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Lafayette at the Seventh

For the first century or so in the history of the United States, there was no more popular Frenchman in America than the Marquis de Lafayette. This nobleman of the Auvergne was an officer in the King’s Musketeers aged 14 and was purchased a captaincy in the Dragoons as a wedding present aged 18 in 1775. Within a year the rebel faction in North America had sent Silas Deane of Groton to Paris as an agent to negotiate support from the French sovereign, but Paris acted cautiously at first.

Lafayette — a young aristocratic freemason and liberal with a head full of Enlightenment ideas — escaped to America in secret and was commissioned a major-general on George Washington’s staff in the last of his teenage years.

Given his relative youth, Lafayette inevitably turned out to be the final survivor of the generals of the Continental Army, and his 1824 trip to the United States solidified his popularity. He visited each of the twenty-four states in the Union at the time, including New York where the predecessor of the Seventh Regiment named itself the National Guards in honour of the Garde nationale Lafayette commanded in France.

This was the first instance of an American militia unit taking the name National Guard, which in 1903 was extended to all of state militia units which could be called upon for federal service.

In honour of this connection and on the centenary of Lafayette’s 1834 death, the French Republic presented the Seventh Regiment with a copy of Joseph-Désiré Court’s portrait of the general that hangs in the 1792 Room of the Palace of Versailles. The Seventh set this in the wall of the Colonel’s Reception Room in their Armory, facing a copy of Peale’s portrait of General Washington.

The privilege of unveiling the portrait went to André Lefebvre de Laboulaye, the French Ambassador to the United States, who was given the honour of a full dress review of the Seventh Regiment on Friday 12 April 1935 before a crowd of three thousand in the Amory’s expansive massive drill hall.

Also present at the occasion was his son François, who eventually in 1977 stepped into his late father’s former role as French Ambassador to the United States. His Beirut-born grandson Stanislas served as French Ambassador to Russia 2006-2008 before being appointed to the Holy See until 2012. In April 2019, Stanislas de Laboulaye was put in charge of raising funds for the rebuilding of Notre-Dame following the fire that devastated the cathedral.

was determined to join the rebels but numerous barriers were thrown up against him.

First he was sent to London to visit the Marquis de Noailles, his uncle by marriage who was serving as Louis XVI’s ambassador to the King of Great Britain. The uncle reproached Lafayette, anxious to preserve good relations between France and its traditional enemy — as was his job. Nonetheless, he presented his nephew at court to George III before Lafayette’s return to Paris.

Back in France, and forbidden by the King to join the American rebels, he went into hiding and continued his plans in secrecy. Having bought a ship and filled it with cargo and supplies, he Lafayette slipped out of a Gironde port in April 1776 and reached America the following month. After some tricky negotiations, the Marquis was commissioned a major general in the Continental Army and attached to the staff of General George Washington.

The two formed a powerful bond — Lafayette even naming one of his sons Georges Washington after the Virginian — and he fought at the battles of Brandywine (where he was wounded in action), Gloucester, Barren Hill, Rhode Island, Monmouth, and Green Spring, as well as seeing through the winter at Valley Forge and being present at Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.

https://digitalcollections.nyhistory.org/iiif/2/nyhs%3A46733%7EJP2%7E2751d11e568c54077caf57e8c5318f8dbc6d7bcc41449078f907a3083859873e/full/pct:100/0/default.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André_Lefebvre_de_La_Boulaye

Published at 3:00 pm on Wednesday 26 October 2022. Categories: Art Errant Thoughts France Military New York Tags: , , , , , .
Comments

A fascinating tale Mr Cusack.

Do we know what has happened to the portraits and other objects amassed by the Seventh over the years?

— LGClark 27 Oct 2022 4:12 pm

Many are in situ, others have been appropriated by the New York State Military Museum and sent upstate somewhere. Some might be in the possession of the Veterans of the Seventh Regiment.

— Andrew Cusack 27 Oct 2022 5:15 pm

Some went to the Museum of the New York Historical Society.

— Col Matthew G. Cusack 6 Nov 2022 7:33 pm
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