Marquis de Lafayette

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, was a French aristocrat who crossed the Atlantic as a teenager to fight for American independence and later became a leading moderate in the French Revolution. Celebrated as "the Hero of the Two Worlds", he spent his long life championing constitutional government, from the siege of Yorktown in 1781 to the Paris barricades of 1830.

Lafayette was born on 6 September 1757 at the Château de Chavaniac in Auvergne, into an old military family. His father was killed by a cannonball at the Battle of Minden in 1759, and the deaths of his mother and grandfather in 1770 left the boy very rich. Commissioned into the royal Musketeers at thirteen, he married Adrienne de Noailles, daughter of a powerful ducal family, in 1774. Hearing of the colonists' revolt against Britain, he resolved to join them, and in December 1776 the American agent Silas Deane signed him up as a major general.

Defying a royal ban, Lafayette bought a ship with his own money and landed in South Carolina in June 1777. Congress accepted him when he offered to serve unpaid, and he formed a close, almost filial bond with George Washington. Wounded in the leg at Brandywine in September 1777, he wintered at Valley Forge, fought at Monmouth and served in the Rhode Island campaign. Returning to France in 1779, he lobbied for greater help, and in 1780 he sailed back with news that a French army under Rochambeau was coming. In Virginia in 1781 he shadowed Lord Cornwallis's army until French and American forces closed in, and his troops stormed one of the key redoubts during the Siege of Yorktown, which ended with the British surrender on 19 October 1781.

Back home, Lafayette sat in the Assembly of Notables of 1787 and was elected to the Estates General of 1789. On 11 July 1789 he presented a draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, prepared with advice from Thomas Jefferson. After the Storming of the Bastille he was made commander of the Paris National Guard, whose blue, white and red cockade gave France its tricolour. Committed to a constitutional monarchy, he tried to hold the middle ground, protecting the royal family during the march on Versailles in October 1789. But the king's flight to Varennes in June 1791 damaged him with the radicals, and on 17 July 1791 his Guard fired on a crowd of petitioners on the Champ de Mars, killing a number of people put by differing accounts at about ten or at fifty-four.

Given command of an army in December 1791, he faced war with Austria from April 1792; that June he denounced the Jacobins before the Assembly and was branded a traitor. After the monarchy fell in August 1792 he fled into the Austrian Netherlands, hoping to reach America, but was seized and held for more than five years in Prussian and Austrian fortresses, latterly at Olmütz, where his wife and daughters eventually joined him. He was freed in 1797 under the Treaty of Campo Formio negotiated by Napoleon, but refused to serve the new regime and lived quietly at his estate of La Grange.

After the Bourbon restoration he sat as a liberal deputy, and in 1815 he called for Napoleon's abdication after Waterloo. In 1824–1825, at President James Monroe's invitation, he toured all 24 American states to huge acclaim. During the July Revolution of 1830 he again commanded the National Guard, declined to take power himself and backed Louis-Philippe as king, but soon broke with him.

Lafayette died in Paris on 20 May 1834, aged 76, and was buried in Picpus Cemetery under soil he had brought from Bunker Hill. In the United States, Congress went into mourning for thirty days.

Our 1783 map shows the newly independent United States he helped to create and the Kingdom of France on the eve of revolution; our 1815 map shows Europe after Napoleon's defeat.