The book describes life in the country and at Versailles under king Louis XV and Louis XVI. It describes the ideas that circulate during the Enlightenment in the literary salons and the Masonic lodges which Lafayette frequented. We meet Silas Deane and Franklin, follow Lafayette's rogue flight to America and his difficult first months in America before meeting Washington.The book details the many battles of the Revolution and Lafayette's key role in them, especially in Virginia and Yorktown. It also shows Lafayette's contribution to securing French help that made the victory decisive. It also delves into Lafayette's character, his idealism and strong belief in the establishment of a free republic and his winning personality that secured him the friendship of Indians and of a black slave.The reader will ride alongside a young idealist who gambled his family's vast fortune and court connections to help a most dubious, distant cause, fighting in the New World against the English monarchy, with a rag-tag band of rebels. Follow him to the king's court in Versailles after a free-rein childhood in the far province of France. Join the lanky red-haired dreamer who bought ships and guns for those rebels, then led them across the smoky battlefields of New Jersey, kept up their morale in the frozen, disease-ridden camp at Valley Forge, and helped lead them to triumph at the cannon-shattered redoubts of Yorktown. Be introduced to Washington's military family and to the mythical Founding Fathers and be a party to the most surprising twists of fate and ambition in which this true hero played such a central role, so you can see how he helped achieve the lofty, never-before-realized ideals of the Age of Reason - a free government, on the shores of an unlikely new republic.
The book describes life in the country and at Versailles under king Louis XV and Louis XVI. It describes the ideas that circulate during the Enlightenment in the literary salons and the Masonic lodges which Lafayette frequented. We meet Silas Deane and Franklin, follow Lafayette's rogue flight to America and his difficult first months in America before meeting Washington.The book details the many battles of the Revolution and Lafayette's key role in them, especially in Virginia and Yorktown. It also shows Lafayette's contribution to securing French help that made the victory decisive. It also delves into Lafayette's character, his idealism and strong belief in the establishment of a free republic and his winning personality that secured him the friendship of Indians and of a black slave.The reader will ride alongside a young idealist who gambled his family's vast fortune and court connections to help a most dubious, distant cause, fighting in the New World against the English monarchy, with a rag-tag band of rebels. Follow him to the king's court in Versailles after a free-rein childhood in the far province of France. Join the lanky red-haired dreamer who bought ships and guns for those rebels, then led them across the smoky battlefields of New Jersey, kept up their morale in the frozen, disease-ridden camp at Valley Forge, and helped lead them to triumph at the cannon-shattered redoubts of Yorktown. Be introduced to Washington's military family and to the mythical Founding Fathers and be a party to the most surprising twists of fate and ambition in which this true hero played such a central role, so you can see how he helped achieve the lofty, never-before-realized ideals of the Age of Reason - a free government, on the shores of an unlikely new republic.
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