Free Lafayette by Harlow Giles Unger

wave of angry émigrés who streamed back into France demanding the restoration of their former properties from equally angry peasants who had worked the land as their own for twenty years or more. Wisely, Lafayette retreated to the quiet isolation of La Grange to focus on farming instead of politics.
    The obese Louis XVIII, once Lafayette’s companion in riding school, acceded to the French throne after Napoléon’s abdication in 1814. (
Réunion des Musées Nationaux
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    Napoléon, on the other hand, saw the rising discontent as an opportunity to return to power. After six months, he sailed back to France and landed in Cannes on March 1, 1815. With a detachment of only several hundred guards, he marched northward toward Paris through the fierce snows of the Alps, 5 gradually gathering a huge army of unemployed workers, former soldiers, and malcontents along the way; although the king sent troops to arrest him, they rallied around their former leader and joined the enormous throng tramping across France. Three weeks later, the march reached the gates of Paris, where the entire population, it seemed, hailed Napoléon’s return—not, ironically, as the former emperor and the conqueror of Europe, but as the leader of a new revolution against the Bourbon monarchy.Sensing popular sentiment, he donned the revolutionary cockade of 1789 rather than the trappings of the empire.
    King Louis XVIII fled to Ghent, Belgium, and Napoléon once again moved into the royal apartments in the Tuileries Palace, but his hold on the palace—and, indeed, on France—was tenuous. The right favored restoration of the monarchy; the left favored revolution, war, and anarchy. Napoléon’s only hope, Lafayette explained, lay in “making himself a constitutionalist. His mind and his character are like opposing currents; he is a strange mixture of imperialist, terrorist, and liberal, but public opinion is stronger than he, and he has a prodigious talent: he submits to everything that he cannot dominate.” 6
    On April 19, a courier arrived at La Grange with a message from Joseph Bonaparte, begging Lafayette to come to Paris immediately. Napoléon had asked centrist leaders to establish a new French government. They had already amended the constitutional charter, which Bonaparte agreed to submit to a national plebiscite; he also called for new national elections for the lower house. Napoléon wanted to appoint Lafayette leader of the House of Peers—and, in effect, leader of the entire National Assembly. Although Lafayette felt a surge of excitement at his recall to leadership, he remained true to his principles and refused to serve a usurper.
    “If my fellow citizens call me,” Lafayette declared, “I will not reject their confidence, but I will not reenter political life by the peerage or any other favor of the emperor.” 7 Napoléon was furious. “Everyone in the world has learned his lesson,” he railed, “with the single exception of Lafayette. He has not yielded a jot. You see him calm. Well, let me tell you, he is ready to begin again.” 8
    Early in May, Bonaparte dusted off the Fayettiste symbols of the revolution and staged a huge pageant on the Champ de Mars in front of his old school, the Ecole Militaire. As Lafayette had done twenty-five years earlier, Napoléon swore to support the new constitution and proclaimed peace with the nation’s European neighbors. On May 10, the department that included La Grange elected Lafayette as its representative to the national legislature—the Chamber of Deputies, or lower house—and George won election at Chavaniac. On June 4, the Chamber of Deputies elected its leaders—all young men, although they paid homage to the old republican by selecting Lafayette as third vice president.
    Despite Bonaparte’s efforts to establish a peaceful, constitutional regime, the allies feared him and French lust for power too much not to act. They declared France in violation of the Congress of Vienna