Lafayette, like Betsy Ross and Johnny Appleseed, is so neatly fixed in the American imagination that it is hard to see him as a human being. He is, in the collective imagination, little more than a wooden soldier with a white plume on his cocked hat. In France, where Lafayette played an even larger historic role, he has come to be a more contentious figure. He is a kind of transposed Jerry Lewis, someone whose high reputation in one country is baffling in the land of his birth.
This is in part, Zecchini explains, because Lafayette, despite having played a central role in two revolutions, was too non-ideological to attract much analysis. It has been suggested that he never earned a reputation in France equal to his reputation in America because he never wrote a proper book. Not long ago, his statue, put up by American subscription, was moved out of the Louvre and into the nearby wooded Cours-la-Reine, where it is nearly invisible among the trees.
In the crazy turnings of his time, he foughtβphysically fought, not merely protested with strong tweets or, anyway, with pamphletsβagainst absolutist monarchy, Colonial bondage, left-wing revolutionary terror, right-wing Bonapartist militarism, incipient imperialism, and then renewed Royalist reaction. He loved American freedom and came to hate American slavery. This had less to do with ideology than with amiability and instinct. He liked good people, and good people liked him.
Where, among his closest friends, Hamilton had the quickest pen in the West, Benjamin Constant philosophized subtly, and Washington held to an ideal of Roman republican virtue, Lafayette himself ran on an emotional motor.
Lafayette sorted good people from bad people by how they struck him on first encounter. The odd thing is that he so often got it right. Read together, they remind us that the United States and France have very different accounts of the American Revolution. The urgencies of a confrontation between great powers were irresistible. Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, was only eighteen and of no particular military distinction when, in , he began lobbying the French government for an American commission.
