Washington's Disciple: The Marquis de Lafayette and the Quest for Liberty

Two hundred and fifty years after the American Revolution, French aristocrat Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier—the Marquis de Lafayette— remains one of its most celebrated heroes. More than an ambitious soldier who risked his life, fortune, and sacred honor for American independence, Lafayette was a man of ideas whose bold actions were animated by the high principles of the Enlightenment and by the earthy republican virtues of the American Founding. Washington's Disciple rediscovers Lafayette as a champion of liberty whose remarkable life played out across five tumultuous decades of revolution and reform on two continents and who influenced the birth of the democratic age.

Not yet twenty years old when he arrived in Philadelphia in 1777, Lafayette stood out among the young French officers who flocked to the American colonies during the Revolutionary War. He had bought his own ship to carry him to America in defiance of king and family, had recommendations from the likes of Benjamin Franklin, and was thoroughly committed to the ideas behind the Declaration of Independence. Commissioned a major general and dedicated to the fight for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Lafayette quickly earned the trust of General Washington, who saw the young Frenchman as a son, and learned from Washington a deep appreciation of the republican values and institutions that sustain a free people.

After the war, Lafayette returned home to a France on the brink of revolution. He took up the cause of reform, proving himself as adept in the salon as on the battlefield. With Thomas Jefferson’s help, Lafayette wrote the first draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (now included in the modern French constitution and designated by UNESCO as a globally important document), and alongside friends such as Madame de Stäel, he staked out a moderate course, ultimately running afoul of Robespierre and the Jacobins. He avoided the guillotine but was forced to flee. Eventually returning to France, Lafayette spent the rest of his life supporting the cause of liberty against Napoleon, the Bourbon restoration, and the institution of slavery around the world.

Based on primary research in both English and French and exclusive access to private archives, Washington's Disciple follows the Marquis de Lafayette from the banks of the Brandywine to the streets of Paris as the Age of Reason birthed the Age of Revolution and traces the evolution and influence of his ideas in his lifetime and beyond. At a time when the shared political values of the United States and Europe are under threat, Lafayette’s legacy— his “electric spark of liberty”— is worth revisiting and recovering.