History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814Mignet, M. (François-Auguste-Marie-Alexis)
History
History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814
Mignet, M. (François-Auguste-Marie-Alexis)
France -- History -- 1789-1815; France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799
abandoning in the least degree the sacred cause he had embraced.
There have been in our day few lives more pure than Lafayette's; few
characters more beautiful; few men whose popularity has been more justly
won and longer maintained. After defending liberty in America at the side
of Washington, he desired to establish it in the same manner in France;
but this noble part was impossible in our revolution. When a people in the
pursuit of liberty has no internal dissension, and no foes but foreigners,
it may find a deliverer; may produce, in Switzerland a William Tell, in
the Netherlands a prince of Orange, in America a Washington; but when it
pursues it against its own countrymen and foreigners, at once amidst
factions and battles, it can only produce a Cromwell or a Bonaparte, who
become the dictators of revolutions when the struggle subsides and parties
are exhausted. Lafayette, an actor in the first epoch of the crisis,
enthusiastically declared for its results. He became the general of the
middle class, at the head of the national guard under the constituent
assembly, in the army under the legislative assembly. He had risen by it,
and he would end with it. It may be said of him, that if he committed some
faults of position, he had ever but one object, liberty, and that he
employed but one means, the law. The manner in which, when yet quite
young, he devoted himself to the deliverance of the two worlds, his
glorious conduct and his invariable firmness, will transmit his name with
honour to posterity, with whom a man cannot have two reputations, as in
the time of party, but his own alone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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