Out of the chaos rose the dictator. Napoleon's comet was beginning to
ascend.
Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797 was commander in Italy of the victorious army
of the French Republic, and as such he demanded of Austria that the
French prisoners in the fortress of Olmutz be set at liberty. Consent
was given as to the others, but only after much talk and grudgingly as
to Lafayette. His unconquerable hostility to the reigning autocracies
was too well known, and Austria even attempted to impose the terms that,
if freed, Lafayette should be deported to America under promise never
again to put his foot either in Austria or Prussia. But Lafayette
himself would not consent to be freed on these terms, and Napoleon
insisted; so, finally, at the dictation of Napoleon Bonaparte, on
September 19, 1797, after more than five years' imprisonment,
Lafayette's fetters were knocked off and he was released. Napoleon
afterward often alluded to the intense hatred of the monarchs and royal
cabinets of Europe for the democrat Lafayette. "I am sufficiently
hated," said he one day to Lafayette, "by the princes and their
courtiers; but it is nothing to their hatred for you. I have been so
situated as to see it, and I could not have believed that human hate
could go so far."
Perhaps at no time was the spirit of Lafayette put to a greater test
than in the years that followed--the years of the rise of imperial
Napoleon, Emperor of the French.
Revenge against his prison keepers, the certainty of high success, the
excitement of a great popular cause, military glory, gratitude to his
deliverer, all coördinated to make him follow the path of conquest, and
lead with Napoleon. He could have been one of the great military heroes
of those times. But apparently these temptations rebounded from him as
an arrow from a steel plate. When only a boy of seventeen, his noble
relatives had been unable to conceive his refusing an honorable place in
royalty's household. It had been inconceivable to the Prussian that this
Frenchman had not gone to America on a quest solely for military glory.
The Jacobin clubs, first by fair promises and then by the demand for his
life blood, had sought to force him from liberty to license, from real
freedom to debauched freedom. But like Sir Galahad, the Knight of the
Holy Grail, he had stood true to his quest, true to his ideal, true to
the inward light that unerringly marked the real from the false, true to
genuine democracy in its fight against autocracy. And now, greater than
all these lures and tests, stood before him Napoleon Bonaparte, his
deliverer, the greatest military captain of the world beckoning him to
paths of fame. The sceptre of all that the professional soldier held
dear was thrust into his hands. He could not be false unto himself, and
the sceptre was turned aside.
When he found that Napoleon was plotting against the democracy of
France, that a new imperial power was rising in Napoleon's person, he
deliberately broke off his relations with the general. During the days
of the French conquests under Napoleon he lived the life of a quiet
country gentleman, interested solely in domestic life, agriculture, and
the pursuit of reading and science. The man who had staked his all in a
desperate chance in the war of democracy against despotic autocracy
would not raise his finger in a war of conquest for the aggrandizement
of an emperor, though driven by the demon of revenge, drawn by the ties
of gratitude, and enticed by the lure of glory.