Marquis de Lafayette

Biography

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, was born in 1757 at the Château de Chavaniac in Auvergne into an old noble family with a military tradition; his father was killed in battle when he was a baby. Commissioned an officer at 13, he became an enthusiast for the American cause and sailed to America, where Congress made him a major general at 19. He served under George Washington, was wounded at Brandywine, and in 1781 his troops in Virginia held Cornwallis in place before the siege of Yorktown.

Back in France, Lafayette sat in the Assembly of Notables in 1787 and was elected to the Estates General in 1789, where he drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen with advice from Thomas Jefferson. After the fall of the Bastille he was made commander of the Paris National Guard, trying to hold a middle course; he led the Guard to Versailles in October 1789 and ordered it to restore order at the Champ de Mars in 1791, where his troops fired on the crowd. In 1792 radicals ordered his arrest; he fled, was captured by Austrian troops and spent more than five years in prison.

Freed in 1797, he refused to serve Napoleon. Under the Restoration he sat as a liberal deputy, and in 1824-25 he toured all 24 US states as the nation's guest. During the July Revolution of 1830 he declined to become dictator and backed Louis-Philippe, though he later opposed him. He died in Paris in 1834.