The legacy of Lafayette.

• Author: Dungan, Nicholas
• Position: Profiles in History - Marie Jean Paul Joseph Roche Yves Gilbert du Moiler de La Fayette - Biography

THIS SEPTEMBER marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Marie Jean Paul Joseph Roche Yves Gilbert du Moiler de La Fayette, who was born in the Chateau de Chavaniac in the same room where his father had been born before him. Lafayette later wrote, "I was baptized like a Spaniard, with the name of every conceivable saint who might offer me more protection in battle.... So large a proportion of fathers and sons were killed on the field of battle that [my] family's misfortunes in war became a kind of proverb throughout the province."

Indeed, it is true that the men in this warrior family, which traced its origins back as far as the year 1000 A.D., had made it a habit of marrying well and dying young. In keeping with this family tradition, Lafayette's own father, a colonel of grenadiers, was killed in 1759 by the British at the Battle of Minden during the Seven Years War when Lafayette was only two years old. After his father's death, Lafayette's mother went to live with her own father and grandfather in Paris. The young Marquis de Lafayette himself was left with his paternal grandmother and a maiden aunt at Chavaniac, described as a Normanesque pile of stone with 20 large rooms and a slate roof, cold in the winter, and separated from the village by a moat. He grew up as a country boy, with the sons of peasants and villagers as his friends, far from the glitter and glamour of court life.

His mother, however, died unexpectedly when he was 13. At that point, Lafayette inherited one of the largest fortunes in France. The family's land holdings in the Auvergne stretched 35 miles west-to-east and 75 miles north-to-south. As an eminently eligible but orphaned young man, he virtually was adopted by the Noailles family when he was 15 and moved into their mansion at Versailles. He married Adrienne de Noailles on April 11, 1774, at the age of 16, His father-in-law, the Duc de Noailles, gave him a Captain's rank and command of a company in the Noailles Dragoons as a wedding gift; a post that Lafayette assumed when he turned 18.

While stationed at Metz in eastern France a month before his 18th birthday, Lafayette attended a dinner with the Duke of Gloucester, the younger brother of British King George III; Gloucester was an outspoken critic of his royal brother's policies in Britain's American colonies. By this time, scores of young French officers were applying each day to volunteer in the American Revolution so as to avenge the defeat of the French army by the British in the Seven Years War--and, in the case of Lafayette, to avenge his own father's death as well. His enthusiasm was heightened by his having become a freemason and thus a member of the brotherhood to which so many of the American leaders, not least of all George Washington himself, already belonged.

At the end of 1776, after the birth of his first daughter, he resolved to go fight in America, writing in his memoirs: "Such a glorious cause had never before rallied the attention of mankind. Oppressors and oppressed would receive a powerful lesson; the great work would be accomplished or the rights of humanity would fall beneath its rain. The destiny of France and that of her rival [England] would be...