He’s the man of two worlds, of two revolutions and of two languages.
He’s a fellow who understands the politics of a republic, an empire and a kingdom.
He’s a citizen of France and an honorary citizen of the United States.
He’s Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette—call him Lafayette—and he’s returning to America for the first time in two hundred years.

Yes, Lafayette is back – in the new series Lafayette in America on Instagram, launched on September 23, beginning with Episode 1: The Awakening in Paris. New episodes will be posted weekly. Follow now as Lafayette prepares to embark on yet another American adventure.

Absurd, intriguing, irreverent, timely and occasionally historical, Lafayette takes to the streets of Paris before returning to the United States, where he reconnects with old comrades, meets Americans, does food reviews, and tries to understand how the country of his dear friend General George Washington has changed over the centuries.

Follow Lafayette in America @lafayetteinamerica now!

Why now?

At the invitation of the United States government, Lafayette made a grand tour of the United States in 1824 and 1825, visiting the then 24 states of the union, where he was celebrated as the oldest surviving major general of the American Revolution and a reminder of the promise of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the creation of the democratic republic of the United States of America. Two hundred years later, in 2025, told that he’s needed, he returns on a quieter but no less significant journey, on a secret mission at the behest of unknown figures, accompanied at times by the charmante Mademoiselle Lilly.

Yes, Lafayette is back!

Here are a few images from the upcoming series, filmed and photographed in France and in the United States.

Left: Lafayette tries to go incognito in Paris, yet, once recognized, he gladly poses with fans by the Eiffel Tower.
Right: Lafayette stands by the equestrian statue of his dear friend the General George Washington, a work by the American sculptor Daniel Chester French, on Place d’Iéna in Paris.

Left: Lafayette takes a seat at Les Parisiennes, 17 avenue de la Motte Picquet, 7th arr.
Right: Lafayette reflects on the evolution of the American project as he walks on Omaha Beach, Normandy.

Left: Lafayette with Axel Robb and fellow patriots at Washington Crossing Historic Park in Pennsylvania, with the charmante Mademoiselle Lilly by his side.
Right: Lafeyette and Will Krakower toast the memory of fallen soldiers of the Continental Army at Princeton Battlefield State Park in New Jersey.

Yes, Lafayette is back! Follow his adventures on Instagram @lafayetteinamerica.

© 2025

Learn about Lafayette’s tomb in Paris.
Learn about Lafayette’s relationship with George Washington.

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While I fully understand the desire of Americans, among others, to want to visit the beaches, cemeteries and WWII sites of Normandy, I can’t help but note the relative lack of visitors to the war memorials and cemeteries within far easier reach of Paris. For example:

– the American WWI cemeteries and memorials near Chateau-Thierry, including the Aisne-Marne Cemetery and Belleau Wood, 60 miles east of Paris,

– the Suresnes Cemetery, originally a WWI cemetery and now also containing the remains of soldiers from WWII, four miles west of the center of Paris, or

– the Escadrille La Fayette Memorial in Marnes-la-Coquette, six miles west of the center of Paris.

I recently attended the American Memorial Day commemoration at the latter.

The monument honors the flying corps comprised of American pilots who, having volunteered to take part in the First World War under French command (1916-1918), lost their lives in aerial combat. Sixty-eight of them are entombed below in a wide semi-circular crypt.

The monument, constructed 1926-1928, is in the form of a triumphal arch with porticoes to either side. The names of Lafayette and Washington are inscribed on the central portion, emphasizing the monument’s role as a symbol of French-American friendship. Inscriptions of the names of those who are entombed in the crypt join Lafayette and Washington in overlooking the Escadrille’s logo.

There’s no need to compare the significance or appeal of this and other cemeteries, monuments and memorials with those in Normandy.  It’s simply worth noting that for Americans visiting or living in Paris, one can pay homage to American involvement in war in Europe without complicated logistics or a full daytrip.

To reach the Escadrille La Fayette Memorial from the capital, take the suburban train from the Saint-Lazare station to the Garches/Marnes-la-Coquette stop, a 20-25-minute ride. From the station, turn left and walk for 10 minutes along Boulevard Raymond Poincaré to the entrance to the park, then follow the path several hundred yards to the clearing where the monument stands in the distance.

Update: When I wrote this brief illustrated text in 2012, the memorial was managed by a foundation, created in 1930, that oversaw its maintenance and operation and had to rely on stopgap measures to ensure its maintenance including funding from the French Ministry of Culture, local government and private donations. A letter of intent signed in 2012 between the American Embassy in France and the French Ministry of Defense promised to support continued financing of the moment. With the blessing of Congress and the French government, the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) took ownership in 2017 and has operated it since, including opening a new visitor center there in 2018.

I leave you with this 5-minute video created by the American Battle Monuments Commission that provides a dramatic overview of the overseas cemeteries, monuments and memorials operated by the ABMC.

© 2012, Gary Lee Kraut

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You don’t always recognize the name. But there he (less often she) is, some local hero, the memory of a moment, a community, a neighborhood, a city, a state, a region, or a nation.

Identifying and telling about the individuals or scenes such sculptures represent is the common stuff of tours. Most guides, whether a text or a person, will tell you who is represented in that sculpture, along with an intriguing or amusing anecdote or two.

The best guides—the rare guides—will also tell you when and why the monument was erected. There are as many insights to be learned by knowing who placed the monument as there are by understanding the social and political and perhaps financial context that brought about the monument and allowed that hero to be praised at that spot. For example, none of the royal sculptures that you see in the great squares of Paris date from the time of the represented king. The curious travel then asks when they were placed there. The wise traveler asks why.

For the group doing the honoring (i.e. paying for the monument), monuments to local heroes are a way of emphasizing a moment in history, writing—or rewriting—history, promoting an agenda, and honoring themselves for holding the views or carrying the supposed mantle of the person being honored. Napoleon III, for example, erected or re-erected statues of Napoleon I.

Unlike in Europe, where an informed visitor could get a great sense of a city’s history and major sights simply by going from statue to statue, far fewer figurative monuments stand out in the United States, though they do exist, particularly on the East Coast. Such monuments naturally appear more often in the nation’s older states because the honoring of public figures with a monument was far more common in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The monument to a public figure, whether financed publicly or privately, lost favor in the 1960s as the will to promote and finance such projects was often resisted. For a while cities and states were conscientiously attaching the names of favored sons to buildings and parks; mostly now those honors go to donors and advertisers.

Even on the East Coast, only a handful of cities have felt the need (or had the political or community drive) to honor their local heroes in marble or bronze. Richmond, Virginia, is one such place, which is why I had such an enjoyable sense of European-style discovery there recently while examining the city center’s many monuments to local heroes and asking Richmonders about them.

They may be forgotten heroes, they may be heroes of another era, or they may be heroes only of those who held influence at the time the statue was erected. In any case, there they sit or stand in the heart of Richmond:

on Monument Avenue
– Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Arthur Ashe;
outside the Virginia Capitol
– Harry F. Byrd Sr., George Washington and fellow patriots, Governor William Smith, Stonewall Jackson (again), Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire, Barbara Rose Johns and others on the Civil Rights Memorial, Edgar Allan Poe;
inside the Virginia Capitol
– George Washington in the rotunda surrounded by the busts of the seven Virginia-born presidents who served after Washington: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Woodrow Wilson. And since that leaves one other niche in the octagonal space, the bust of Marquis de Lafayette fills the eighth. Meanwhile, in the Old Hall of the House of Delegates, Robert E. Lee turns his back to George Washington as takes up the fight of the Confederacy.

As a Northerner, I was fascinated by the many monuments to leaders and heroes of the Confederacy. Asking around I learned that construction of monuments to men of the Confederacy in Richmond, as elsewhere in the South, derived from the same form of nostalgia and political strength as monuments to, say, Napoleon in Paris or churches of the Counterreformation. I leave you to investigate that nostalgia or strength on your own. Ask around when you come to Richmond.

Instead, I’ll jump to my purpose for writing today about this stop on my East Coast road trip: local Francophilia.

The friendly folk at the welcome desk to the State Capitol were so willing to guide me in my search for local Francophilia that I nearly overstayed my coins in the parking meter. We discussed how Jefferson, in designing the original Capitol in the 1780s (the central portion of the current building, before it sprouted wings), was inspired by the Roman temple known as the Maison Carée in Nimes.

Those proud Richmonders actually found and photocopied a leaflet for me noting various French connections in the Capitol Square. Due to Jefferson’s French connections and Francophilia, Frenchmen were involved as consulting architects, draftsmen, and scale model makers in planning the building’s construction.

The sculptures of Washington and Lafayette in the rotunda are the work of French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. Both are made from life masks that Houdon made of the men. Houdon was recruited for the Washington job by Jefferson himself who was then in Paris. The marble bust of Jefferson, copied from an original by Houdon, was presented to the Commonwealth of Virginia by a committee of French citizens in 1931. A bronze copy of the famous Washington statue was presented by the Commonwealth of Virginia to the Republic of France, specifically to the Museum of Versailles, in 1910.

Lafayette, Virginia’s first honorary citizen by act of the State Assembly, visited the Capitol in 1824 during his tour of the United States celebrating the cause of the American Revolution and his role in it.

Between touring Monument Avenue and the State Capitol I enjoyed driving along the center-city grid and seeing the magnificent old mansions.

I also visited the commercial Uptown and Carytown sections. Carytown, along and around Cary Street, was my main point of attack because I wanted to have breakfast at Jean-Jacques. I’d been told by a Francophile working at one of the city’s museums the Jean-Jacques was Richmond’s premier French bakery. (Where you visiting from? she’d asked. Paris, I’d said. The rest was history, and no parking meter to worry about.)

The entrepreneurial Jean-Jacques who launched the business left the eponymous bakery and café long ago, but Jean-Jacques has stayed as its name because there’s no denying that Jean-Jacques sounds French… far more than Josef, first name of the head chef since 1985 and owner since 2006.

Josef Bindas grew up in Belgium and traveled the world for many years before finally settling in the Virginia capital, yet his roots in French baking, and more particularly northern French baking, are deep and strong. His daughter Liliana now assists as manager and wedding cake expert.

There’s an appealing earnestness to the way he describes his work, his use of French equipment, and his insistence on importing as many fresh products (cream, butter) as possible from France. I sensed his integrity as a baker and as a businessman, the desire to appeal to local tastes without betraying his own sense of quality French baking.

When visiting a bakery in the morning, as I did here, I invariably first test the croissant. Spoiled by butter-rich Paris croissants, I would have liked Josef’s croissant, fresh though it was, to be more flaky and buttery, but it was quite nice for dipping in coffee.

I went for the calories on my next selection, a strawberry allumette—a puff pastry with strawberry, almonds, custard, and whipped cream. I already liked the place, and that pastry made me like it even more, earning Josef and his Francophile shop high marks from this writer.

I call it a Francophile shop not just for the offering and the equipment but because during my visit time several French-speaking clients and friends of Josef stopped in for a morning chat. There’s a long bakery counter and a half-dozen tables here. Nothing extraordinary, but I liked the feel of the place and Josef’s attitude toward his work and his clientele.

There’s a handsome French brasserie on the other side of the parking lot called Can-Can (or Can, as the half-lit sign indicated when I found when stopping by in the evening). You might also consider this, as I did, for an evening wine stop. Nice atmosphere, even on a calm night.

A more intimate and more upscale French restaurant 1 North Belmont, whose name echoes its address, is around the corner.

Meanwhile, on the western edge of the city Frenchman Alain Lecomte has an excellent reputation for classical French cuisine at his restaurant Chez Max.

I said to Josef, “Let me get this straight: there’s French restaurant called Chez Max run by a guy named Alain and a French bakery called Jean-Jacques run by a guy named Josef. Don’t you find that a little strange?”

“C’est comme ça,” Joseph said with a Gallic shrug—that’s just the way it is.

– Text and photos (except Library of Congress photo) GLK.

* * *

Addresses, etc.

Jean-Jacques, 3138 West Cary Street. http://www.carytownbakery.com/

Chez Max, 10622 Patterson Avenue. http://www.chezmaxva.com/

Can Can, 3120 West Cary Street. http://www.cancanbrasserie.com/

1 North Belmont, 1 North Belmont, http://www.1northbelmont.com/

The Capitol is open to visitors Mon.-Sat. 8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m. and Sun. 1-4 p.m. Guided tours are given regularly and self-guided tours are also possible. See http://www.virginiacapitol.gov/ for more.

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The Marquis de Lafayette first met George Washington in Philadelphia in the summer of 1777.  At 19, the marquis had left his wife and baby in France to pursue his heroic dream of helping to win America’s freedom. His reckless venture had been opposed by his family and by the Court of Louis XVI, but still he came.

From almost his first meeting with Washington, Lafayette claimed the general as the father he had never known since he was only two years old when his own father had died in battle with the English during the Seven Year’s War.

When they first met, Washington was a 45-year-old general struggling against terrible odds to win America’s independence on the battlefield. He was childless and not yet father of his nation, but it’s doubtful that his first regard for Lafayette was paternal. Even though he immediately invited the young nobleman to move into his own quarters, his invitation likely reflected some calculation on his part. The young marquis was extremely rich and well connected in the French Court, where Benjamin Franklin was then using all his diplomatic and social skills to try to secure an alliance. That also explains why, in spite of his youth, Lafayette was appointed a major general by the Continental Congress. It helped that the Marquis had stipulated that he would serve entirely at his own expense.

Nevertheless, Washington’s heartfelt attachment to Lafayette grew quickly, and before long he took on a guiding role in the young man’s life and fully returned his affection. Within months he persuaded Congress to appoint the Marquis to the command of a division in the Continental Army, which greatly delighted the young man and pleased Washington as well. By the end of 1777, the usually aloof Washington was writing to Lafayette of his “friendship and attachment” and of his “purest affection,” adding, “it will ever constitute part of my happiness to know that I stand well in your opinion.”

Only six weeks after they met, the Marquis was wounded at the Battle of Brandywine. When he wrote to his wife afterwards, he made light of his injuries but was ecstatic about his adoration of Washington. “His tender interest for me soon won my heart to him. . . . When he sent me his personal surgeon, he told him to take care of me as if I were his son, because he loved me like one.”

Throughout his life Lafayette was capable of acting rashly out of idealism, but while in America he was both restrained and educated by the older man. It was from Washington that he learned to appreciate the value of liberty, limited government, and the inherent rights of citizens. Without Washington, it is nearly unimaginable that, a dozen years after they first met, Lafayette would write the Declaration of the Rights of Man that would serve as a guide to the French Revolution. (By then Lafayette had also befriended Thomas Jefferson in Paris.)

Washington relished his role as mentor, yet in spite of his republicanism this lord of a Virginia plantation maintained the comportment of an aristocrat. He enjoyed the civility of his protégé’s companionship at dinner. In Lafayette’s company he could reveal emotions that he usually kept carefully buttoned up.

With fighting at a hiatus for the winter months, Lafayette returned home to France in January 1779. He was by then so much appreciated that Congress wrote a spectacular testimonial to Louis XVI about the young man’s services. Lafayette was assured that he could resume his commission whenever he chose to return. Lafayette dashed off a last letter to Washington from his ship in Boston harbor: “The sails are just going to be hoisted, my dear General,” he wrote, “and I have but the time of taking my last leave from you . . .”

Back in France, Lafayette was hailed as a hero—and promptly fathered a son whom he named George Washington Lafayette.

In April 1780, Lafayette returned to America. This time, though, it was by the king’s order and as the representative of France. Franklin’s diplomacy had paid off, and Louis XVI was substantially committed to the cause of American independence. The marquis landed in Boston to thunderous acclaim.

When a courier brought Washington the news of his young friend’s arrival, the American general reacted with such joy that tears rolled down his cheeks. His emotion may have been all the greater since Lafayette also came with word that six thousand French infantrymen would soon be arriving, along with much-needed supplies of arms and ammunition. Lafayette himself had persuaded the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, that the French force under General Rochambeau should fight under Washington’s command.

This second venture to America for Lafayette ended with triumph in the Battle of Yorktown in October 1781. The division he commanded had played a critical role in the Franco-American action that brought the surrender of Cornwallis. Soon America’s independence was assured. When word of all this reached Paris, the king himself expressed his “most favorable opinion” of Lafayette, then made the 24-year-old hero a maréchal de camp (brigadier general) in France’s armies.

With the fighting ended, Lafayette again returned home, but not before addressing another billet-doux to Washington. “Adieu, my dear General,” he wrote. “I know your heart so well that I am sure no distance can alter your attachment to me—With the same candor, I assure you that my love, my respect, my gratitude for you are above expressions, that . . . I more than ever feel the strength of those friendly ties that for ever bind me to you.”

Lafayette made a third visit to America in the latter half of 1784, when Washington had retired to Mount Vernon. Lafayette visited him there during his own triumphal tour of American towns and cities. Now Washington’s concern was the need for a stronger federal government, which he made Lafayette’s passion as well, and which become the usual subject of Lafayette’s speeches to American audiences.

Once they parted parted, Washington’s tone was elegiac in the letter he wrote to Lafayette: “In the moment of our separation, upon the road as I travelled, and every hour since, I have felt all that love, respect and attachment for you with which length of years, close connexion and your merits have inspired me. I often asked myself, as our carriages separated, whether that was the last sight I should have of you? And though I wished to say no, my fears answered yes.”

Lafayette would have none of it: “No, my beloved General, our late parting was not by any means a last interview. My whole soul revolts at the idea—and could I harbour it an instant, indeed, my dear General, it would make me miserable.”

But that was the last time they met. Lafayette didn’t return to the United States until 1824, a quarter century after Washington’s death and after decades of political vicissitudes in France, when he made one final visit across the ocean. Sixty-seven years old, a living symbol of the birth of a nation, he came as reminder to the Americans of the ideals and struggles of their independence and their continuing need for unity. The triumphal tour lasted a full year, during which the marquis/general received a hero’s welcome as he visited all of the then-24 states.

In Virginia, he went to Washington’s estate at Mt. Vernon to pay his respects at the tomb of his adopted father. He sent everyone else away, including his son George. He meditated at the tomb for an hour in silence.

Lynn H. Miller is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Temple University. He is co-author of the French Philadelphia and a member of the Board of Directors of the Alliance Francaise de Philadelphie.

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Those words are often attributed to U.S. General John Pershing when, on July 4, 1917, having arrived in France with the American Expeditionary Force upon the U.S. entrance into WWI, he visited Lafayette’s tomb at Picpus Cemetery in Paris. They were actually spoken by Pershing’s aide, Colonel Charles E. Stanton, but no matter, the Americans had indeed arrived to pay homage to the French hero of the American Revolution.

They still do.

In permanent recognition of his role in aiding the American cause, an American flag has flown over Lafayette’s grave ever since the end of WWI. The flag is changed every year on July 4 in a highly orchestrated ceremony attended by French and American dignitaries, including representatives of the U.S. Embassy, the French Senate, the Mayor’s Office, the Office of the Mayor of the 12th Arrondissement, the Society of American Friends of Lafayette, the Sons of the American Revolution in France, and the Society of the Cincinnati in France.

Watch France Revisited’s audio slide-show of the Fourth of July Ceremony below.

Lafayette and revolution
The life of the Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), and by consequence his tomb and the flag that flies there, are among enduring symbols of the mutual engagement of France and the United States in times of trouble. Known as “the hero of two worlds” or “the patriot of two countries,” the general-marquis speaks of the best of French-American relations.

Lafayette served the American cause on both sides of the Atlantic—as a nobleman promoting lobbying Louis XVI for arms and money and as an officer fighting alongside George Washington. In 1776, when only 19, he went overseas, befriended Washington and fought on the forefront of the American War of Independence. A decade later he was involved in the politics of his own country in the throes of revolution. He eventually gave Thomas Paine the key to the Bastille for him to present to Washington.

With the French Revolution underway, the marquis favored transforming the ancien régime into a modern democracy through a bloodless revolution that would likely bring about a constitutional monarchy. While in favor of the abolition of feudal privilege he also sought to defend the king.

He served as a commander in the Revolutionary Army in 1792, but sensing that his position as a moderate and as a nobleman was untenable he fled to Belgium. There he was immediately imprisoned by the Prussians and Austrians who considered him dangerous as an anti-monarchist. The United States failed—or at least was unable—to help win his release and he spent the next five years in prison despite his having earlier been made an honorary citizen of Virginia and Maryland. In 2002 the U.S. Congress named Lafayette an honorary U.S. citizen, only the fifth person to have received that honor. (The full text of that resolution follows this article.)

Returning to France under Napoleon’s rule, Lafayette again entered political life, and he lived long enough to play a role in yet another revolution, the overthrow of Charles X in 1830.

Why Picpus Cemetery?
Picpus Cemetery, where Lafayette is buried, is adjacent to the area where two mass graves were dug in the summer of 1794 to dispose of the remains of the 1306 people who were beheaded several hundred yards away during the Revolution, at the height of the period known as the Terror.

The main venue for the guillotine was on what is now Place de la Concorde, where throngs witnessed the most spectacular beheadings, from that from Louis XVI on Jan. 21, 1793, to that of Robespierre on July 28, 1794. From June 14 to July 27, 1794, a guillotine was also set up on the eastern edge of Paris at Place du Trône (Throne), then sardonically called Place du Trône Renversé (Overturned Throne), now called Place de la Nation,

Two years later, in calmer times, the land was purchased by a noblewoman, and in the early 1800s some of the noble families whose relatives had been guillotined began to use land adjacent to the mass graves as a family cemetery. Lafayette’s wife (1859-1807), who’d lost her grandmother, mother, and sister to the guillotine, was one of the founding members of the Committee of the Society of Picpus, which is why she and her husband, who died of natural causes on May 20, 1834, are buried here.

Lafayette’s full, forgettable name, by the way, is Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert Motier, Marquis de La Fayette or Lafayette. French purists may insist on the aristocratic form La Fayette, but the tomb itself indicates Lafayette.

Picpus is the only private cemetery in Paris, overseen by the Foundation de l’Oratoire du Cimetière de Picpus, however it is open to the public, though the July 4 ceremony is by invitation only.

The cemetery is located behind the oratory (chapel) Notre-Dame de la Paix, seat of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. The names of the 1306 people who were beheaded nearby in the summer of 1794 are engraved on two walls of the oratory. The oratory takes its name from an 11-inch statue dating to the 16th century whose annual feast day is July 9. Louis XIV is said to have been miraculously cured from illness on that date in 1658 after praying to the statue.

Cimetière de Picpus, 35 rue de Picpus, 12th arr. Metro Nation or Picpus. Tel. 01 43 44 18 54. Open April 1 – Oct. 15 Tues.-Sun. 2-6pm; Oct. 16 – March 30 Tues.-Sat. 2-4pm. Also closed holidays throughout the year. Entrance fee: 3 euros.

© 2009, Gary Lee Kraut

Read this accompanying article on France Revisited:
My Dear General: The Relationship Between Washington and Lafayette

Text of the 2002 Joint Resolution of the Congress conferring honorary citizenship of the U.S. to the Marquis de Lafayette

Public Law 107–209
107th Congress
Joint Resolution
Conferring honorary citizenship of the United States posthumously on Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette.
Whereas the United States has conferred honorary citizenship on four other occasions in more than 200 years of its independence, and honorary citizenship is and should remain an extraordinary honor not lightly conferred nor frequently granted;
Whereas Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette or General Lafayette, voluntarily put forth his own money and risked his life for the freedom of Americans;
Whereas the Marquis de Lafayette, by an Act of Congress, was voted to the rank of Major General;
Whereas, during the Revolutionary War, General Lafayette was wounded at the Battle of Brandywine, demonstrating bravery that forever endeared him to the American soldiers;
Whereas the Marquis de Lafayette secured the help of France to aid the United States’ colonists against Great Britain;
Whereas the Marquis de Lafayette was conferred the honor of honorary citizenship by the Commonwealth of Virginia and the State of Maryland;
Whereas the Marquis de Lafayette was the first foreign dignitary to address Congress, an honor which was accorded to him upon his return to the United States in 1824;
Whereas, upon his death, both the House of Representatives and the Senate draped their chambers in black as a demonstration of respect and gratitude for his contribution to the independence of the United States;
Whereas an American flag has flown over his grave in France since his death and has not been removed, even while France was occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II; and
Whereas the Marquis de Lafayette gave aid to the United States
in her time of need and is forever a symbol of freedom:
Now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, is proclaimed posthumously to be an honorary citizen of the United States of America.
Approved August 6, 2002.

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