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Why
did La Fayette Come To America?
André Kesteloot
Gilbert du
Motier, Marquis de La Fayette (1757-1834), is rightfully considered
one of the heroes of the American Revolution. Numerous books have
described him as a man who dedicated his life to the pursuit of
liberty, and his appurtenance to the Craft is cited with pride by
French and American Freemasons alike.
Illustrative
of the laudatory style adopted to describe La Fayette's early days
is the following extract from the Masonic Service Association's
"Short Talk Bulletin" dedicated to La Fayette, where we
are told that: "¼ gathering a few elect souls like Baron
de Kalb aboard, [La Fayette] set sail from an obscure port in Spain."
Nothing, in
fact, could be further from the truth. La Fayette did not gather
Baron de Kalb, (who, incidentally, was not a baron), or any other
soul for that matter. In reality, La Fayette became unwittingly
entwined in an intrigue woven by Comte Charles de Broglie , the
former head of the French Intelligence Service, who was desirous
to take the place of George Washington as leader of the American
military.
Not everyone
thought highly of La Fayette: Napoleon, for instance, depicted La
Fayette as a "niais," Jefferson described La Fayette as
having "a canine appetite for popularity and fame," Mirabeau
deplored "l'imbécillité de son caractère,
l'inertie de sa pensée et la nullité de son talent,"
while Stendhal wrote: "[La Fayette] vivait au jour le jour,
sans trop d'esprit, faisant, comme Epaminondas, la grande action
qui se présentait."
The aim of
this paper is certainly not to detract from La Fayette's many achievements
and the very real courage and military flair that he would eventually
display at Monmouth and Yorktown. Rather, the purpose of this essay
is to take a closer look at how-and more particularly by whom-La
Fayette became motivated to come to America.
La Fayette
was born in Auvergne in 1757. At age fourteen, he joined the King's
Black Musketeers, (a regiment his grandfather had commanded) and
two years later, was promoted to the rank of Second Lieutenant.
On April 11, 1774, not quite seventeen years of age, he married
Marie-Adrienne de Noailles, a member of one of the most powerful
families of the French nobility. His contemporaries described him
at the time as being ill-at-ease and provincial as well as "falot
et maladroit, et très susceptible." In addition, he
could neither dance well nor hold his liquor, two absolute prerequisites
for any member of the nobility.
When Louis
XV died in 1774, his young and inexperienced grand-son Louis XVI
was sadly unprepared to assume the responsibilities of reigning
over France. As an example, one of the young king's initial decisions
was to dissolve "Le Secret du Roi," his own Intelligence
Service. At that time, Charles, Comte de Broglie (1719-1781) a member
of one of the best-known families in French history, had become
the head of that secret service after having served at French Ambassador
to Warsaw. An extremely ambitious man suddenly finding himself without
either an employer or a cause, Charles de Broglie reached the rather
interesting conclusion that America needed "a political and
military director." In fact, he entertained the idea of replacing
George Washington as head of the American military and of becoming
the Stadtholder of America. (In Swiss cantons, the Stadtholder was
the second officer of the civil government, ranking just under its
president).
On 8 August
1775 , while in garrison in Metz, La Fayette attended a dinner hosted
by Charles de Broglie. During the dinner, the Duke of Gloucester,
exiled brother of King George III, gave a speech during which he
criticized his brother's government and sided openly with the Colonists,
i.e., the residents of Britain's colonies. The speech, which La
Fayette would still recall vividly fifty-three years later, awoke
in him a desire to combat the British, an aspiration that dovetailed
with his own ideas of avenging France for the disastrous Seven Years
War (1756-1763), during which his father had been killed by an English
shell. (To illustrate the feelings of that period, it may be helpful
to quote from a memoir written by Vergennes to Louis XVI: England
was "the natural enemy of France. She is an enemy at once grasping,
ambitious, unjust and perfidious").
In June 1776,
La Fayette had left the French Army, possibly of his own volition
but more probably because he was forced out, like many other captains
of his time, by the Minister of War. Our young anti-British Frenchman
was thus footloose and in search of something meaningful in which
to engage his juvenile enthusiasm. Two details may help us understand
his frame of mind during that period in his life: (a) at a time
when coats-of-arms bore mottos somehow related to God, country,
honor or other noble concepts, La Fayette modified his family crest
to read: "Cur Non" (Why Not?), and (b) as he was about
to board a ship to England on February 20, 1777, he wrote to his
wife, pregnant a second time, and whom he was not to see again for
two years: "I leave all the people I love, I leave you, my
love, and in truth, without knowing why."
One of de Broglie's
closest collaborators was Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes (1719-1787)
who had been a member of Louis XV's Intelligence Service since 1755.
By 1774 Vergennes was serving as French Ambassador to the Court
of Stockholm, when Louis XVI, utterly unaware of the identities
of the members of the Intelligence Service he had just disbanded,
appointed him as Foreign Affairs Secretary. Hence, unbeknownst to
the new king, his Intelligence Service, although officially dissolved,
now had one of its own as the head of French foreign diplomacy.
Another member
of the recently disbanded French Intelligence Service, and one of
de Broglie's most faithful followers, was Johannes "Baron"
de Kalb (1721-1780). Born in Bavaria of peasant parents, de Kalb
had enlisted in the French infantry and distinguished himself in
several battles, and particularly so during the Seven Year War.
By 1761, having assumed the title of baron (to which he had no particular
right), he had reached the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel when he became
one of Charles de Broglie's confidants. In 1766, de Broglie recommended
him to Etienne, duc de Choiseul, then minister of War of France,
who dispatched him to America, from January 1768 until June 1768,
on a secret mission designed to gauge the political and economic
situation in these British colonies. At de Broglie's suggestion,
de Kalb on November 6, 1776 introduced La Fayette and two other
French military officers to Silas Deane, then American Commissioner
to France.
*
* *
This excerpt is from Heredom, the
transactions of the Scottish Rite Research Society
Volume VI, Year 1997
©1997-2002, Scottish Rite Research Society
All Rights Reserved
Scottish Rite Research Society
1733 16th St., N.W., Washington, DC 20009-3103
202-232-3579 voice, 202-383-1847 fax
srrs@srmason-sj.org, www.srmason-sj.org
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