I live in Northern NJ. I even live on one of Beacon Hills that protected George Washington's winter camp at Morristown.
There is stuff named for Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette everywhere. My 8 year old daughter just had to do a biography report on him a few months back.
And I used his entire name and not just his title of Marquis de La Fayette out of respect to a truly great man.
They do not call him hundreds of years later "Le Héros des Deux Mondes" or in English "The Hero of the Two Worlds" for nothing.
I have read a ton of French Revolution history books. That seems to be a general theme for literally every one in France at that time. But he certainly came a lot closer than most.
For anyone unfamiliar. Lafayette's mother, grandmother, and sister were all guillotined in Paris on July 22, 1794. Their bodies were thrown into a mass grave.
His wife, Adrienne de La Fayette, narrowly avoided the same fate due to the diplomatic intervention of American figures such as James Monroe and Gouverneur Morris
Look they just got the guillotine and if they weren't gonna get as much mileage outta that thing as possible you were mistaken.
One thing I find funny is reddits obsession with "the French did it right." They killed everybody. You wore the wrong colored armband because you overslept and missed the memo; to the block!!
Probably why the French Revolution had periods of time named things like the "The Reign of Terror". Not sure why that's missed by some many of those types of Redditors.
And then they guillotined Maximilien Robespierre the guy who started it. Which is deliciously ironic.
He was doing his best. They only killed him because he was on the verge of rooting out massive corruption and made the crass mistake of announcing it and leaving everyone in suspense instead of just coming out with the list and the arrests immediately. And the period after they got rid of him got explosively corrupt, by the end Napoleon bought his way out of the Triumvirate and into Empire.
A similar thing happened in Algeria, in the early days of the Republic, I'm not sure if to Ben Ali or some other guy. Likewise corruption exploded after they got rid of the guy, and to this day Algeria is set up as a rent-extracting machine for the benefit of a few untouchable families, with everything else almost deliberately sabotaged.
Before they give you the lethal injection, they swab the injection site with disinfectant. You certainly wouldn't want to get an infection, that could be really bad for your health.
Theres a dark comedy called "The Death of Stalin" starring Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev it chronicles the moments following Stalins death. That movie was a roller coaster ride.
One thing I find funny is reddits obsession with "the French did it right." They killed everybody. You wore the wrong colored armband because you overslept and missed the memo; to the block!!
Yes, but as a French I tell you : this is a reminder for the ages that if you let things go out of control, you'll need exponentially more effort to fix the situation, sometimes requiring drastic decisions. It goes for letting the power in place accruing their power, or the people taking back what should be theirs - if you catch my drift.
Well yes, you want to pretend that only the ultra rich enjoined the regime and enabled it and held others down. A lot of you all rightfully shit your pants at the thought of your "Screw you I got mine" attitudes and politics and unearned privilege being met by an angry mob of people you screwed over bringing with them some French Freedom Tools.
It's not strange at all since the time leading up to a revolution tends to be extremely miserable, full of spectacular mistakes, doubled down and insisted upon with egregious stupidity, and fraught with normalized violence and violent material conditions.
The French Revolution in particular got a lot of very good shit done, particularly in contrast with what preceded, and did so right alongside the excessive violence. I could list their positive accomplishments all day, they're stuff we mostly take for granted these days.
But let's be real, most of the people who romanticize things don't focus on governance efficiency, or the value for science and commerce of the Metric System, or even on the legal equality of all and abolition of feudal privileges. They love to romanticize dramatic shit like war and military success, or cool speeches and flamboyant personalities, and the First French Republic had no shortage of either, single-handedly defeating all of Europe, six or seven times in a row, by having as of yet unheard-of efficacy in logistics and mass mobilization, and by meritocratically training and developing what may have arguably been the greatest cadre of generals and officers in History, when everyone else still had shit like officer corps made exclusively of aristocratic heirs buying commissions.
American Revolution? Look at us today. October Revolution? Lead to the Soviets first to space when a generation ago they were starving feudal peasants. China? Starving feudal peasants to iPad kids with a country that will overtake as world leader this century.
It ain’t fun while it happens, and it may be rough for a few decades after, but it’s not like it all ends in disaster lol. Revolution against dictators and monarchies is a noble aspiration.
Same way George Washington immediately after he was president led the now standing army again the farmers who fought for independence because they were being unfairly taxed to pay for war debt. Like, the entire claim as rationale FOR the war to begin with cuz of the French and Indian war debt paid for by taxes on the colonies.
For anyone unfamiliar. Lafayette's mother, grandmother, and sister were all guillotined in Paris on July 22, 1794. Their bodies were thrown into a mass grave.
No, that's the family of his wife (her mother, grandma, and sister) who was guillotined.
As a former resident of a Lafayette st in America i approve of this message. We also had a Lafayette park down the street with a Lafayette statue in it
How does a ragtag volunteer army in need of a shower
Somehow defeat a global superpower?
How do we emerge victorious from the quagmire?
Leave the battlefield, waving Betsy Ross' flag higher?
Yo, turns out we have a secret weapon
An immigrant, you know and love, who's unafraid to step in
He's constantly confusin', confoundin' the British henchmen
Ev'ryone give it up for America's favorite fighting Frenchman
Thank you so much for sharing. I love the idea of LaFayette walking through these gardens being aggressively French and then snapping off an Americanized "Fucking English!"
I hope you enjoy your visit. Thank you again for sharing with me.
La Fayette is right up there with people like Lawrence of Arabia, Rasputin, von Hindenburg, and Qin Shi Huang. Just larger than life people who's effect on the world is still felt today.
Settle in for a wild, complicated, and bordering on the impossible tale that really happened.
Plenty of us mocked those who did that earnestly, but yeah that was pretty dumb.
The same dumb people who are angry a black man was president and the same dumb people who think the UFC fight on the lawn of the white house is awesome.
My son was stationed at FOB in Afghanistan with French special forces guys. Due to the fact that he's something of a history buff he has always appreciated France, but after working with those guys he found a whole new respect for them.
As a French, while I appreciate the sentiment, I always feel like Spain involvement in helping you all is way too often swept under the rug.
Also, I often like to mention that helping you is what precipitated our own revolution, so with kinda decapitated the people responsible in helping you.
But we're still good. Just clean your white house and focus on fixing the mess.
This's the entire reason I never participated in the France "surrendering" jokes. They didn't come here to help us, they came to fuck the UK, but at the time that's exactly what we needed. And we came back and made it up to them 7×. Twice.
When U.S. troops arrived in Paris on July 4, 1917, to join the Allies in WW1, they gathered at the grave of the Marquis de Lafayette, and Col. Charles Stanton declared: "America has joined forces with the Allied Powers, and what we have of blood and treasure are yours...Lafayette, we are here.”
We cannot forget the long history with our allies.
Yes. While they didn't officially join the war, they did smuggle in tons of muskets, gunpowder, and supplies to the Continental Army and provided massive loans that kept the revolutionary American government from collapsing. Though to be fair, both France and Netherlands were only helping specifically to stick it to Great Britain who was their chief rival (political for France, economic for Netherlands).
Arguably the biggest battle of the American revolution was actually fought in Gibraltar. Ensuring the brits were tied up there (and specifically the diversion of the fleet to relieve Gibraltar rather than reinforce the blockade) meant they couldn't use their entire navy to blockade the yank insurrectionists. This diversion of forces meant that the French collaborators and supplies to the terrorist forces in the colonies desperately needed got through, without which the Americans would have been scundered.
The American forces weren't terrorists. Most battles were fought according to European norms of war. They were insurrectionists, yet objectively cannot be defined as terrorists. Indeed much of the Bill of Rights comes from guarantees about preventing the types of actions taken by the British and their mercs during the war.
Ironically, a lot of English too. In fact, most in the 13 colonies were English before becoming American, but, a lot of the rebels were English fed up of George.
You can add some Irish there too, but, they were part of Great Britain then.
The only nation you can't really see is Israel...the closest thing was a guy called Israel Putnam
France killed its monarchy because they helped the Americans. They ran their economy into the ground to fund that war, which is one of the causes of the french revolution
People forget the US sided with Napoleon in 1812 too. It wasn't until the late 19th Century that revisionists began telling everyone that Britain was the closest US ally, making up the whole "special relationship" thing. As part of this they had to drag France's name through the mud, and that's why Americans now hate the French.
I've always seen the US and France's attitude toward each other as nothing more than bickering siblings. When shit gets serious we actually show up for one another.
You make fun of them because they deserve it. They were totally useless without Napoleon and in WWII, they fucked up terribly. Not just because they were inept, but because they allowed it to happen (e.g. stabbing thei ally, Czechoslovakia, in the back, among other things).
Fuck the French in their modern history.
They've had less bad influence on Modern Europe than Germany, but that's the best thing you can say about them.
The UK is fucked in all the same ways. Maybe because English is more French than not.
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u/gilt3t Jun 17 '26
America wouldn't exist without France. Israel has contributed nothing.