Lafayette (review)

Lafayette has been the subject of a series of dreadful biographical attempts throughout the last hundred and fifty years. What is different here? Harlow Giles Unger, accomplished journalist and author of several biographies, reveals his mastery of the published sources on Lafayette. The result is the best popular biography of Lafayette. Unger has captured the essence of the young Lafayette, no small feat. As a good journalist he has studied the witnesses' testimonies, compared their accounts, and only then has written his story. Unger's objective is to explain why Lafayette has kindled intense and extreme feelings from his own time to the present. This book benefits from the multi-volume Cornell edition of Lafayette's correspondence during and after the American Revolution and from a published collection of thoughtful essays by Lloyd Kramer—both based on meticulous archival scholarship. When Unger sticks to these sources, his work is almost impeccable. Literary license adds an occasional flourish; such is his recurrent characterization of Lafayette as the last of the world's gallant "knights" (pp. xvii, 3, 380). Yet Lafayette as an Enlightenment figure used medieval symbols pejoratively and saw himself rather as a modern man, even apostle for a new era.

The book is roughly divided into three major periods. The first major period, the American Revolution, dominates the text. This is the most accurate section, also drawing on the scholarship of Henri Doniol and Louis Gottschalk. The second period, Lafayette's French Revolutionary years, depends too greatly on the prejudiced commentaries of American diplomat Gouverneur Morris, who believed republican and liberal principles incompatible with French national character. The third period, the remainder of Lafayette's life, is the briefest part of the book though more completely handled than by earlier biographies. Unger based much of this portion on the bowdlerized 1836-37 edition of Lafayette's letters and speeches, a fundamental and defective source for most biographers. This period was one in which Lafayette had the opportunity to apply much from his earlier experiences to Atlantic revolutionary movements and to the practical politics of France as Sylvia Neely's study effectively demonstrates.

For military historians, Unger provides the best available survey narrative of Lafayette's military activity in Revolutionary America. Though Unger gives little analysis of its consequences to Lafayette's command of the French National Guard in 1789 and 1830, to his role in European insurgencies, and to such issues as civilian/military relations, militia/regular army rivalries, and the politicization of a citizen army, he captures much of Lafayette's overall personality and values and reveals them to the reader's delight.