The Arthur H. and Mary Marden Dean Lafayette Collection

This collection comprises over 10,000 items concerning the life and career of Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), best known for his role in the American and French Revolutions. The Lafayette Collection includes manuscripts, correspondence and documents, graphics, broadsides, and printed books, as well as microforms, artifacts and memorabilia.

Hailed in his time as "the friend of Washington," "hero of three revolutions" and "defender of liberty," Lafayette played a significant role in the American and French Revolutions, and worked to bring the newly formed United States to the European political consciousness. Through his voluminous correspondence, Lafayette sustained a lifelong exchange with political leaders, social reformers, writers, and ordinary people who, like him, were engaged in the liberationist struggles and liberal ideas of the day.

This Web site offers a comprehensive finding aid to the manuscripts, letters and other documents in the Lafayette Collection, as well as a selection of digitized facsimiles from the collection.

Link to RMC's French Revolution web page for other related collections.

Collection Description

The Lafayette Collection contains more than 10,000 items documenting the life and career of Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), best known for his role in the American and French Revolutions. Arranged in series of manuscripts, correspondence and documents, the collection also includes graphics, broadsides, and printed books, as well as microforms and memorabilia. Individual pieces range in date from a land deed of 1245 to election handbills of 1874, with the earliest items concerning Lafayette's ancestors. Most date from the years of Lafayette's life and, although there is a greater concentration of manuscripts after 1797, the year Lafayette was released from prison, the collection represents all phases of a career closely connected with the major historical events and personages of his time.

Manuscript material includes early drafts of the Mémoires, notes on contemporary events, and drafts of speeches. Correspondence, which constitutes the largest part of the collection, includes a sequence of letters written by General Lafayette to his wife Adrienne de Noailles de Lafayette from America during the Revolution; his prison letters; a voluminous American correspondence from admirers, petitioners and war veterans; correspondence on both public and personal matters with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other U.S. presidents. Lafayette's thoughts on the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1830, the Empire and the Restoration appear throughout his correspondence, as well as in his notes.

The correspondence also records his intellectual and practical involvement in liberation movements in Belgium, Italy, South America, Haiti and Greece, and reflects his interest in liberal social causes such as abolition and capital punishment. Especially well documented is Lafayette's role with regard to the Polish Revolution and the international support it garnered. A group of letters and documents connected to Lafayette's colonial plantation in Guiana provides information about the slave trade and abolitionism, the government and management of colonies, and the effect of the French Revolution on the colonies. The correspondence of Lafayette's wife Adrienne de Noailles de Lafayette, and of his son George Washington Lafayette, form a substantial part of the family papers.

The collection also contains legal, military and other documents pertaining to Lafayette's various civil and military roles, with a significant amount of material on the National Guard, which Lafayette commanded during two important historical junctures, and on the management of family estates and other financial and business affairs. Documents also concern the status of Émigrés, Lafayette's American properties in Louisiana and Florida, and lawsuits related to those properties. There are six large manuscript maps of Lafayette family lands in France.

Complementing the manuscript material are broadsides, political cartoons, and numerous prints and engraved portraits of Lafayette. Among the memorabilia there are two busts of Lafayette, numerous commemorative medals, a commemorative mug, and decorative fans.

Two sets of material only indirectly related to Lafayette provide parallels and enrich the historical context: one concerns the career of Nicolas Poussin, a topographical engineer in the American army who was involved in railroad improvements and later served as French Ambassador to the United States; the other concerns the de Tessé family, relatives and close friends of the Lafayettes. The Tessé papers include letters from Mme. de Sta‘l, and provide information about liberal and fashionable society in Lafayette's time.

Major correspondents include Lafayette's wife, Marie Adrienne Françoise de Noailles Lafayette; his son, George Washington Lafayette; his business manager, Philippe Beauchet; Madame de Chavaniac; the princesse d'Hénin; Madame de Tessé; Louis-Philippe; Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours; the Bonaparte family; Antoine Levasseur; Jules Cloquet; George Washington; Thomas Jefferson; John Jay; John Adams; John Quincy Adams; James Monroe; Andrew Jackson; James Madison; Henry Clay; Daniel Webster; Jeremy Bentham; Robert Owen; William Cobbett; Jared Sparks; Emma Willard; Mary Shelley; Frances Wright; James Fenimore Cooper; Samuel Morse; Madame de Sta‘l; Frances Trollope; Thomas Pinckney; and John C. Calhoun.

Collection Credits

The Finding Guide to the Arthur H. and Mary Marden Dean Lafayette Collection was produced in 1996 with funding provided by the United States Department of Education grant Title II-C, "Strengthening Research Library Resources," The French Revolution Collections at Cornell University: a Retrospective Conversion and Preservation Project.

Project staff included Jean V. Callahan, Peggy John, and Isabel Rivera. The Lafayette website (guide and exhibit) was conceived by Jean V. Callahan and implemented by Noni Korf Vidal in 1998.

In 2003, Peter Martinez encoded the Finding Guide in EAD and the website was redesigned by Kari Smith.

In 2008, the website was redesigned by Ken Williams.