A brief interval of less than ten years intervened between the closing scenes of the American Revolution and the opening scenes of the French Revolution. Democracy in America was a victor, and the republic had been established. Democracy in France was just entering upon its cyclonic and hideous struggle for the right to live.

The government of France was at that time an absolute despotism. The king was the supreme arbiter of its destinies. He was the head of the army. He appointed his own ministers, made his own laws, levied and raised taxes at his pleasure, and lavished his treasures as he pleased. The common people were more like cattle than men. They tilled the ground and bore the yoke; the king and the aristocracy wielded the whip. Years of suffering ignorance for the many years of riotous profligacy for the few!

True democracy is world-wide. It knows no nationality. All mankind are its countrymen. When at the close of the American war Lafayette returned to France, he hung in his house a copy of the American Declaration of Independence upon one of the walls, leaving the corresponding space on the opposite side vacant. “What do you mean to place here?” asked one of his friends. “A Declaration of Rights for France,” he replied.

Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, the first giant of the Hohenzollerns and the fountain head of modern Prussian autocracy, attracted by Lafayette’s military reputation, invited him to the royal palace at Potsdam to witness and take part in the review of the Prussian army. At dinner one evening Frederick declared confidently his opinion that America would not long be a republic, but would return to the good old system. “Never, sir,” replied his guest. “A monarchy, a nobility can never exist in America.” “Sir,” said the monarch, “I knew a young man who, after having visited countries where liberty and equality reigned, conceived the idea of establishing the same system in his own country. Do you know what happened to him?” “No, sir.” “He was hanged,” replied the King with a smile.

In 1789 the mutterings of the coming storm became more ominous, but the King of France, deafened by the clamour of cackling advice from his aristocracy, either could not or would not hear. Almost bankrupt because of the extravagance of the court, he needed money, still more money, and called an “assembly of notables” to assist in devising measures to relieve his embarrassed finances. They were men from the most distinguished of the nobility. Lafayette was one. In a letter to Washington he humorously remarked that “wicked people called them not-ables.” Lafayette’s part in the assembly consisted in making a bold protest against the prodigality of the crown. “All the millions given up to cupidity or depredation,” he forcefully exclaimed to the noble gathering, “are the fruit of the sweat, the tears, and perhaps the blood, of the nation”; and he concluded by requesting that the King convoke a real National Assembly, made up of representatives of the common people. It was the beginning of the Revolution. For Lafayette’s part in this the King’s prime minister, Calonne, proposed to the monarch to send Lafayette to the Bastile.

Nothing was accomplished by the notables, and the monarch then decided to assemble the states-general. This was not a legislative body, but an assembly of representatives from the nobility, the clergy, and the common people, sometimes called by the crown when it needed assistance, the commons always being in the minority. The commons, lé tiers état grasped the opportunity, met by themselves, and on June 17, 1789, resolved themselves into a National Assembly, to accomplish the regeneration of France.

Troops were summoned by the crown to put down the rebellion, and more than fifty thousand mercenary troops from foreign states were engaged by the King to take the place of the French troops, whom he distrusted. Lafayette joined with the National Assembly, and then and there proposed to it the first draft of that French Declaration of Rights for which he had prophetically left a space on the wall of his home. The essence of his draft lies in the following extract: “No man can be subject to any laws, excepting those which have received the assent of himself or his representatives, and which are promulgated beforehand and applied legally. The principle of all sovereignty resides in the nation.”

On July 14, 1789, the storm broke. The gigantic fortress of the Bastile which for ages had reared its menacing head among the people of Paris, a terrible engine of despotic military autocracy, was attacked and taken by the mob. M. De Launay, its Governor, was killed by a bayonet thrust, and his head cut from his body and carried through the streets upon a pitchfork. “And in this bloody manner, into those dungeons where thousands had wasted away, often without trial and with no knowledge of the charges against them, liberty sent her first ray of sunlight.”

“When oppression renders a revolution necessary, insurrection becomes the holiest of duties,” was the ringing message of Lafayette to the Assembly. The key of the Bastile was given to him as the representative of freedom in Europe, and together with a sketch of the ruins of that fortress of despotism, he sent it to George Washington. “It is a tribute,” he wrote, “which I owe, as a son to my adopted father as an aide-de-camp to my general as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch.”

A National Guard, a new army of two hundred thousand citizen soldiers, was authorized and formed by the National Assembly, both for the protection of the rights of the people at home and for resistance to possible foreign aggression. Lafayette, now thirty-two years of age, was chosen its commander-in-chief. Thus was born democracy in France.