The Rights of Man

Although the critics and supporters of the marquis de Lafayette from his time to our own have rarely agreed on politics, ideology, or Lafayette's significance in European history, they almost all share the judgment that his long military and political career gave expression to an unchanging liberal political creed. Critics have always charged that Lafayette's adherence to this creed blinded him to political and economic realities and assured his political failure in the complex, changing conditions of French and European society. Supporters, on the other hand, have always praised his resolute advocacy of liberal principles throughout the extraordinary events of revolution and reaction and his mediating position between the extremes of postrevolutionary ideologies. Whatever else one might say about Lafayette from the left or from the right, almost everyone concedes that his liberalism gave exceptional coherence to a political life that extended from the Enlightenment of the 1770s to the Romanticism of the 1830s. No other prominent figure of his generation lived through so many revolutionary events or participated so extensively in the sequence of national revolutions that moved from North America (1770s) to France (1789) to South America (1820s) to Greece (1820s) to Spain (1820s) to France again (1830) to Belgium (1830) and finally to Poland (1830-1831)-not to mention other national movements in Ireland, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. Lafayette

Economic history · Political science · European Political History Analysis · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies