journalist, makes it clear that he has been quarantined as a largelyhero. This is in part, Zecchini explains, because Lafayette, despite having played a central role in two revolutions, was too non-ideological to attract much analysis. Unlike Tocqueville, Zecchini notes, Lafayette “never theorized his experience”—a terrible thing to say about a Frenchman. It has been suggested that he never earned a reputation in France equal to his reputation in America because he never wrote a proper book.
Yet, given that the French were playing a long game against a rival superpower in which the Americans were merely pawns, it has been suggested that the entire Lafayette expedition was an elaborate scheme—right out of “” the television series about the blundering subtleties of French intelligence—in which Lafayette was being used by an officially defunct but apparently still quite active spy service, Le Secret du Roi.
It is easy to underestimate, too, how much the Enlightenment was a matter not only of shared reading but of shared experience. New rituals inspire revolutions more surely than new reasoning ever can. Just as a youth in 1968 did not have to read Marcuse or Mao to catch the counterculture’s anti-authoritarian vibe, you could catch the spirit of the Enlightenment through communal means.
The other trick—and here Lafayette’s role was critical—is to have the assistance of a foreign power. The truth, neatly concealed in most elementary American textbooks, is that, though the Americans did the fighting, the French war engine won the battles. At Saratoga, it was the French artillery that made the difference; at Yorktown, the French fleet, which Lafayette’s circle had helped cajole into joining the struggle, proved decisive in the end.
That summer, Lafayette could easily have tried to seize power for himself, and some people expected him to do so. But, of all the lessons that Lafayette had learned in America, perhaps the most important came from George Washington, whose love for the exercise of authority came with no particular appetite for power.
For Lafayette, the choice was never between radical purists and reactionary Royalists. The choice was always, as Thomas Paine put it, in his speech against executing the King, between humanity and cruelty. But it was clear that Lafayette would have to flee France, and, in August of 1792, he did.
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