A French Count Who Aided the Revolution Was Not Keen on Americans (February/March 1997 | Volume: 48, Issue: 1)

A French Count Who Aided the Revolution Was Not Keen on Americans

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Authors: Robert A. Selig

Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

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February/March 1997 | Volume 48, Issue 1

“In 1492, Christophe Colomb discovered America!! 300 years later, on January 21 1783, a vast country raised itself up in the north of this continent, acquired its independence from British power and monarchy with the help of the arms of France and by a solemn treaty of peace!!! Liberty reigns here! Who can as yet say and predict what the consequences of this immense and glorious event will be??”

 

When Captain Louis François Bertrand Dupont d’Aubevoye, Comte de Lauberdière, wrote these lines, he was safely back in France after three years of service in the American Revolution. French arms had been crucial for American independence, and Lauberdière wanted to write an account of France’s role—and his—in that “most glorious revolution of which history speaks.” He also wanted to record those experiences that “had surprised him most in this little known country.” Some of the surprises had not been pleasant ones.

For years, Lauberdière’s journal lay in private hands in France; it was given to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1978 and has only now come to light. It gives a lively, sharp, and immediate picture of some of the strains that begot the unlikely alliance that won our Revolution a working partnership between French royalists and British colonists determined to have done with their king.

The first and most unsettling surprise that met Captain de Lauberdière was the anti-French prejudice he found everywhere. King Louis’s troops had come to help against a common foe, but they might well have been better treated had they been the British enemy; at least they wouldn’t have been fleeced so mercilessly when buying much-needed supplies. Then, there was the total absence of culture. In Lauberdière’s eyes, the attempts by Virginia planters to ape the manners of European courts only emphasized their lack of true culture. Many New Englanders were at least hardworking republicans, even if they did worship money; Virginians “do not have at all the character of the inhabitants of the north.” They were “used to from infancy to do nothing but give orders to their blacks. They live in idleness and indolence.” Throughout his American travels, but especially in Virginia, Lauberdière met with an “apathetic spirit” that “reigns among the people.”

More than 200 years have passed since Lauberdière penned his scathing indictment of most Americans in the more than 350 pages of his Journal de l’armée aux ordres de monsieur le comte de Rochambeau pendant les campagnes de 1780, 1781, 1782, 1783, dans l’Amérique septentrionale. How could he combine the highest praise for a very few with detestation for the rest? How could he call New Englanders ungrateful and charge Virginia, the home of George Washington and Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, with indifference and lack of culture?

Lauberdière was born on October 27, 1759 in Boce, southwest of Paris, into a family ennobled in 1576. The Lauberdières served France with the sword. Lauberdière’s father, François Charles