America’s fervent attachment to France arose from gratitude for its indispensable help during the Revolutionary War, and no country saluted its revolution with more fraternal warmth. In a variety of ways, the French Revolution had been spawned by its American predecessor, which had bred dreams of liberty among French aristocrats who fought in the war, then tried to enshrine its principles at home. The most visible standard-bearer of these hopes was the Marquis de Lafayette, who told Washington from Paris that the “ideas of liberty have been, since the American Revolution, spreading very fast.”8 As Jefferson stated proudly, the French had been “awakened by our revolution . . . Our proceedings have been viewed as a model for them on every occasion.”9 As early as 1780 Washington had predicted that France, to pay for its American adventure, would face a huge deficit and resort to ruinous taxes that “the people of France are not in a condition to endure for any duration.”10 Those taxes and other hardships had provoked immense discontent, leading King Louis XVI to convene a special advisory assembly called the Estates-General in May 1789, which mingled commoners with the clergy and nobility.

Always a perceptive student of politics, George Washington, from the first stir-rings of the French Revolution, was astonishingly prophetic about its course. He regarded Louis XVI as a good-hearted but fallible king who would make a clumsy, self-destructive effort to foil revolutionary impulses. “Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth,” Washington remarked to Madison in 1788. “The checks [the king] endeavors to give it . . . will, more than probably, kindle a flame which may not easily be extinguished, tho[ugh] for a while it may be smothered by the armies at his command.”11 With his sure instincts, Washington intuited that the French Revolution might veer off into fanaticism and warned Lafayette “against running into extremes and prejudicing your cause.”12 On the other hand, he also thought that if the king managed change properly, a constitutional monarchy might ensue. Paradoxically, Jefferson, an eyewitness to the revolution’s outbreak, seemed blind to its violent potential. In August 1788 he blithely reported to James Monroe from France, “I think it probable this country will, within two or three years, be in the enjoyment of a tolerably free constitution and that without its having cost them a drop of blood.”13 Perhaps because of his association with enlightened Parisian intellectuals, Jefferson missed the bloodthirsty spirit of the French Revolution, its lust for gore and its gratuitous butchering of innocent victims.

The early days of the French Revolution, so giddily triumphant, produced general rejoicing among Americans. In the spring and summer of 1789 they applauded the creation of the National Assembly and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, written by Lafayette with assistance from Jefferson. The Bastille’s downfall, however, displayed the bloody predilections of the Parisian mobs, who decapitated the prison governor and sported his head on a pike. Such grisly details seemed lost upon many Americans cheering the event. The day after the Bastille was stormed, Lafayette, who hoped for a “fusion between the royalty and the people,” was named head of the National Guard of Paris, further encouraging Americans to believe that their revolution had engendered a fitting sequel in France.14 In a masterful stroke, Lafayette sent Washington the ponderous old key to the Bastille gate plus a sketch of the infamous fortress. “Give me leave, my dear general, to present you with a picture of the Bastille just as it looked a few days after I had ordered its demolition, with the main key of that fortress of despotism,” he wrote. “It is a tribute which I owe as a son to my adoptive father, as an aide-de-camp to my general, as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch.”15 Later on, the president hung the key inside a wall lantern at Mount Vernon, with the picture below it, spurring Chateaubriand’s mordant comment, “If Washington had seen the ‘victors of the Bastille’ disporting themselves in the gutters of Paris, he would have felt less respect for his relic.”16

While careful to support France in public, Washington succumbed to deep foreboding in private and predicted a cascading series of violent events. Like other Americans, he wanted to embrace the French Revolution, but he recoiled from its excessive zeal. In October 1789 he told Gouverneur Morris that while France “has gone triumphantly through the first paroxysm, it is not the last it has to encounter before matters are finally settled. In a word, the revolution is of too great magnitude to be effected in so short a space and with the loss of so little blood.”17 He feared both the frenzied mobs and the benighted aristocrats plotting to restore their privileges. Morris’s letters from Paris had a profound impact on Washington, as Jefferson suspected, because they captured with a cool eye the demagogic logic of the revolution and the fanaticism fast taking hold.

Lafayette’s tragedy in the French Revolution was that he tried to model himself after Washington and re-create his success in a situation that mocked his ambitions. In January 1790, calling himself Washington’s “filial friend,” Lafayette wrote to say how often he had wished for his mentor’s “wise advices and friendly support!”18 He was not oblivious to the revolution’s defects, but he thought they would be mended in time and hoped for the French equivalent of a Constitutional Convention in ten years. There was a note of quiet apprehension in Lafayette’s letters, a lonely whistling in the dark, as he recorded the wholesale destruction of the aristocracy, while hoping that liberty would somehow thrive in the resulting vacuum. Still wedded to replicating the American Revolution, he wrote in the slightly defensive tone of a man trying too hard to convince himself that all was well.

As news of Parisian atrocities reached American shores, Washington remained guardedly supportive of the French Revolution in public, confining his misgivings to a small circle of intimates. Writing to Rochambeau on August 10, 1790, he dismissed the horror stories printed in the London papers as reminiscent of British propaganda during the war: “Happily for you, we remembered how our own armies, after having been all slain to a man in the English newspapers, came to life again and even performed prodigies of valor against that very nation whose newspapers had so unmercifully destroyed them.”19 In truth, Washington lent considerable credence to British reports, as he confided to Lafayette: “I will avow the accounts we received through the English papers . . . caused our fears of a failure almost to exceed our expectations of success.”20

When deputies in the National Assembly abolished aristocratic titles in June 1790, Lafayette surprised his fellow noblemen by supporting the measure, claiming it had “something of the American character.”21 Henceforth, the Marquis de Lafayette was known simply as Lafayette. Even as he curried favor with the masses, however, Lafayette worried that mob violence would supplant the rule of law, telling Washington in August 1790, “I have lately lost some of my favor with the mob and displeased the frantic lovers of licentiousness, as I am bent on establishing a legal subordination.”22 It was Lafayette’s misfortune that the lower classes regarded him as too conservative while patricians jeered at him as too radical. Nothing better illustrates the distance between the American and French revolutions than the fact that Lafayette, who was so at home in the Continental Army, seemed tragically out of place in France, naïvely pursuing the chimera of a constitutional monarchy among political cutthroats on the Paris streets.