ON THE EVENING OF DECEMBER 13, 1830, IN A COLD and damp Paris, a great man was buried, one of the men who had embodied liberalism since 1815. Less than five months earlier, on July 31, he had been carried in a chaise in the procession of his colleagues in the Chamber following the Duke d’Orléans from the Palais-Royal to the Hôtel de Ville, where the duke had come, according to Chateaubriand, “to beg for the crown.” The deceased was Benjamin Constant. He had barely survived the establishment of the constitutional monarchy he had hoped and prayed for, although from the very beginning of the new regime he had joined the ranks of the opposition. The government nonetheless manifested its respect and recognition at his passing. Ministers, generals, peers of France, deputies, and all the dignitaries of the kingdom were there, along with the people of Paris, whose presence had an entirely different significance. Six legions of the National Guard preceded and six followed the coffin. A cavalry squadron headed the procession. The drums were muffled, and black ribbons fluttered in the breeze with the flags. The crowd following the procession was so dense that it moved more slowly than had been anticipated. Night had fallen when the hearse entered the cemetery, and the burial was conducted by torchlight.
Among the shadowy figures gathered around the open grave, one was taller than all the rest. As he approached the grave the others moved aside. He was heard to say a few words. The torches illuminated a very pale face that the others suddenly recognized: it was Lafayette, Constant’s old friend, his companion in struggle in the Chamber, who said a few words of farewell to the man who had passed on. But his emotion and the cold sapped the energy of the old fighter. He suddenly felt faint, lost his balance, and almost fell into the hole into which the coffin had just been lowered. Louis Blanc, who witnessed the scene, wrote: “Everything had now been said, and the crowd melted into the shadows.”
The death of Benjamin Constant in December 1830 had a symbolic value for Lafayette. He had only three years and five months left to live, and during this last period of his life, funerals of friends were to have consequences for his own fate. But in Constant’s grave had been interred not just the body of a friend, ten years younger than he, but also the illusions they had shared in July.
It has been said that Lafayette the republican made a king. This was particularly true in the realm of public presentation. Louis-Philippe and his supporters needed Lafayette’s blessing, a public gesture from him, the backing they would receive from his huge popularity. He had not dreamed up this solution in solitude and then tried to persuade others of its advantages. The Duke d’Orléans was primarily the candidate of Thiers, the banker Laffitte, Odilon Barrot, and Armand Carrel. This group of men, who knew what they wanted, required Lafayette’s agreement, and they got it. Without the weight he threw into the scale at the last moment, matters would not have been so simply resolved, because there were many republicans prepared to fight. Lafayette’s intervention had made it possible to avoid a long and bloody revolution with an uncertain outcome. But unlike Thiers, he did not know what he wanted, except to have the hateful ordinances abrogated, get rid of the Polignac government that had passed them, and institute a real regime of freedom, faithful to the spirit of the Charter and going beyond it through measures of gradually increasing democratization. Because he would derive his power from the two Chambers, that is, theoretically from the people, because he accepted the tricolor flag and the title “King of the French,” because he gave up the coronation at Reims, and because he was associated with the democratic “program of the Hôtel de Ville,” the Duke d’Orléans appeared to be a crowned president of the Republic setting the country on that path. But only in appearance.
When he became king, Louis-Philippe told Lafayette that he agreed with him that what was suitable for the French people was “a popular throne surrounded by entirely republican institutions.” Subsequent events justify casting doubt on his sincerity. At the outset, Charles X, who was still at Saint-Cloud pretending to believe and asserting that he still represented legitimate authority, had to be forced to abdicate. He would have to give up the idea of naming his grandson the Duke de Bordeaux as his successor, and go into exile with dignity. The next priority was to arrest and try Polignac and his ministers, responsible for having violated the Charter by promulgating the July 26 ordinances and for having ordered that the people of Paris be fired on, although they had merely been demanding that their rights be respected. Polignac, Guernon-Ranville, Peyronnet, and Chantelauze were captured before they could flee abroad. They were tried by the Chamber of Peers and sentenced to long prison terms, after Lafayette, following an old habit of his, had saved them from an attempted lynching.
On August 9, following a decision by parliament, Louis-Philippe was proclaimed king at the Palais-Bourbon, where the peers had joined the deputies. The benches were festooned with tricolor flags. Four marshals of the Empire carried the insignia of this unprecedented kingship to the new monarch on velvet cushions. This was far from the pomp of Reims. No foreign state had yet recognized the new regime. But in the population’s eyes, this historic event was the work of Lafayette. The Parisians presented him with two cannons intended to be set symbolically at the entrance to his château at La Grange. On August 15, the city of Paris gave a banquet in his honor with 350 guests, including the cabinet ministers of the new government.
A famous singer named Nourrit sang a hymn composed in his honor, and the guests stood to sing the chorus. The new Prefect of Seine, his friend Alexandre de Laborde, delivered a speech in his praise. The next day the king appointed him commander in chief of the National Guards of the entire country; until then, he had commanded these forces that had come out of the insurrection only in Paris. On that day he was indeed the rampart of freedom.
Was this finally the glory that he had pursued with varying results since the age of nineteen? It had all the appearances of being just that. It was not missing titles, honors, hymns, popular acclaim, praise in the press, or success in the salons, but the glory was ambiguous, not to say poisoned.
Lafayette was a symbol, an immense symbol, an admirable statue who occupied a considerable place in the new landscape of France, but the king and his most trusted ministers, formidable politicians, wanted him to be nothing but that. Louis-Philippe was in a hurry to pay off his debt of gratitude. He admitted that he owed Lafayette a good deal, but he did not want to have him as a mentor. The king might very well appear to be a simple bourgeois with manners as democratic as those of an American senator; he was hungry for power, had an elevated idea of his own abilities, a very cool head, and a good deal of stubbornness. In his view, Lafayette was simultaneously a figure from the past and a bothersome political ally. If he were given free rein, the regime, in which he considered himself a participant, would drift dangerously to the left, since the country had not yet recovered its stability.
Already on August 7, this “disciple of the American school,” as Lafayette called himself, had asked for the abolition of the hereditary peerage. On August 17, he called for the abolition of the death penalty, a proposal he had already made to the Constituent Assembly forty years earlier.
The new regime was not yet fully in place when he called for the abolition of the slave trade, the erection of a monument to the memory of the Four Sergeants of La Rochelle and their transfer to the Pantheon, the presentation to the king of all political prisoners since 1815, the removal of the proscription that prevented members of the Bonaparte family from living in France, and the reduction of the king’s civil list. How far would one go if one were to follow this terrible old man, more enthusiastic and agitated than when he had been thirty?
Perhaps the king had been too indulgent by appointing him commander of the National Guard, to which Lafayette dared to address an order of the day shortly before Christmas 1830 declaring: “Everything has been done for public order. Our reward is to think that everything will be done for freedom.” What did he mean by that last sentence? Had the king not already done everything for freedom that could be expected from him; and what were the limits of this freedom in the mind of the man who seemed to utter nothing but that word? The time seemed to have come for Louis-Philippe, sooner than he had expected, to seriously rein in the man who thought he had made him king.
The procedure chosen was singularly lacking in elegance, but then, political struggle is seldom elegant. On December 24, 1830, the Chamber approved a bill organizing the National Guard. It provided that command would be exercised only at the local level. Lafayette was thus deprived by law of a tool that gave him real power in the country. From one day to the next, he was demoted to the rank of head of the National Guard in the city of Paris alone. He refused the title of honorary commander intended to appease him, and offered his resignation, which the king accepted with “deep regret,” after trying to persuade him to reverse his decision by sending emissaries for whom Lafayette had some respect, such as his cousin General de Ségur.
Louis-Philippe may have acted too soon. By the end of the year, less than five months after the Revolution, Lafayette had resumed his role in the opposition, which seemed to be his natural place.
From then on, he would defend all the causes in France and around the world that he considered just, with no concern for immediate political circumstances, persuaded that the king would lose his throne in a few years if he did not frankly play the democratic card, just as Charles X had lost his. He no longer wanted to be merely a flag dividing his time between La Grange and the few salons he frequented in Paris.
He fought for the rights of Poland, appealing to Britain and Sweden, and urging the French government to act. He fought for the freedom of Ireland, and called for the independence of Belgium, where some patriots wanted to call on him not as the leader of insurrectionary forces, nor as president, but as king, a proposition that he found simultaneously touching and funny.
In the elections of June 1831 he was again elected deputy for Meaux and for Strasbourg, where admirers had voted for him as a write-in candidate. Out of loyalty, he chose to represent Meaux. He was also regional councilor for Seine-et-Marne, and mayor of Courpalay, the little town that was a dependency of his château.
He was recognized in the Chamber as the greatest opposition figure. He tried in vain to have the electoral law changed to bring it as close as possible to universal suffrage. He wanted to replace the Chamber of Peers with an elected Senate, and he failed to achieve this reform as well. The peers stayed in place, but he at least secured the end of hereditary transmission of seats. Armed with this success, he tried to reduce the length of their mandate to fifteen years. Casimir Perier, the hard-line prime minister who had replaced Laffitte, opposed his views, despite the esteem in which he held Lafayette’s character.
In May 1832, Lafayette, who had lost all his illusions about the new regime, participated in a banquet at which toasts were drunk to the Republic, which gives an inkling as to his state of mind.
On June 5, he followed the funeral procession of his friend, the liberal General Lamarque, whose body was solemnly transported to the Pont d’Austerlitz, from which the coffin was to be taken to Mont-de-Marsan, his native town, for burial. As he had for Constant, Lafayette delivered a eulogy for Lamarque, exalting the great hopes of 1789 and of the end of the reign of Charles X, but he prevented excited supporters from seizing the body to take it to the Pantheon. This earned him widespread jeers, and he heard some activists talk of throwing him into the Seine in the hope of having the crime blamed on the government. He returned home in great disappointment. But the demonstration resumed and spread in a totally unforeseen way. Red flags appeared. A portion of the National Guard (now commanded by General Mouton de Lobau) refused to repress the disturbance in contravention of their orders.
The next day, the hard core of the insurgents, who had gathered near the Saint-Merri cloister, had to be defeated with cannon fire. The forces of order had prevailed, but the repression exacted a toll of eight hundred victims. Shocked by this ferocity, which he called “counterrevolutionary,” Lafayette resigned his posts as mayor and regional councilor, offices that he held from a government that he reproached for having gone back on its commitments.
In his last two years, he was more than a member of His Majesty’s opposition, critical but courteous and playing the institutional game: he was an open opponent of the regime of which he had been one of the principal “founding fathers.” He attended political banquets where the toasts made left no doubt as to the sentiments of the participants toward the king and his government. And in the Chamber itself, in January 1834, on the occasion of the debate on the address to the king, he asserted that the country was being led down a retrograde path.
His voice was again heard raised to call for freedom of association and to protest against the abandonment of Poland. His last speech was in fact in support of a demand for aid to Polish refugees, some of whom he was sheltering in his château in La Grange.
On February 1, 1834, the burial of a third friend had a direct effect on his personal destiny. This time it was the liberal deputy from Eure, Dulong, killed in a duel with General Bugeaud. The distance from the home of the deceased, rue de Castiglione, to Père-Lachaise is significant. Lafayette nonetheless covered it on foot, in the bitter cold, despite the fact that he still had to use a cane. As at the funeral of Constant, from standing for so long he felt faint, but this time more seriously. He was carried home. After two months of care, he seemed to have recovered. He remained in his room but read and wrote a good deal. In April 1834, following Lyon, there were troubles in Paris. A mob took over the Marais neighborhood. Repression was even harsher than in 1832. Once again, Lafayette protested against the brutality of the government and its threats to limit freedom. Paradoxically, the only good political news came from England, where Parliament was discussing laws in favor of the emancipation of slaves. He could not help but applaud this positive move, even though it came from a country he had fought against. He occasionally went out for an evening. Stendhal observed him in a salon among friends: “M. de Lafayette, at the tender age of seventy-five, has the same defect as I do. He is fascinated by a young Portuguese woman of eighteen who has come into M. de Tracy’s salon, where she is friends with his granddaughters… . He imagines that this young Portuguese woman, like any other young woman, is taken with him; he thinks only of her, and what’s amusing it that he’s often right to think the way he does. His European fame, the basic elegance of what he says, despite its apparent simplicity, his eyes that sparkle whenever he finds himself one foot away from a pretty breast, everything contributes to his spending his final years in gaiety, to the great scandal of the women of thirty-five who frequent this salon.”
On May 9, 1834, he thought he was sufficiently recovered to go for a ride in his carriage. He was mistaken; the weather was still unsettled, and he had a relapse. This time medical treatment turned out to be futile.
On May 20, 1834, at four in the afternoon, the major-general of the American army, lieutenant-general of the French army, deputy from Seine-et-Marne, Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, member of the Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, gave up the ghost after kissing a gold medallion containing the portrait of his wife, Adrienne.
The national funeral ceremony in Paris on May 22, 1834, proceeded in perfect order from his home to Picpus cemetery, where he was buried next to his wife in a coffin that was covered with the soil he had brought back from Brandywine in 1824.
The authorities had taken measures to make certain that popular excitement would not cause the slightest disturbances during the ceremony. The army was in charge of security and it had carefully surveyed the entire route. Deputies and peers of France, along with members of official bodies, and the highest civilian and military dignitaries followed the hearse under army supervision. Three thousand members of the National Guard, led by their commander, followed in uniform but without weapons.
The ceremony went on for six and a half hours. Only a few officials were allowed to approach the grave. The people of Paris had only their tears and their memories. Among the deputies following the procession was one who had only been sitting since 1833. His name was known for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. He was one of the most prominent of the Romantic poets, and young men and women frequently knew his Méditations poétiques by heart. He had given up a diplomatic career to join the liberal battle (without giving up poetry) and became an opposition deputy at the moment Lafayette left the scene. Fourteen years later, he was a minister in the Second Republic, and then saw his hopes swept aside, as Lafayette had seen his defeated in after 1830. This new deputy—who when the decree instituting the Second Republic in 1848 was issued proclaimed: “We are going to make the most sublime poetry”—was named Alphonse de Lamartine.
The ceremony in France had all the trappings of reasonableness. The mourning in America, his spiritual home, was more heartfelt, even on the official level. On June 24, the House of Representatives and the Senate expressed their grief and declared a national period of mourning of thirty days. The eulogy delivered on December 31 by Speaker of the House John Quincy Adams was published, and sixty thousand copies were sold. All army and navy flags were flown at half-mast; countless services were held in churches of every denomination; funeral rites were organized in all Masonic lodges, which were draped in black with silver tears.
In Paris, an American flag was put up next to the grave, and it has been replaced annually since then every July 4 by the American embassy.