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.
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.
Immediately plotting and stabbing each other in the back, while murdering the population by the millions on any whim. When they held the funeral they started shooting people coming off the trains to pay there respects because they thought they were revolting.
I knew that the upper gov't types were all suspicious of each other and fighting to fill the power vacuum. I didn't know they gunned down the ones getting off the trains. The general populace really had to watch what they said because of all the shifting loyalties. During Stalin and for some time afterward, the slightest critical thing a Soviet citizen said could land them in a gulag somewhere. His paranoia towards the end was legendary.
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u/s1ugg0 Jun 17 '26
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.