Quote of the Day (Thomas Jefferson, on Going ‘From Despotism to Liberty’)

“We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty, in a feather-bed." — Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, September 3, 1824, in Gilbert Chinard, Letters of Lafayette and Jefferson (1929)

Photo of the Day: Lafayette Statue, Prospect Park, Brooklyn

“Lafayette, we are here,” legend had American General John J. Pershing saying upon arrival at the tomb of the Revolutionary War hero, after  coming to aid France and her Allies in World War I. Over the past two and a quarter centuries, there has been no more powerful symbol of Franco-American friendship than the general to whom he paid tribute.

I’ve been wanting to use this image ever since I took it while visiting Brooklyn’s Prospect Park back in May. Now I have an excuse.

Exactly 225 years ago today, the Marquis de Lafayette was selected colonel-general of the National Guard of Paris by acclamation. It was a crucial post, only 14 hours after the storming of the Bastille had signaled the end of France’s Ancien Regime. For revolutionaries about to issue the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen to the international community, there hardly seemed a better man for the military post than the aristocrat who had made countless friends for his country in the new American republic a dozen years before by volunteering to serve without pay.

The bronze statue and bas relief seen here, the only one of the nine in the park that’s dedicated to a war hero, stands at the end of 9^th Street, on Park West. The memorial was created by Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of choice for the first three decades of the last century on the Boston-to-Washington corridor, including, most famously, the Lincoln Memorial. (See this prior post of mine for a description of his work on that project.) It was dedicated May 10, 1917, one month after Woodrow Wilson had decided to step into the Great War. In the late 1770s, France had come to the assistance of the imperiled United States. Now it was our turn to return the favor.

Lafayette’s nickname, “Hero of Two Worlds,” bestowed on him by his friend, King Louis XVI, testifies to his enormous influence, but also hints at his vulnerability. He had journeyed home in 1779 to become a very persuasive advocate at the royal court for the American rebels, then had crossed the Atlantic again to serve out the remainder of the war in exemplary fashion. (His hit-and-run harassment had led Lord Cornwallis to seek relief on the Yorktown peninsula, where the British commander ended up cornered and forced to surrender.) He had earned the respect, among many others, of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, and—what was even harder—the almost paternal affection of the more remote George Washington. Lafayette had returned home a much-feted hero.

Matters were about to take a sharp turn for the worse, though, in the summer of 1789. None of Lafayette’s actions over the next year—serving in the military post, ordering the destruction of the hated Bastille, submitting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (written with Jefferson’s assistance), even renouncing his aristocratic title—counted for much with the radicals who had increasingly seized the initiative in the French Revolution. His refusal to support the Reign of Terror resulted in his imprisonment for five years.

In 1824, Lafayette, now in his late sixties, returned to the United States as one of the last surviving generals of the American Revolution. His tour of the country was an unending triumph. Even today, no name holds such power to unify two nations whose recent history has been marked by mutual self-interest at best and hostility at worst.

This Day in French History (“Declaration of the Rights of Man” Adopted as New Model for Revolutionaries)

August 26, 1789—Before it degenerated into war, terror, reaction and dictatorship, the French Revolution reached its zenith when the newly formed National Constituent Assembly formally adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

Certain words and phrases spring out at you in both the French declaration and the one that inspired it, America’s Declaration of Independence: “free,” “equal,” “liberty,” “sacred,” and “nature/natural.” 

The American "self-evident" principles become the French "simple and incontestable" ones. 

Another word from the French document, “imprescriptible" (rights prior to the state, government and society), is a more intense version of the American “inalienable” (rights that not only cannot be taken away but cannot be given up).

If it sounds at points like the French document echoes America’s, two reasons might explain it:

* Both documents reflected Enlightenment philosophers’ thinking on the relationship between liberty and the state.

*France’s declaration involved two people deeply associated with the United States: the Marquis de Lafayette, onetime general under George Washington, now part of the 30-member committee that drafted the French declaration; and Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, now the American minister to France—and a keenly interested reader of the new document.

And yet, there are signal differences between the two. 

Start with length: the American document is more than 1,300 words, while France’s was merely 300—short enough to fit on one side of a single paper, virtually guaranteeing that it would be disseminated not only in France, but in every major European language.

Second, France’s declaration reads as a more impersonal document. No person is held responsible for the poverty and lack of freedom that produced the storming of the Bastille the month before, largely because many leaders of the Revolution still believed that, if they could sever King Louis XVI from ministers offering bad advice, they could maintain a functioning constitutional monarchy. (This proved to be a forlorn hope when Louis plotted to escape from France to his royal cousins to the east.)

In contrast, despite a stated need to keep in mind “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” (a necessity, given that it wanted to secure France as an ally in the struggle against the crown), the Continental Congress spent more time reviewing the middle part of their document—King George’s “long train of abuses”—than the now far more famous preamble (“we hold these truths to be self-evident…”).

Though products of revolutions, both documents were written by men who were anything but the have-nots of society. 

For every aristocrat like Thomas Jefferson in the Continental Congress, there was a self-made man such John Adams or Ben Franklin, middle-class bourgeois who bitterly resented the encrusted privileges and corruption of a British elite.

Similarly, the Declaration of the Rights of Man was imbued with an upper-middle-class sensibility. It even mentions a word left out of the list of rights enumerated in the American document: property. (Ironically, it did not matter at first to the great majority of Frenchmen, most of whom owned no property when the Bastille fell.)

There are other rights not enumerated in the French document, either: to employment, women’s suffrage, subsistence, public relief, or education. 

Neither slaves nor freed blacks are mentioned (indeed, though slavery was outlawed in France in 1794, it was re-introduced under Napoleon, and was not finally abolished in the nation and its possessions until 1848.)

The American Revolution, for all the stunning change it introduced in North America, did not influence Europe as decisively as France’s. The National Constituent Assembly produced not just a change in governance, but the overthrow of an entire social order—one based on feudalism and manorial privilege. The great sweep of this change posed a threat to every European monarch.

A powerful document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man was the high point of classical liberalism—a movement that stressed the sanctity of property, individualism, and the universality of its principles. 

But, as the French were about to learn, in more ways than one, so much depends on execution.