In Love with a Word

THE APOSTLE OF LIBERTY (344 pp.)--Maurice de la Fuye and Emile Babeau --Yoseloff ($5).

When liberty seemed mainly the preoccupation of a few French philosophers and the dissident American colonials, a millionaire nobleman called Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, gave up his title and pledged his sword to make room for it on the earth. With that pledge and sword, he won a secure place in the pantheon of American heroes. What the French think of him is a more complicated matter. As depicted by his most recent biographers, Maurice de la Fuye and Emile Babeau. the French hero of U.S. schoolboys was himself a schoolboy.

A Man in Love. He was a man in love with a word--liberty. Though he was intimately involved in its success in America, General Lafayette never realized that the achievement of liberty on the new continent owed as much to geography and British Blimpishness as to George Washington. His later attempts to translate American liberty into reality back home in France involved him in one glori ous absurdity after another. Before the French Revolution, he was a popular idol, and after it he might even have become head of state. Instead, his pride in his ideas and inability to compromise lodged him in prison, cost him his fortune in millions and, finally, made him a sort of walking effigy of liberty. To realists like Mirabeau, who tried to take over the revolution, Lafayette's "only ambition is to be praised," and to Napoleon, Lafayette was "a bit of a simpleton."

U.S. readers of the biography may be startled to find some very French notions of Lafayette's role in the Revolutionary War; e.g., there is an implicit assumption that it was primarily a French-British war, and that only the loss of Canada to the British ensured that the British would lose the Thirteen Colonies to the Americans (because the colonists no longer feared French domination). Even more at odds with the U.S. notion, the French biographers insist that Freemasonry played a big role in the 1776 upheaval. Lafayette, they report, was distrusted by Washington until he became a member of an American Masonic lodge; thereafter, he was a young brother, or "an adopted son" to the first American commander in chief, who was himself a top-level Mason.

Lafayette had a faculty for speaking in quotation marks, as if he were conscious of his role in history. In his memoirs he referred to himself as "Lafayette," in the manner of Julius Caesar. He once claimed grandiloquently: "I have vanquished the King of England in his might, the King of France in his authority, the people in their fury. I shall not yield to Mirabeaij." Hanged Talker. The biographers docu ment Lafayette wherever history found him -- which was at the dead center of the libertarian movement of the U.S.

and French revolutions. At one time, Frederick of Prussia seated him at dinner next to the defeated Cornwallis. Nothing is recorded of the civilities between these former antagonists (Yorktown), but an exchange between the King and the Frenchman ran:

Frederick: I knew a man who talked like you. Do you know what became of him?

Lafayette: No, Sire.

Frederick: Why, sir, he was hanged.

Whatever Lafayette's troubles in Europe (the French Royalists could not forgive him for protecting King Louis XVI's life while attacking his power), Lafayette was pure hero in the young U.S. Nantucket sent a 500-lb. cheese to "the hero of two worlds"; and by 1824, 37 Masonic lodges had taken his name. When he made his first triumphal return in 1784, he bore in his luggage a Masonic apron embroidered for Washington by his wife.

Translator Edward Hyams, himself a witty English essayist and liberal critic, tries in an admirable introduction to pull Lafayette out of the Gallic haze and put him into focus. He quotes Lafayette's bitter enemy, the Marquis de Frenilly, who said: "[He] did, in a way, mitigate the horrors of the Revolution, by making it predominantly ridiculous," but Hyams adds: "Of course, brave, obstinate, rather stupid, perfectly honourable men with a blind faith in liberty and the perfectibility of mankind, are ridiculous; they are also the only men. who make it possible to civilize man's politics and improve his lot."

The reader willing to fight through the odd hedges which French historians build about the most shattering events of their history will be rewarded with a psychological box of tricks, a lot of odd incidental information, and some of the lights and shadows necessary to a true portrait of America's first friend in need. At the end. the reader may well cry: "Lafayette, we are puzzled."

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