Marquis de Lafayette

September 6, 1757 – May 20, 1834

French aristocrat who became a key American ally and hero of both the American and French Revolutions.

military leaderdiplomatfrench revolution

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, was born on September 6, 1757, into one of the oldest noble families in France. Orphaned young and heir to an immense fortune, he was a wealthy, restless teenager when news of the American rebellion reached France. Fired by Enlightenment ideals of liberty and eager for glory, he defied both his king and his own family, bought a ship at his own expense, and sailed for America in 1777 at just 19 years old. He offered to serve the Continental Congress without pay. Lafayette quickly won the trust of George Washington, who came to treat the young Frenchman almost like a son. Commissioned a major general, Lafayette was wounded in the leg at the Battle of Brandywine in 1777 but stayed with the army through the freezing winter at Valley Forge, sharing the hardships of ordinary soldiers. His greatest value, however, was diplomatic: as a well-connected aristocrat, he lobbied the French court relentlessly, and his enthusiasm helped persuade France to enter the war openly on America's side in 1778. That alliance, bringing French troops, ships, and money, transformed the struggle. Lafayette's finest military hour came in 1781. Commanding American forces in Virginia, he shadowed and boxed in the British army of Lord Cornwallis, helping pin it against the coast until Washington and a French fleet could arrive. The result was the decisive Siege of Yorktown, whose surrender effectively secured the independence the colonies had proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence five years earlier. Lafayette returned to France a hero of the American Revolution. Back home, Lafayette tried to carry the ideals of liberty into his own country. In 1789, at the dawn of the French Revolution, he helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, partly modeled on American principles, and he commanded the new National Guard. But revolutionary France grew far more violent than America's had, and Lafayette, a moderate who wanted a constitutional monarchy, was distrusted by radicals and royalists alike. He fled France, was imprisoned for years by Austria, and later returned to public life. In 1824 an aging Lafayette toured the United States to enormous celebration, welcomed as the last great living hero of the Revolution. His life shows how the American cause inspired people far beyond its borders, and how much harder those ideals proved to secure elsewhere.

Marquis de Lafayette

Further reading

Marquis de Lafayette

Further reading