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LAFAYETTE

Hero of two worlds

by Catherine Bailey

Over the last few years, the name of Lafayette has become more familiar thanks his characterization in Hamilton - The Musical; but who was he really and why was a Frenchman in America supporting the revolution. On September 6th 1757, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette was born into a wealthy land-owning family in Chavaniac in the province of Auvergne in south central France. The family had a long military tradition, Gilbert de Lafayette III, a Marshal of France, had been a companion-at-arms of Joan of Arc's army during the siege of Orléans in 1429. Gilbert du Motier followed the family's martial tradition and aged less than 14, was commissioned as an officer in the Musketeers, with the rank of sous-lieutenant. His duties, which included marching in military parades and presenting himself to King Louis XVI, were mostly ceremonial and he continued his studies as usual.

At the age of seventeen, Gilbert du Motier was to be found at Versailles. Possessing an immense fortune and established into the powerful Noailles family by his marriage to Adrienne, he had everything needed to succeed. However, his spirit of independence made him refuse a brilliant office at Court, instead choosing a military career. Lafayette was impassioned by the ideas of philosophers and the ideals of freedom; the announcement of the war of independence in the British colonies of America in 1776 reinforced his will to fight on the side of the young nation and he secretly organized his departure for the New World, against the will of the King. Learning some English en route he became fluent within a year of his arrival and by using his Masonic membership opened many doors in Philadelphia.

After Lafayette offered to serve without pay, Congress commissioned him a major general, and his advocates included the recently arrived American envoy to France Benjamin Franklin, who by letter urged Congress to accommodate the young Frenchman. A meeting with George Washington at a dinner on 5 August 1777 proved momentous and it was noted that "the two men bonded almost immediately”. The more Washington saw of his fellow Mason the more impressed he was and the closer the two became. Wounded during the Battle of Brandywine but still managing to organize an orderly retreat, he then served with distinction in the Battle of Rhode Island. In October 1778, he requested permission from Washington and Congress to go home on leave. They agreed, with Congress voting to present him with a ceremonial sword in France. His departure was delayed by illness, finally sailing for France in January 1779. Lafayette reached Paris a month later where he was placed under house arrest for eight days for having disobeyed the king by going to America, although this was soon replaced with a hero's welcome and an invitation to hunt with the king. Lafayette worked with American envoy Benjamin Franklin to secure the promise of 6,000 soldiers to be sent to America, commanded by General Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau. It was agreed that Lafayette would resume his position as a major general of American forces, serving as liaison between Rochambeau and Washington, who would be in command of both nations' forces. In March 1780, he departed from Rochefort for America. Over the next 18 months Lafayette and his men harried the English and combined with Washington’s forces took the surrender of the British in Yorktown in 1781. Lafayette left Boston for France in December of 1781 where he was welcomed as a hero, being received at the Palace of Versailles, promoted to maréchal de camp and made a Knight of the Order of Saint Louis. When the Treaty of Paris was signed between Great Britain and the United States in 1783, Lafayette took part in the negotiations. Still believing in the ideals of freedom, Lafayette joined the French abolitionist group Society of the Friends of the Blacks which advocated for the end of the slave trade and equal rights for free blacks. He urged the emancipation of slaves and proposed their establishment as tenant farmers in a 1783 letter to Washington, he then purchased a plantation in French Guiana to house the project. He became an honorary citizen of several states on a visit to the United States in 1784.

Within the French National Assembly, he drafted the first Declaration of the Rights of Man, largely inspired by the American Declaration. The day after the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, he was appointed, against the advice of the King, commander of the National Guard responsible for ensuring order in Paris, and thus played a determining role in the beginnings of another revolution. In October, when the people of Paris marched on Versailles, La Fayette, himself overwhelmed, allowed the Palace to be invaded leading to the massacre of the Queen’s bodyguards although he managed to save MarieAntoinette. Later that year his troops saved King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette from the fury of a crowd that invaded Versailles and he then escorted the royal family to Paris, where they became hostages of the revolution and despite his lobbying were ultimately executed. At the time of the fall of the Bastille, troops wore a cockade (a knot of blue and red ribbons), Lafayette added white as he believed it to be the ancient French colour and a symbol of the House of Bourbon and when he was promoted to General of the National Guard adopted the “tricolore” as part of the uniform.

Believing in a moderate revolution, concerned with the respect of order, faithful to the King but promoting a constitutional monarchy, he became the most popular character in France. He supported measures that transferred power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, but he feared that further moves would encourage the lower classes to attack property rights. When a crowd of petitioners gathered on the Champ de Mars in Paris in 1791 demanding the abdication of the king, Lafayette’s guards opened fire, killing or wounding about 50 demonstrators. The incident greatly damaged his popularity, and in October he resigned from the guard. With Maximilien de Robespierre’s power on the rise, Lafayette would have been tried for treason had he not defected to the Austrians, who held him captive until 1797. While Lafayette and his immediate family survived the Reign of Terror, members of his wife’s family did not. After the first Restauration, he was quickly disappointed by Louis XVIII and went back to his property as a gentleman farmer. However, he opposed Napoleon during what has been called “the hundred days”, and, in another return to politics, became the leader of the opposition as a member of the Parliament. In 1803, the now President Jefferson offered to make Lafayette governor of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory, but Lafayette declined. The disaster of Waterloo led him to take part in peace talks. As a member of the liberal opposition under the second Restauration, he committed the political error of joining the Charbonnerie’s conspiracy but was one of the few not arrested when the plot was uncovered. Lafayette retired once again in La Grange, maintaining links with politics when in 1822 he became deputy of Meaux near Versailles. He then accepted the invitation of the American President James Munroe to be the nation’s guest and made his fourth and final journey overseas that ended up in a blaze of glory and returned his prestige. The visit included emotional stops at Washington’s grave and at Monticello, where the ailing 81-year-old Jefferson lauded and feted his old comrade. Lafayette became the first foreign citizen to address the U.S. House of Representatives in December 1824. As a direct result of that tour and the patriotic enthusiasm that it inspired, dozens of cities across the country were named in his honour.

Once back in France and re-elected deputy of Meaux, Lafayette took an active part in the short-lived July Revolution of 1830, when the antirepublican King Charles X was forced to abdicate. Lafayette was given the opportunity to lead a military coup and seize control of the government, but he refused the creation of a Republic, even though he was offered the presidency. He joined the Orleanist party and contributed to the accession to the throne of Duc d’Orléans Louis-Philippe the “citizen king”, who appointed him General of the National Guard in gratitude. However, Layfayette quickly opposed the king who had become autocratic and soon broke ties with him, retiring six months later. Lafayette died on the 20th of May 1834 aged 76, in Paris where he is buried in the Picpus cemetery next to his wife and, in accordance with his wishes, with soil from Bunker Hill that he and his son, George Washington Lafayette, had collected during his last trip to America. He was awarded the same memorial honours that had been bestowed on Washington at his death and both Houses of Congress were draped in black bunting for 30 days, and members wore mourning badges. He was awarded honorary citizenship of America in 2002. American journalist Marc Leepson wrote ”... he consistently stuck to his ideals, even when doing so endangered his life and fortune. Those ideals proved to be the founding principles of two of the world's most enduring nations, the United States and France. That is a legacy that few military leaders, politicians, or statesmen can match”.

Taking Better Photographs ...

Close-Ups

by Steve Marshall

Close-up photography can be challenging and difficult and it can produce great pictures.

Flowers and insects can work very well in close-up but so can many subjects. There is a classic French subject of a field of sunflowers disappearing into each other in the distance. But go closer and a single flower or part of a single flower invokes the entire field and lets the viewer into the detail of the individual elements of the flower. Adding an insect starts telling the story of both flower and insect. There are different ways to get close-up to your subject. Some are technical and range from the expensive to the surprisingly inexpensive.

Macro Lenses and Alternatives

Specialist macro lens are designed to let you get close to your subject, but they can be pricey. Cheaper alternatives include close-up filters which are effectively magnifying glasses that you attach to the end of your lens. Extension tubes fit between the camera body and the lens – so will only work if you can remove your lens. They cost as little as €20-30 but at the cheaper end you lose the electrical contacts between camera and lens so must focus manually.

The cheapest option is to use the telephoto lens your camera came with. Set it to maximum magnification and train it on a flower.

Whichever route you use it is a good idea to work out your minimum focal length. This sounds very technical but is just the shortest distance between camera and subject that still allows sharp focus. That helps you work out where to position yourself for the closest shot.

Depth of Field

Close-up photography means the depth of field – the part of the image that will be in focus – will be very shallow. Getting close and magnifying your subject both reduce depth of field. So camera shake can be a problem and a tripod can really help. Ideally add a remote control to fire the shutter and as well as eliminating camera shake you can use longer shutter speeds.

You can still take great close-ups hand-held. Just take more than one shot to increase the chances of a great image. A shallow depth of field allows you to blur out annoying or messy backgrounds – as in the picture of the elderberries, with that all important raindrop.

As with all photography the key ingredient is light and close-up creates a problem. It is very easy to introduce the shadow of your camera lens or yourself into the picture and this may be subtle and not obvious but can spoil the end result. Check the first shot you take and if necessary move.

Objects

We use and come across all sorts of objects in our lives, practical and decorative, and we rarely look at the elements. As you get closer and closer to them, that detail can become fascinating. The grape design on the wine filter is about three centimetres wide but hung above a wine merchant’s door it could be much bigger.

Fauna and Flora

You do not have to take exotic trips to mountains or fiords for great close-ups. Plants and animals, especially insects, are in the garden and your neighbour’s garden and the local park.

Plants have the advantage of usually staying still provided there is little or no wind. Though I have ruined some pictures by bumping into the subject of my photograph, so take care. Insects have a tendency to move from flower to flower sometimes very quickly. Mornings and evenings are often best as they tend to move more slowly. Patience is still needed. Sudden movement by you will scare them away.

I recommend finding somewhere with a range of suitable flowers. Plant your feet firmly and comfortably so you can turn easily and give yourself a number of spots on which to focus. Then wait for the insects.

Set your camera to continuous focus and be prepared to follow chosen insects with the camera, without shuffling around. Some insects will disappear before you can shoot, but at this time of year others will arrive. And if one spot proves poor just try another.

The hummingbird moth flits from flower to flower far faster than I can point, focus, compose and shoot. I waited where it was working and tracked it. Focus was set to continuous so as it moved and I moved the camera, the focus adjusted itself. Shooting mode was also set to continuous so when I pressed the shutter I would take at least two or three photographs. And I achieved half a dozen good shots out of a hundred.

Have fun and if you are interested in meeting up with some fellow life-long photographic learners please get in touch on

stevemarshall128@gmail.com

Later appearances of the Sibyls

by Howard Needs

Vault Turiac

This article is a continuation of my exploration of images of the Sibyls in French churches which can be found in DSM issues April and June 2022.

The Roman Sibyls

The ancient Greek (and Middle Eastern) prophets were women – virgins, in fact, like all female prophetesses are traditionally – and they were credited with the gift of being able to predict future events. Their sayings, or oracles, were written down and collected into what are known as the sibylline books. The early Latins adopted this veneration for the prophesies, and new Sibyls were attributed to locations in Roman Italy. There is a Latin legend dating from the V Century BCE about an old woman who came to Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (known in English as Tarquin), the last king of the Roman kingdom, offering him nine books of sibylline prophesies for a sum that was so high that he refused the offer, whereupon the woman burnt three of the volumes and then offered the remaining six for the same price. This, too, he refused, and the woman proceeded to burn a further three volumes and offered the remaining three for, yet again, the same price. King Tarquin was so overwhelmed by this that he accepted the final offer, and thus these three volumes of sibylline prophecies became part of the Roman tradition under the care of a college of priests in the Temple of Jupiter. The old woman was supposedly the Cumaean Sibyl, originating from Cumes, a Greek colony near Naples. Whether the books were worth their price is another matter – the obscurity of the predictions made them applicable as one chose to interpret them. The three volumes were lost in a fire in the 80s BCE and their content was reconstructed from copies from the four corners of the empire, to be then housed in the Temple of Apollo.

Erythrae Turiac

Cicero, writing in the I Century BCE, had his doubts about the sibylline prophecies and noted that the writers skillfully made any event seem to be predicted by them because there was no identification by means of time or names. Obscure language made a particular verse applicable to multiple events depending on the context. Cicero, however, did not deign to use the prophesies to reinforce his political aims of restoring a king to the throne of Rome, and this bad habit of self-interested interpretation of the prophesies continued under the Empire and into the Christian era.

In Roman times, both Republic and Empire, there was a general belief in material happenings indicating future events, that is to say, that the future could be read in tea leaves or, in Roman terms, in the entrails of a sacrificed goat. The Sibyls, on the other hand, declaimed prophesies coming directly from the gods. However, whatever the source of a prophecy, it had to be interpreted in a traditional fashion by a priestly functionary, according to a prescribed ritual. As pagan Rome progressed to a Christian empire, pagan belief transformed Christian belief as much as the other way round. Delphi, for example, was selected as the seat of a new bishopric maybe to couple the respect and reverence for the pagan Sibyl to the new Christian religion.

Sibyls during the Middle Ages and Renaissance

The Sibyls slowly disappeared from Roman literature, to eventually reappear in Christian art of the XII Century CE. Christian scholars and church fathers sought, during the intervening centuries, means of showing that the pagan world had predicted the coming of Christ, perhaps to strengthen the sometimes precarious position of the church. These justifications were found in obscure writings and required considerable ingenuity to see such a prediction. Early Christian writers and church fathers, such as Augustine, Clement of Alexandria and others, often quoted the sibylline verses as a support for Christian thought, and thus in this way the Sibyls entered the Christian tradition. First in literature, from the II Century onwards, and then progressing to sculpture in stone and wood and, commencing in the late Middle Ages, wall and vault paintings such as I am showing here.

The Roman Church traditionally refers to twelve Sibyls, but sites with fewer are frequently represented. When twelve are found they are in association with twelve “church fathers” – Old or New Testament figures and non-biblical saints. This I suppose to validate the coupling of the pagan Sibyls to the Church teachings. The names of the twelve and their attributes are not always the same. By attributes I mean the items held in their hands denoting something concerning their prediction.

Five Sibyls were painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine chapel, together with seven church fathers. There are many examples in Europe, particularly in the south, and it is surprising that they are not well known. So far I have found only a few examples here in France,

Tibura St Lizier

but many more must have existed and been lost to the degradations of time. Brittany in particular has a number of sculpted examples.

Sibyls and modernity

I suspect that fairground fortune tellers have always been with us with their tea leaves, palm reading and tarot cards. Spiritualists with their Ouija boards and knockings on tables, ghostly emissions and guides have been with us since the Cumana St Lizier times of Conan Doyle, and whilst they do not directly deal with prophecies, they do deal with unreal information from an unreal “realm”, as did the Sibyls. Astrologers use the real world of the zodiac to make predictions. However, our modern Sibyls are the supercomputers predicting our weather systems, following and predicting the stock market, and keeping our airways and space ways safe.

Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, in her book The Last Man, used what I have always supposed to be a modern literary convention i.e. that, that the author is relating a true story which she or he happened upon in a mysterious fashion. In this case, in the introduction, she claims that whilst exploring near Naples she and a companion entered the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae. At a given moment their guide protested that it was dangerous to proceed farther, but they ignored him and pushed on until they came upon an inner sanctuary. I think that you can guess what they found there – leaves with Sibyl's prophecies written upon them. These Africa Turiac prophesies when deciphered formed the material for the book in question. This was a book set in the 21 Century CE and related the effects of a pandemic nearly wiping out the human race. Was that a real prophecy on the part of Mary Shelley of the effect of COVID-19?

Agrippa St Lizier

Another author, David Drake, wrote a book, To Bring The Light (published together with a book by L. Sprague De Camp in one volume), in which the Cumaean Sibyl was a time traveller – a well-born Roman lady from 300 CE who was transported to the time of Romulus and Remus, 700 BCE, became the Sibyl of Cumae, and ensured the birth of the Roman Empire.

Images of the Sibyls found at Tauriac

The church of Saint-Martial in Tauriac, Lot, dates from 1549 and has XVI Century paintings on the vaults of three of the side bays of the nave. On the walls and vault of the fourth bay, it has XIX Century paintings over, presumably, earlier works. The paintings on the walls are largely unrestored; those on the three XVI Century vaults were restored in the XIX Century. In the cathedral of Notre- Libya Turiac Dame-de-la-Séde, St Lizier, Ariège, the Sibyls were associated with the sons of Jacob and alternated with them in the vault paintings (see DSM April and June 2022). Here in Tauriac, the Sibyls are painted on the SE vault, whilst sixteen prophets are painted on the NW vault. In both cases, the close proximity of Old Testament figures is intended to reinforce the notion that the pagan Sibyls had predicted the coming of Christ, strengthening the Old Testament prophecy of the coming of Christ. The phylacteries (a term originally referring to small, leather boxes containing scriptural passages written in Hebrew, on vellum, worn by Jewish men at weekday morning prayer as a reminder to keep the law), in the form of banners, purport to quote the original Sibyl’s words.

In both churches, the Sibyls are shown as women with specific clothing and attributes and a banner proclaiming their prophecy. The paintings in St Lizier show older women, wearing more formal “religious” clothing, and those in Tauriac Phrygian Turiac show young women, wearing clothing in a XVI Century French style lying between that of wealthy traders and the nobility.

The details of the Tauriac paintings show the hair as being long and well tended, as befits celibate women of those times, but the women do wear head coverings, perhaps to denote their role as wise women. Each Sibyl wears a robe, over an undergarment that is somewhat longer and of a different colour. The décolleté is small and covered by a decorative top. The wide sleeves of the outer robe are shortened to just under the elbow, and in one case have slits cut in them – a decorative fashion feature found in the clothing of the nobility. There are also necklaces to be seen, as well as other jewellery.

Each Sibyl carries a different attribute associated with a detail of the life of Christ, reinforcing her pagan prophecy, and the phylactery proclaims that prophecy. However, the phylacteries are very concise and to the point, which does not agree with the tradition of extensive and very obscure written prophecies.

Cimera St Lizier