Lafayette (49 page)

Morris had witnessed only part of the savagery, which had started earlier that afternoon. Street-corner agitators had spread rumors that Foulon, a financier the king appointed to the finance ministry, had speculated in grain during the winter bread shortages and
boasted
—rather than simply stated fearfully—that Parisians “will be lucky if we give them hay to eat.”
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As he rode through the city, the mob dragged him from his carriage to the city hall square to hang him. Lafayette raced out to stop the outrage: “You want to kill this man without a judgment,” he cried out to the mob. “That is an injustice which dishonors you and me and will tarnish all my efforts for liberty, if I were so weak as to permit it. I will not permit it. I will not save him if he is guilty, but I want him . . . tried by a judge before a tribunal according to law. I demand respect for the law, without which there is no liberty, without which I would not have supported the revolution in the New World and without which I will not support the revolution here.”
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Lafayette’s eloquence calmed the frenzy long enough to enable him to escort Foulon into the Hôtel de Ville, but minutes later the mob broke into the building and dragged the old man out to a lamppost to hang. Foulon’s body was still convulsing when another mob seized his son-in-law, Bertier de Sauvigny, trying to flee Paris. They dragged him to the city hall square to watch the dreaded Jourdan Coupe-Tête
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cut his father-in-law’s lifeless form from the lamppost, sever its head, and plant it on a pike to show the terrified Bertier. Suddenly Coupe-Tête’s vicious knife went to work again, and, as the hysterical mob screamed encouragement, he butchered Bertier alive, piece by piece. A few minutes later, a dragoon raced into the city hall assembly room with a large, bloody piece of meat in his hand and proclaimed, “Here is Bertier’s heart!” Another man followed with the dead man’s severed head, and still others marched in with Foulon’s head and heart on pikes. Coupe-Tête led them all to the Palais Royal, where Gouverneur Morris saw the grisly trophies and uttered his final judgment: “Gracious God, what a people.”

From his window at the Hôtel de Ville, Lafayette could see the leering face of the ambitious agitator, Danton, in the mob below, goading it to greater slaughter. Lafayette was helpless to restore law and order. In the days that followed, the madness spread beyond the gates of Paris, with riots breaking out across Alsace in eastern France, in Normandy to the west, and in Burgundy to the south. Revolutionary fervor spread north across French borders to Liège, in the Austrian-occupied Netherlands, where rebels proclaimed a Belgian republic. For the first time, Lafayette understood Gouverneur Morris’s warnings that it was easier to begin a revolution and unleash people’s passions than to control either. Lafayette had not envisaged the revolution he now saw evolving before him, and it disgusted him, as nothing in the American Revolution had ever done.

“I was called to military command of the capital by the people, on condition of their complete and universal confidence in me,” he told the Paris
Assembly. “I have continually told the people that I would defend their interests to my dying breath so long as they heeded my advice. . . . The people have not heeded me, and, as I stated from the beginning, the day when I no longer have the confidence they promised to give me, I shall abandon my position because I can no longer be useful.”
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His resignation stunned the Paris assembly, which had founded its collective hopes for stability on his heroic stature and military skills. They shouted and pleaded with him not to resign; the old curé of the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, where Sainte Géneviève, the patron saint of Paris, was buried, fell at Lafayette’s feet, begging him to retain command and pledging to obey his every order. Lafayette raised the old curé to his feet, and, before he could respond, the assembly voiced a unanimous resolution: “We, the electors of all the districts in the city of Paris, reflecting the unanimous acclamation of all the citizens of Paris and our entire confidence in the virtues, talents and patriotism of Monsieur de La Fayette, again proclaim him general of the National Guard of Paris and promise, in our own names and those of our armed brothers in our districts . . . submission and obedience to all his orders, so that his zeal . . . can complete to perfection the great work of public liberty.”
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In effect, the assembly appointed Lafayette military dictator of Paris— even offering him a salary of 120,000 livres and an additional 100,000 livres as an entertainment fund. As he and Washington had done in the American Revolution, he emphatically refused all compensation: “When so many citizens suffer, and so many expenditures are necessary, it is repugnant to me to augment them unnecessarily. My fortune is sufficient for the state in which I live, and my time does not permit official entertaining.”
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Armed with new powers—and the unanimous support of law-abiding citizens—he tightened control of the National Guard and imposed tough law-enforcement procedures on the streets. He named friends from the corps of French officers at Yorktown to impose order and discipline in the guard. Only those who swore allegiance to “nation, king, law and the Commune of Paris” would remain. Ever aware of the symbolism he had used to build the esprit de corps in his Virginians, he presented each guardsman with an ornate certificate of recognition after he took his oath. He issued magnificent new uniforms that he designed himself, combining the red and blue colors of the revolutionary cockade with the white color of the Bourbon flag. Their vests and breeches were white and their blue tunics carried tall red collars and silver epaulettes. By August 9, Lafayette and his officers had organized and trained an elite corps of just under 50,000 men, or what he described as “six superb divisions [about 8,000 men each] composed of sixty battalions,”
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with one battalion for each district. They seized all the arms they could find and arrested suspects for every type of crime, ranging from
pickpocketing to inciting riot with propaganda leaflets. To augment the guard’s efforts, Lafayette and Mayor Bailly issued a decree ordering gun manufacturers, dealers, and owners to turn all weapons over to military commanders in their districts.

With relative calm restored, Lafayette plunged into a whirlwind of political activity at Versailles, as well as in Paris, “to end the revolution,” as he put it, and build a constitutional monarchy based on the American republic. “Only after the beginning of the American era,” he argued, “did the question arise of defining . . . the rights that nature imparted to every man, rights so inherent to his being that society as a whole has no right to deprive him of them.”
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Lafayette seemed to be everywhere, day and night: the Paris city hall, the Assembly in Versailles or the palace, trotting along forest roads, or down the narrow streets of the city’s massive slums. In the National Assembly, he voted with the centrist majority to abolish feudal rights; to tax the nobility and clergy; to abolish serfdom and declare all serfs free; and to abolish the church’s right to tithe the people, a universal tax that deprived even the poorest of 10 percent of their earnings.

Declaring that “the feudal régime has been entirely destroyed,” the Assembly began debating a new constitution, including the shape of the legislative assembly and veto powers of the king, who would serve as chief executive under a new constitutional monarchy. True to his beliefs in all things American, Lafayette favored two chambers in the legislative assembly, with members of both chambers popularly elected. Other proponents of republican government, however, favored a single chamber, while conservatives called for an English-style bicameral legislature, with a nonelective House of Lords. Debate over the king’s legislative veto powers caused the most furor, with leftist extremists arguing against any royal veto powers and ultraroyalists demanding absolute royal veto power. Moderates proposed temporary, “suspensive” veto powers, giving the king the right to suspend temporarily legislation he opposed, while the Assembly worked out a compromise that satisfied his objections.

Four parties emerged in the Assembly during the debates. The ultraroyalists, or Court party, favored restoration of an absolute monarchy. The Orléanists were populists seeking to replace Louis XVI with his cousin, the duc d’Orléans. The duke had courted the Third Estate by discarding his title and becoming a commoner under the name “Philippe Egalité”—“Philip the Equal.” The republican “Fayettistes” formed a third party that favored a constitutional monarchy with Louis at its helm. A radical lawyer, Maximilien Robespierre, led the fourth party of left-wing extremists who favored overthrow of the monarchy. Described as an “imbecile fanatic” by many Assembly members, Robespierre favored limiting the terms of Assembly members to one session and called for obedient submission of all citizens to a dictatorship of
the “common will,” which he refused to define, presumably until he himself assumed power.

When Lafayette was not in the National Assembly in Versailles, he was in Paris, often in his office at the Hôtel de Ville, issuing administrative orders, listening to citizen complaints, hearing appeals from aristocrats for passports to flee the city, and shifting troops from one district to another to cope with the continual outbreaks of rioting and looting. Sometimes he left his office to gallop across the city to calm and disperse mobs himself and prevent hangings. He plunged fearlessly into crowds, shaking hands, calling out to command their silence. At just over six feet tall, he towered over his relatively short countrymen, and his stately presence—especially on Jean Leblanc—invariably calmed them while his troops worked their way through the mob, slowly, unobtrusively, forming columns that sliced it in half, then eased along subsidiary paths that eventually dispersed it into small, ineffectual groups who had little choice but to return to their homes.

Lafayette’s National Guard of Paris became a model for other towns and cities. Leaders from other provinces sought his counsel in organizing their own American-style citizen’s militias, founded on Lafayette’s conviction that men with roots in their communities will fight selflessly to preserve them. Almost every community established a local National Guard, with many asking Lafayette to merge them into a national organization and assume overall command himself. Gradually, Paris and the rest of France rested easier: the insurrection, if not the revolution, seemed at an end. Lafayette used the constant threat that he would resign to ramrod ever more stringent decrees through the city assembly. In mid-August, it banned “seditious gatherings” and allowed Lafayette’s troops to prevent idlers from gathering around street-corner orators and expanding into a mob. The decree made him the most popular figure in France—the nation’s unelected but acknowledged leader. He had given the nation a bill of rights, restored peace in the streets, and made the nation safe for ordinary citizens to go about their business and move about freely and securely.

His family shared in his glory, with Adrienne making appropriate public appearances at civic ceremonies and leading efforts to provide for the poor. “She believed so deeply my father’s principles and was convinced of his power to do good and prevent evil,” her daughter Virginie recalled, “that she displayed incredible strength in facing the many dangers to which she was exposed. . . . She accepted all the demands made by each of the districts of Paris—sixty in all—to appear at ceremonies for various patriotic causes.”
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When one guard unit sought to make ten-year-old George-Washington Lafayette an honorary second lieutenant, his father turned the honor into theater: “Gentlemen,” he proclaimed to the assembled militiamen, “my son is no longer mine; he belongs to you and to our nation”
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—and the troops
roared as the little boy stepped forward and stood at attention in his snappy-looking new uniform of a fusilier in the Paris guards.

Lafayette nevertheless rejected every suggestion that he assume government leadership, either as regent for the king or civilian
stathoudérat
(“stateholder”). “I shall decline no burden, no danger,” he declared, “provided that the moment calm is restored, I shall again become a private citizen.”
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He would never explain why his emulation of America’s George Washington did not extend to his assumption of executive powers in his native land.