Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette

Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette

1757–1834 ○ Natural causes · Paris

French general who fought in the revolutions of two continents

He presented a draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen on 11 July 1789, and after the storming of the Bastille was made commander-in-chief of the National Guard. The Guard's firing on the crowd at the Champ de Mars in 1791 cost him popular trust and ended his middle course.

French military officer and politician, born in 1757 to a land-owning family at Chavaniac in Auvergne and dead in Paris in 1834. He volunteered for the American Revolutionary War, served as a Continental Army major general at the siege of Yorktown, sat in the Estates General of 1789, commanded the National Guard, and helped write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In the Revolution he sought a middle course and defended constitutional monarchy, but the bloodshed on the Champ de Mars in 1791 cost him popular trust, and the Austrians held him over five years after his arrest was ordered in 1792. He refused to serve Napoleon and sat as a liberal deputy under the restored Bourbons. In the July Revolution of 1830 he again commanded the National Guard and backed Louis-Philippe. He advocated the abolition of slavery and was called the 'Hero of the Two Worlds'.