Alright so let's take a look at what the local Lafayette "expert" with the "neutral view" has to say. Which they will call bullying, harassment, intimidation, violence, etc. because that's what a person does when they can't discuss the actual topic with actual arguments.
Literally incapable of differentiating between holding a historical figure accountable for what he actually did and a 200-year old black legend rooted in demonization and scapegoating which helps countless ideologies regurgitate tropes vilifying the French Revolution.
Like this one. The Revolution was not "eating itself". That's a very loaded interpretation with biased symbolism.
Still doesn't know that representatives on missions aren't the same as the military and that it's got nothing to do with being a soldier or a general.
So did countless others. These are the most basic stances you can possibly have on the Revolution. I'm sure they also agreed that the sky was blue. However, they did disagree rather importantly on the power given to the people: Lafayette supported the division of citizens in "active" and "passive" categories, which Robespierre very strongly fought against.
Dismissing the massacre of unarmed petitioners as an "error of career" he didn't need to apologize for sure is a choice. (Making it about rocks being thrown too, as if that's not a chillingly contemporary excuse used by cops all the time.) He was the commander. The actions of the troops under his command are his responsibility. That's why we hold him accountable for it. That's not "demonization"; that's stating a historical fact.
It has nothing to do with paranoia, fatigue, anger or his poor mental state. This is apologism bordering on infantilization via pop-psychology. You are blaming his hypothetical "mental health" rather than analyzing his political ideology and class interests. Stop psychologizing political maneuvers.
Lafayette's letter to the Legislative Assembly on June 16 1792 was a deliberate, calculated, partisan political intervention. His goal was to use his position as an active military general commanding the Army of the Center to intimidate the Assembly into suppressing the Jacobins and the growing popular democratic movement. He was attempting to use military leverage to halt a democratic revolution that was outgrowing his bourgeois-monarchist comfort zone. It was about preserving a constitutional monarchy that favored the bourgeois elite, not a mental breakdown.
You know who else was a notorious idiot who didn't understand politics? Carnot. Guess what? That doesn't excuse their actions. You just happen to buy the very rhetoric they used to justify themselves.
It does not matter if he claimed to speak as a citizen. He was actively stationed at the front lines commanding a massive faction of the French military. Sending a letter from a military camp to the Assembly demanding they shut down political clubs is the very definition of a veiled military threat. If a modern general did this, it would be recognized instantly as a soft coup attempt.
Robespierre wasn't "paranoid" and "obsessed' - he was right. (Also "obsessed" is a bit of an exaggeration. He didn't write about Lafayette that often. Saint-Just likely did just as much. It was kind of the hot scandal of the day.) Two months later, after the August 10 insurrection, Lafayette tried to force his soldiers to take an oath to the king on August 15. People had plenty of reasons to believe he could have turned his army around and marched them on Paris to crush the revolution. (And some historians argue he did want to, but I'll grant you that this remains unresolved.) However, his troops refused to follow his orders, the Assembly heard about the oath and declared him outlaw on August 17, and then he ran. He abandoned his post and defected. It doesn't matter if the Austrians caught him, if they imprisoned and tortured him, because it doesn't change his intention.
Actually, it wasn't the first time the Assembly voted on his actions and whether they were considered treasonous or not:
The reception of Lafayette’s letter was followed by a powerful demonstration of the challenge to the existing constitutional order from radicals in Paris. On 20 June popular militants from the Faubourgs of Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marchel marched to the Legislative Assembly where they demanded that the deputies remove or constrain the king. Their spokesmen insisted they had assembled to celebrate the anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath of 1789, but the demonstration had in fact been organized in response to the king’s dismissal of the ‘Patriot Ministry’ on 13 June. The crowd then invaded the Tuileries Palace to intimidate the king directly. The armed militants demanded that he restore the dismissed ministers, and that he sanction the decrees against the émigrés and the refractory priests. They also denounced his veto power under the constitution. Although forced to wear the red bonnet of the Sans-Culottes, and to drink a toast to the nation, Louis XVI made no concessions to the demonstrators. Following the belated arrival of Mayor Jérôme Pétion, the crowd eventually withdrew from the palace.
Learning of these events, Lafayette decided to go immediately to Paris, accompanied only by an aide-de-camp. He shared his intentions with Marshal Luckner, commander of the Army of the North and senior general, who neither encouraged him nor forbade him from going. Lafayette appeared dramatically before the Legislative Assembly on 28 June and demanded that the deputies charge those responsible for the invasion of the Tuileries with treason, that they destroy the ‘sect’ that was usurping national sovereignty and that they assure the army that the constitution would not be attacked from within while soldiers were shedding their blood to defend it on the frontier. Following his speech, Lafayette met with Louis XVI. He claimed in his memoir that both the king and queen recognized that their only safety lay in the constitution, an assurance that perhaps reflected his naivety as much as his centrist hopes. Beyond seeking to dissuade the royal family from placing any hope in counter-revolution, the general hoped to organize a public display to animate the courage of the moderates within the Legislative Assembly. He met with officers of the National Guard and proposed that, beside the king, he preside over a review of guardsmen the following day. Whether or not he intended to lead the National Guard to arrest members of the Jacobin Club, as his enemies would allege, the review never occurred. Leaving on 30 June to return to his army, Lafayette’s bleak perception was that the ‘faction’ dominated the Assembly, and that the Jacobins and the radical fédérés, provincial volunteers who had arrived to celebrate the Festival of Federation on 14 July before marching to the front, were the masters of Paris.
Lafayette’s appearance and words before the Legislative Assembly on 28 June created, or perhaps solidified, fears that the general intended to use his army in a coup d’état to crush the Jacobin Club or perhaps overturn the revolution entirely. Radical deputies denounced his speech and accused him of aspiring to become a ‘Cromwell’. Intense suspicion was focused on his communications with Luckner, whom radicals claimed Lafayette had tried to persuade to join him in marching their troops on Paris. Debate within the Assembly on whether Lafayette leaving his army and delivering a petition in his role as general were treasonable offences culminated with an appel nominal, or public roll-call vote, on 8 August. The Assembly’s rejection of the proposed decree of accusation against Lafayette helped to provoke the insurrection in Paris on 10 August.
I think it's very interesting that this led to the insurrection that caused the fall of the monarchy.
As for the opportunity to be president - do you mean in 1830? He didn't do it out of humility. He did it because he didn't want a republic and preferred to crown Louis-Philippe as a "Citizen-King" who would protect the bourgeoisie from any return of republican radicalism - you know, the one Robespierre and Saint-Just incarnated? Oh wait, no, you don't know that. So let's move to that topic:
There is a lot of hyperbole and historical shortcuts here.
First, a small chronological mistake: Lafayette presented his draft of a declaration of rights on July 11 1789. He was not put in charge of the National Guard until July 15, 1789. So he couldn't have written it "after being put in charge of the guards".
Second, the concept of natural rights (that all men are born equal and possess inherent rights) was not invented by Lafayette. It had been thoroughly developed by philosophers like Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu.
Lafayette wrote a draft of 13 statements based on the most incredibly basic principles of the Enlightenment with the help of Thomas Jefferson. You know. The slave owner who raped a child. Not the ideal choice for a co-writer.
It might have been the first formal text presented to the newly formed National Assembly, but the idea of prefixing the constitution with a declaration of rights was a collective demand. Dozens of other deputies were heavily involved in the committee work, debates and alternative drafts that eventually became the final Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August 1789. Lafayette did not single-handedly author or birth the concept.
He wasn't a singular, visionary pioneer who "invented" human rights; he was just adapting pre-existing American and Enlightenment templates. Lafayette's ideal system was fundamentally built to protect the property and status of the bourgeois elite while offering a veneer of representation.
Meanwhile, Robespierre and Saint-Just were attempting to codify a completely different social contract, where society itself bore a sacred debt to its people. In contrast to Lafayette's derivative work on the 1789 text, Robespierre and Saint-Just had a direct influence on the final product of the Declaration of 1793 (heavily influenced by Robespierre's model) and the Constitution of 1793 (Saint-Just presented a project and was part of the writing committee).
The Declaration and Constitution of 1793 were monumental because they introduced a redefinition of property as well as the rights to subsistence and work, the right to education, and the extremely important right to insurrection.
Their defense of socio-economic rights was truly visionary and revolutionary. The bourgeois liberal oligarchy spent 174 continuous years suppressing these concepts. The abandonment and dismantling of these principles after 1794, driven by a liberal bourgeoisie that chose to prioritize capital over human lives, set a trajectory that eventually favored the rise of fascism over social democracy. It took the cataclysm of the Second World War for the liberal bourgeoisie to finally concede these basic protections in the 1948 Declaration by the United Nations... rights they would promptly target yet again after the fall of the USSR and the rise of neoliberalism. And, we could argue, has directly led us towards the resurgence of fascism again. Almost like those rights are a safeguard for humanity.
This is pure fanfiction. There were no "missionaries" (representatives on mission) who would have tried to hunt him and his family. This system didn't even exist in August 1792, and neither did the National Convention. The National Convention didn't formally establish and dispatch them to the departments and armies until March 1793. There was a provisional Revolutionary Tribunal established on 17 August 1792 (and abolished in November 1792) which is probably where your confusion stems from. But there's no "Terrorist" apparatus to target his family: the Law of Suspects is from September 1793 and the Revolutionary Government is decreed in October 1793. There was no policy of executing the families of traitors. When Lafayette defected, his wife Adrienne was placed under house arrest, not executed. She explicitly survived the Revolution. Stop raising the dramatic stakes to turn a treasonous general's military desertion into a tragic fanfiction rescue arc.
Actually, Lafayette was in so little danger he had commissioners from the Assembly arrested on the 14th of August:
On 13 August, he wrote to Sedan’s municipality, warning its members that ‘so-called commissioners of the National Assembly’ were about to arrive intent on preaching an ‘unconstitutional doctrine’ to the army. The king’s suspension was clearly the act of a ‘violated Assembly’, according to Lafayette, and he ordered Sedan to arrest the commissioners. He took full responsibility for the drastic action, justifying it in terms of his loyalty to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and to the constitution. On 14 August four deputies of the Assembly, dispatched as commissioners to the Army of the Centre, arrived at Sedan: Antonelle, Kersaint, Klairevue and Pelardi. The town’s commune, recognizing neither their passports nor their commission as legitimate, placed them under arrest. The commune’s account stated that if these ‘so-called commissioners’ were truly members of the Legislative Corps, they would not have accepted a mission to destroy the constitution, deceive the people and cause disorder in the army. By the deputies’ own admission, given the violent insurrection, the Assembly was not free. Therefore, they could be considered only as emissaries of a faction that had usurped the legislative and executive powers delegated by the nation.
Which people? Quel peuple? The bourgeois or the poor? Because Lafayette's entire career - from ordering the National Guard to fire on unarmed citizens at the Champ-de-Mars to crowning Louis-Philippe in 1830 - proves he only ever cared about the former. He chose the bourgeoisie every single time.
You accuse his critics of "demonization", but the only thing we are doing is refusing to replace actual history with an idealized fanfiction designed to protect your poor dorky little soldier boy. This isn't neutrality; it's the very definition of apologism and blorbofication. History requires looking at class interests and structural realities, not psychologizing a general's treason to preserve a clean, comfortable narrative just so you can enemies-to-lovers ship him with Robespierre while erasing Saint-Just from history.
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