CHAPTER 20
In the late 1820s, as the French economy staggered, the government of Charles × veered sharply to the right. Supported by ultraconservative ministers, the king abolished the Chamber of Deputies and severely curtailed freedom of the press and voting rights. Calls for revolution rang out in July 1830, when government troops faced off against armed citizens at barricades made of paving stones ripped from the streets of Paris. Hoping to avoid the fate of his brother, the executed Louis XVI, Charles fled to England, leaving his nine-year-old grandson to take the throne of France. But the young Bourbon never ascended. Instead, Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans—the son of the man who had been Lafayette’s nemesis during the French Revolution—put himself forward as ajuste milieu, or middle-of-the-road, alternative to his cousins, and Lafayette traveled to Paris from La Grange to lend his support.
On July 29, Lafayette reprised his role as commander of the National Guard. Speaking to a group of former deputies gathered at a private home, Lafayette explained his motives: “an old name of ’89,” he said, “might be of some use in the grave circumstances in which we find ourselves.” Lest anyone deem him too old for the task at hand, he pledged that “my conduct at seventy-three will be what it was when I was thirty-two.” Then he left the meeting “to devote myself to the common defense.”
Lafayette understood that his was a symbolic role, but it was one that he was happy to play. On July 31, he threw the full weight of history behind Louis-Philippe when he publicly endorsed the pretender. Just as he had with Marie Antoinette some forty years earlier, Lafayette stood on a balcony beside his monarch. But instead of a deferential kiss, he bestowed a tricolor flag on the man who would soon govern France while fully beholden to a constitution.
Lafayette had triumphed, but once again, his triumph was short-lived. Louis-Philippe’s “July Monarchy” retained its open-minded bent for only a brief period of time. By 1834, with economic and social crises mounting, freedoms of speech and association were once again curtailed. In a crushing blow to his lifelong faith in constitutional monarchy, Lafayette lived just long enough to see abuses of power running rampant in Paris once more. On April 15, 1834, a workers’ demonstration went fatally awry. As military police clashed with protesters on the Rue Transnonain (part of today’s Rue Beaubourg), someone began throwing rocks from an apartment. Without taking the time to seek out the actual perpetrators, a band of soldiers retaliated. They entered the building and murdered everyone they found. Twelve people were killed—women, children, elderly men—all gunned down in their homes, as memorialized by Honoré Daumier’s famous lithograph of the tragedy.
The following month, Lafayette took to his bed, desperately sick, in the apartment he maintained on the Rue d’Anjou in Paris. His physician, Jules Cloquet, believed that “moral affections” had exerted a “baneful influence” on Lafayette’s health. The general had been unwell throughout the year, afflicted first with a urinary infection, then gout, bronchitis, stomach ailments, and more. Finally, in May, he had contracted a fever that could not be brought down despite the quantities of quinine he was imbibing. For weeks, friends and family had been gathering around him, but as the end drew near his doctors forbade visits from all but the closest relatives. At one o’clock in the morning of May 20, 1834, his respiration began to fail, “drowsiness, delirium, and prostration of strength, became more decidedly pronounced.” As Cloquet remembered it, “a few moments before he breathed his last, Lafayette opened his eyes, and fixed them with a look of affection on his children, who surrounded his bed, as if to bless them and bid them an eternal adieu.” The marquis pressed Cloquet’s hand, let out a final sigh, and expired at twenty minutes after four that morning.
Honoré Daumier. Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834. Lithograph. (illustration credit 20.1)
Throughout that day, men and women filed in to pay their last respects to Lafayette, whose body was laid out on the bed where he’d died. Mourners did what they could to preserve their last memories: one took a plaster cast of his lifeless features, several were moved to sketch the scene before them, and the romantic painter Ary Scheffer, who had created one of the last portraits of the living Lafayette, put brush to canvas to memorialize the great man as he appeared in his final rest.
A large but muted crowd was in attendance for Lafayette’s funeral and burial. From the Rue d’Anjou to the Church of the Assumption, Lafayette’s casket was borne aloft by nine men selected to represent the Chamber of Deputies, the National Guard, the army, Poland, the electoral colleges of France, and, of course, the United States. Tricolor flags flew from every corner of the bier, while the sword and epaulets that Lafayette wore as commander of the National Guard were carried behind on a black velvet cushion. Two columns of soldiers in full dress—members of the National Guard and army alike—lined either side of the cortege, which made its way to the Picpus Cemetery, in eastern Paris, for the interment. The site had been chosen years earlier by Adrienne. During the Reign of Terror, Picpus had been a mass grave where victims of the guillotine were buried; Adrienne wished to rejoin her executed mother, sister, and grandmother. After George Washington Lafayette sprinkled the tomb with soil brought back from America, Lafayette would rest alongside his beloved wife. There would be no funeral orations at Lafayette’s graveside; the rules of the cemetery forbade it, and the authorities were grateful for the excuse to impose silence on the ceremony. Emotions run high at funerals of controversial figures, and Lafayette was nothing if not controversial.
In fact, on February 1 of that year, Lafayette himself had experienced an unsettling incident at Père-Lachaise Cemetery during the burial of François-Charles Dulong, a leftist deputy to the National Assembly who had been killed by a political rival in a duel. According to Isaiah Townsend, a visitor from Albany, thousands of agitated mourners were crammed into the cemetery that day—some standing atop monuments, others sitting on trees or fences, and their voices raised in an “uninterrupted thunder … like the cataract of Niagara.” With the services concluded, Lafayette had climbed into his carriage when, suddenly, “the horses were detached from the vehicle and the General drawn in triumph by a band of young students to the gates. It was evidently their intention to proceed with him in this manner through the streets of Paris.” Only a request from Lafayette put an end to the plan.
Louis-Philippe wanted no such dramatics at Lafayette’s funeral, but he apparently had little to fear. The people of France remained silent. In a June 6 letter to his mother in Albany, Isaiah Townsend described the mood with chagrin: “A month has scarcely elapsed since the death of the General, yet in Paris his memory would seem almost forgotten. The name of Lafayette is not heard.” Despite the indefatigable efforts Lafayette had exerted on behalf of the French people during nearly five decades of public life, his countrymen felt that they had few reasons to mourn his loss.
It was different in America, where news of Lafayette’s death reignited the outpouring of affection that had greeted the living man ten years earlier. President Jackson declared a national state of mourning, flags flew at half-mast, government buildings were draped with crepe, and legislatures around the country heard speeches in honor of Lafayette. Speaking to a joint session of Congress, former president John Quincy Adams delivered a funeral oration that lasted more than three hours. In a melancholy recapitulation of Lafayette’s triumphal tour, amateur troupes performed plays honoring the deceased hero, and souvenirs were once again sold, now with black ribbons obscuring the beloved face.