Marquis de Lafayette - Return To France and Visit To America

Return To France and Visit To America

Lafayette returned to France on 18 December 1781. He was welcomed as a hero, and on 22 January 1782, was received at Versailles. He witnessed the birth of his daughter, whom he named Marie-Antoinette Virginie upon Thomas Jefferson's recommendation. He was promoted to maréchal de camp, skipping numerous ranks. Lafayette then helped prepare for a combined French and Spanish expedition against the British West Indies. The Treaty of Paris signed between Great Britain and the U.S. on 20 January 1783 made the expedition unnecessary.

In France, Lafayette worked with Thomas Jefferson to establish trade agreements between the United States and France. These negotiations aimed to reduce U.S. debt to France, and included commitments on tobacco and whale oil. He joined the French abolitionist group Society of the Friends of the Blacks, which advocated the end of the slave trade and equal rights for free blacks. In 1783, in correspondence with Washington, he urged the emancipation of slaves; and to establish them as tenant farmers. Although Washington demurred, Lafayette purchased land in the Cayenne for his plantation La Belle Gabrielle, to "experiment" with education, and emancipation.

In 1784, Lafayette returned to America, and visited all the states except Georgia. The trip included a visit to Washington's farm at Mount Vernon on 17 August. In Virginia, Lafayette addressed the House of Delegates where he called for "liberty of all mankind" and urged emancipation. Lafayette advocated to the Pennsylvania Legislature for a federal union, and visited the Mohawk Valley in New York for peace negotiations between the Iroquois, some of whom had met Lafayette in 1778. Lafayette received an honorary degree from Harvard, a portrait of Washington from the city of Boston, and a bust from the state of Virginia. Maryland's legislature honored him by making Lafayette and his male heirs "natural born Citizens" of the state, which made him a natural born citizen of the United States after ratification of the new national Constitution. Lafayette later boasted that he had become an American citizen before the concept of French citizenship existed. Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Virginia also granted him citizenship.

Upon his return to France, it is said that Lafayette became involved in an affair with the comtesse Aglaé d'Hunolstein, one that he broke off on 27 March 1783 by letter, at the insistence of her family. He became briefly linked amorously to Madame de Simiane; however, scholars are divided, whether Adrienne knew of these two extramarital affairs. Enemies of Lafayette made much of the court gossip.

Through the next years, Lafayette was active in the Hôtel de La Fayette in the rue de Bourbon, the headquarters of Americans in Paris, where Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and his wife Sarah Livingston, and John Adams and his wife Abigail, met every Monday, and dined in company with family and the liberal nobility, such as Clermont-Tonnerre, and Madame de Staël.