A very readable biography reccommended to me by mildred_of_midgard. Now while the title is a famous contemporary description of Lafayette, I've always thought, and reading the biography deepened this impression, the title is true only with qualifications, in while he was "the Lancelot of the revolutionary set" - to quote the musical Hamilton in the US, he's seen more as Don Quixote in terms of his actions in France during the French Revolution and the various successive regimes. I don't mean that negatively; as opposed to so many youthful revolutionaries, Lafayette didn't age into becoming autocratic, conservative or both. He never stopped believing in the ideals he held when young, or acting on that belief. His qualities of personal bravery and loyalty never wavered, either, and some of what made him go from folk hero to loathed hate object in the French Revolution was him trying the impossible, being true to the Revolution while also preserving the lives of the Royals (who loathed and blamed him). He came out of the worst time of his life - several years of imprisonment on both Prussian and Austrian territory, a lot of which was spent in isolation - not bitter or broken, but with an additional cause to argue for with people (that solitary confinement, no matter who the prisoner is, is torture; Amnesty International agrees, Monsieur le Marquis!). All of this makes the "hero" designation earned.

But, and here Duncan impressed me as a biographer, perfect, he was not. Duncan clearly admires Lafayette, but he still points out Lafayette when arriving in the rebelling colonies at age 19 still had no problem with the existence of slavery (and for a brief time owned a slave); his abolitionism, which was sincere and life long, came later (apparantly mostly due to the friendship with John Laurens). Said abolitionism also includes an episode which sums up Lafayette's Quixotic side in the negative as well as the positive sense. Now he was born into a more obscure French noble family, but due to a lot of relations dying in his childhood, he ended up inheriting a fortune. (A lot of which was spent for the American Revolution.) Once he was converted to abolitonism, he wanted to do more than speak about it (which he kept doing), he wanted to do something practical. To that end, he had the following plan: 1) Aquire a plantation in the French colonies, plus slaves, 2) Educate slaves and pay them wages, 3) free slaves, thereby proving to all the other planters it can be done without - which was the central argument of a lot of his friends who went "yes, in principle I'm anti slavery too, but in practice it would ruin economically, and therefore..." - losing the estate. Proof the morally just and the economically sensible thing can be accompolished at the same time, provide a role model to all the rest! (BTW, here I would have been sceptical that this was the plan from the beginning and not something claimed years later, but Duncan quotes from letters written at the time, such as "I have purchased fro 125,000 French livre a platantation in the colony of Cayenne and I'm going to free my negroes in order to make the experiment which you know is my hobbyhorse", Lafayette to Washington, February 1786.) Alas, though, Lafayette only got to step 1 and part of 2 before things went pear-shaped for him in the French Revolution. He was already a prisoner in Prussia when still writing confidently he hoped his wife would by now have gotten to step 3, free the slaves. Of course, his wife (still in France) was lucky to be alive by then and had her property (both in France and abroad) confiscated, as Lafayette had been declared an emígré and enemy of the state (his imprisonment abroad not withstanding). The slaves were freed when all the slaves in the colonies were declared to be freed by the French National Convention in 1794, but by then they were no longer Lafayette's property. The bitter punchline was still to come, though, when Napoleon was First Consul of France. At this point, Lafayette was back in France, his own imprisonment having ended when Napoleon, once he was in a position to dictate terms to Prussia and Austria, demanded the freedom of all the French prisoners of war and prisoners of state, which included Lafayette. Having reunited with his wife and children, Lafayette found himself deeply in debt. (His wife had basically lived from personal loans by friends, including Washington, because, see above, confiscated property.)

At first, Napoleon tried to win Lafayette over, who was grateful for the release, but by no means condoning Bonapartism, for, as he wrote to the man himself, "Whenever people come to ask me if your regime conforms to my ideas of liberty, I will answer no". Quoth Mike Duncan: Knowing the Lafayettes were deeply in debt, Bonaparte directed his government to recognize Lafayette's title to La Belle Gabrielle, the largest of his plantations in Cayenne. The state never sold the property after it was confiscated in 1792, and returning it to Lafayette was a simple matter of filing out a few forms. Bonaparte told Lafayette as soon as the title was transferred, the state would immediately buy it back for 1400,000 livres. All of this paperwork could be done in an afternoon and Lafayette would walk away with a badly needed cash windfall. This purchace agreement was part of the dark conclusion to Lafayette's noble experiment in emancipation. The slaves he owned were all freed by the emancipation decree of 1794, but when Lafayette read the contract he discovered he was 'made to cede 'the blacks' and consequently recognize a right of property 'over those found' on the plantation. Lafayette said, 'This is the first notion that I had plans to reestablish slavery." He tried to get this clause removed and wrote Adrienne, 'I declared I would not cooperate in any kind of slave system'. But lawyers told him the sale was contingent on renouncing any and all claims to the hproperty. 'In the long run,' Lafayette told Adrienne, 'it was agreed that I should renounce my rights and all property of whatever kind that belonged to me in Cayenne.' Lafayette needed the money so he took it. Within a matter of weeks, Bonaparte published an act reestablishing slavery in the French colonies. The slaves Lafayette purchased to set free were only emancipated after Lafayette no longer owned them; then, once he regained his claim, he sold them all back into slavery. It is an ignoble end to a once noble experiment.

The fallout of the Cayenne "experiment" doesn't take as much narrative space as the stories of Lafayette's war heroism, tireless lobbying for the American revolutionaries, his early work for the French Revolution or his later work against the various autocratic systems he found himself in (he was both instrumental in bringing Napoleon's "100 Days" to a an end without some bloody final last stand in Paris and for the 1830 July Revolution, as he abhorred the restored Bourbon regime even more than Bonapartism). But it's in the book, and as I said, I think it's very much to Mike Duncan's credit that he doesn't, well, literally whitewash this dark chapter in his hero's story. (For a comparison, see here this post on Lafayette and slavery, which mentions the ultimate fate of the Cayenne slaves but without also mentioning Lafayette's part in it.)

In terms of people not Lafayette, Duncan never fails to give us the pov of his long suffering wife Adrienne (who startled her contemporaries by being in love with her husband, very much not the thing to do) - and also brings to live the two young women Lafayette was close to late in his life, when neither contemporaries or later biographers could agree whether they were daughter figures or romantic friendships, and Duncan instead of deciding for one and treating it as fact ever after (an annoying habit in similar cases of many a biographer) frankly says he has no idea which one it was, either. But it's noticable there is much more source material for the many male friendships with basically the Who Is Who in the American Revolution as well as some in decades of French politicis. (Oh, and there's a worthy adversary type of relationship with the last Bourbon, Charles X, once upon a time the youngest and most staunchly conservative brother of Louis XVI, the Comte d'Artois; he and young Lafayette had briefly been at school together, and while they found each other's political ideas abhorrent, they seem to have had personal respect. When people bashed Lafayette in front of Charles X, he wouldn't hear of it and said that the only two people he knew who never changed since his youth were himself and Lafayette.) In terms of the antagonists hostile to our protagonist, I would say it probably helps if you already know your Danton from your Mirabeau, but since I do, I find it hard to judge how the story would feel to someone completly new to the French Revolution.

In conclusion: a well written biography of a remarkable man, sympathetic without ignoring the imperfections, and thus very human.

A reason not to give up occasionally reading fandomsecrets despite the annoying bashing sometimes going on: first someone pines for Danton/Robespierre slash and then there is a Robespierre/St. Just is the One True Revolutionary Pairing counter reaction. It gladdens my geeky soul.

Incidentally, my own observations on this matter:

1.) The early 80s movie Danton (starring a young Gerard Depardieu in the title role) does provide slashy vibes between D & R, but

2.) Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety has irrevocably convinced me the real subtext was between Camille Desmoulins/Robespierre and Camille/Danton (actually, Camille/Anyone isn't hard to justify because, you know, Camille) plus

3.) The Robespierre/St. Just 'shippers have a point about St. Just's big, big crush on on The Incorruptible.

My basic problem with any of the above, though, is that Robespierre strikes me as asexual. Though he did have a mistress during the last years of his life, so clearly I'm wrong.