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 cooerdinated 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.