Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Lafayette’s Long Fight for Liberty,” a look at the life, struggles, and legacy of America’s favorite fighting Frenchman, with Richard Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland and author of The American Revolution and the Fate of the World.
When the Marquis de Lafayette returned to the United States in 1824, Americans greeted him with a frenzy of affection unmatched by anything the nation had ever shown a single individual. Crowds filled streets, towns held ceremonies in his honor, Congress showered him with gifts, and parents named children for the French aristocrat who had helped win the American Revolution.
Explore the extraordinary life behind that adulation with historian Richard Bell, whose excellent past talks have earned him a big following among Profs and Pints fans.
Professor Bell will take Lafayette far beyond his familiar role as George Washington’s young protégé and the hero of Yorktown.
You’ll learn how Lafayette became one of the Atlantic world’s most persistent champions of liberty—fighting for constitutional government, religious freedom, prison reform, press freedom, antislavery, and independence movements from Greece to Poland.
You’ll also hear how Lafayette’s ideals repeatedly put him in danger, making him a target of kings, radicals, imperial powers, and revolutionaries who regarded him as “the most dangerous man of all.”
Professor Bell will show how Lafayette’s life was full of contradictions: a nobleman who challenged aristocratic privilege, a centrist caught between monarchy and mob rule, an antislavery advocate whose efforts fell short, and a dreamer whose causes often failed in his lifetime. Yet Lafayette never stopped trying to make liberty universal.
Come learn why Lafayette’s name still graces hundreds of American towns, parks, counties, schools, rivers, and lakes—and why his most important monument might be not any statue or place name, but the freedoms he helped generations of people imagine, demand, and defend. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)