French Founding Father: Lafayette's Return to Washington's America (N-Y Historical Society/Exhibition Review in NYT)
From Lafayette, Wis., to Fayette, Me.; from Fayetteville, Ark., to Lafayette County in Missouri; even in La Grange, Wyo., and La Grange County in Indiana the renowned Frenchman Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette left his mark (or at least the name of his estate east of Paris, La Grange). Lafayette, as he was more familiarly known here, also left his visage on 19th-century punch bowls and serving plates, clothes brushes and bank notes, pitchers and paintings.
But this was not just because Lafayette was this nation’s “French founding father,” the comrade of George Washington, the military leader who spent more than a quarter million dollars of his own money to supply troops during the Revolutionary War, the dedicated ally who came here against the wishes of his king, his family and his wife. (“The welfare of America,” he wrote in 1777, “is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind.”) Alone, those achievements, however important, did not lead to the mass market for Lafayette memorabilia or the proliferation of Lafayette towns and institutions across the United States.
The great wit of an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, “French Founding Father: Lafayette’s Return to Washington’s America,” which opens today, is to argue that the importance of Lafayette’s first visit here during the Revolution may be matched by the importance of his last. In 1824, at the age of 67, after having spent much of his life disillusioned with the ways in which the French Revolution mistranslated the lessons of the American Revolution, after escaping the guillotine only to end up spending five years in dank, miserable prison cells in Prussia and Austria, after retiring to his estate the way Washington repaired to Mount Vernon, though without that American’s sense of accomplishment or the effusive praise of fellow citizens, after returning late to French politics — after that often difficult life, Lafayette was invited by Congress to visit as “the Nation’s guest.”...
Read entire article at Edward Rothstein in the NYT
But this was not just because Lafayette was this nation’s “French founding father,” the comrade of George Washington, the military leader who spent more than a quarter million dollars of his own money to supply troops during the Revolutionary War, the dedicated ally who came here against the wishes of his king, his family and his wife. (“The welfare of America,” he wrote in 1777, “is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind.”) Alone, those achievements, however important, did not lead to the mass market for Lafayette memorabilia or the proliferation of Lafayette towns and institutions across the United States.
The great wit of an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, “French Founding Father: Lafayette’s Return to Washington’s America,” which opens today, is to argue that the importance of Lafayette’s first visit here during the Revolution may be matched by the importance of his last. In 1824, at the age of 67, after having spent much of his life disillusioned with the ways in which the French Revolution mistranslated the lessons of the American Revolution, after escaping the guillotine only to end up spending five years in dank, miserable prison cells in Prussia and Austria, after retiring to his estate the way Washington repaired to Mount Vernon, though without that American’s sense of accomplishment or the effusive praise of fellow citizens, after returning late to French politics — after that often difficult life, Lafayette was invited by Congress to visit as “the Nation’s guest.”...