. Spencer, a professor of history at Brock University, is the author of “David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America.”
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