I'm thinking this Bastille Day of Lafayette. The young Lafayette was an amazing prodigy. A very courageous, charismatic, and capable military commander he won battles before the age of twenty. He summoned all the courage and daring of adolescence to demand that George Washington free his slaves and provide land and means for them to make a living as free people. He said this to Washington's face, and at Mount Vernon, instantly over-shadowing the handful of Founding Fathers who opposed slavery.
The older Lafayette appeals more to me these days, probably because I am older. He began as a star of the French Revolution creating a National Guard to safeguard the new republic and repel foreign invaders. With help from Thomas Jefferson, he wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. As the revolution radicalized and became more violent, Lafayette found himself on the death lists of both monarchists and Jacobins. He fled to Belgium hoping to catch a ship going to America. Instead Hessian soldiers captured him. Lafayette spent the rest of the French Revolution going from one German prison to another sometimes living in appalling conditions. That was a misfortune that probably saved his life.
Napoleon negotiated Lafayette's freedom and brought him back to France. Lafayette standing on principle and being foolishly naive called out Napoleon for being an autocrat and betraying the original liberal spirit of the Revolution. Napoleon responded by seizing all of Lafayette's assets reducing him to being a pauper. For the rest of his life, he lived off his wife's inheritance and what he could earn speaking and writing.
During the Bourbon Restoration, Lafayette mostly lived quietly always receiving American visitors, but also many others, especially those involved in other liberation struggles. He served briefly in the restored Chamber of Deputies under King Louis XVIII, but changes in election laws preventing liberals like him from being elected to the Chamber caused his defeat.
In 1824, he toured the United States for a little more than a year. The tour was a triumph. Everywhere he went Lafayette was hailed as a hero of the American Revolution and as a living link to the brave days of independence. Politicians competed to share the stage with him. Towns and cities competed to have him visit. Lafayette returned to France under the reactionary autocratic rule of King Charles X.
Lafayette made himself the king's enemy openly calling for a democratic republic on the American model. The king's heavy handed rule created a lot of popular support for Lafayette that probably saved him from being arrested. But the king's spies were everywhere and always kept watch over Lafayette and read his correspondence.
Lafayette was 72 years old when the July Revolution of 1830 broke out after the king tried to disenfranchise everyone except his supporters. Once again Lafayette was summoned to command the National Guard to protect the Chamber of Deputies from the king's troops. Lafayette refused to negotiate with King Charles and forced his abdication. Lafayette very reluctantly accepted the reign of King Louis-Philippe in order to avoid another civil war in France.
Lafayette died in 1834 at the age of 76.
I think about all that the older Lafayette did and endured these days because it appears to me that the USA of today like the France of Lafayette's maturity is about to send liberal democracy into a long eclipse.
I've never thought much of political ideologies -- like religious dogmas they always degenerate into pretexts for dominating people -- but I've always felt loyal to liberal democracy. How to continue once it ends? How to remain true to democracy when it becomes unfashionable, inconvenient, and perhaps illegal? How to believe and act on the concept of freedom and dignity as the birthright of all people, that people can govern themselves for their own sakes without anyone representing God on earth, or some political messiah embodying the forces of destiny? These were all things Lafayette faced through most of his life. The tragedy and the heroism of Lafayette is that he remained true to liberal democracy and to France long after France had betrayed him.
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