"obtenir une meilleure position de commerce vis à vis des Americains"

Lafayette, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de, French statesman and military officer (1757-1834), hero of the American Revolutionary War. Autograph letter signed.

€ 6.500,00

To the French Reformed pastor Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne, accepting an offer to begin a correspondence, discussing Lafayette's long-standing relations with American Protestant ministers and his hopes to improve trade with America, whose economy he believes will grow with the country. Commercial negotiations would be resumed after Lafayette's return from Germany, he writes, and the issue would be debated with great urgency by ministers and private individuals alike during the coming winter: "J'accepte de bien bon cœur l'offre que vous me faites de correspondre avec moi, et n'être qu'une longue habitude d'amerique m'a fait voir sans effroi la liaison, et la correspondance avec des ministres protestant, j'avisai que j'y trouve encore l'avantage d'annoncer vous les idées sages, les opinions modérées, la soumission aux circonstances qui vous rendront ainsi que M. votre pere un Homme precieux à l'administration du Languedoc [...] à mon retour d'allemagne, je reprendrai mes négociations commerçantes, et j'ai fait avant de partir tout ce que la circomstance permettaient. il m'est impossible de ne pas esperer, qu'un peu d'un côté, et un peu de l'autre, nous en parvenions à obtenir une meilleure position de commerce vis à vis des Americains, qui puisse croitre en avantage avec le pais lui même, et ce doit être un objet pour les ministres et les particuliers dans le courant de l'hiver prochain [...]".

Celebrated as a hero of two worlds, Lafayette, himself a Catholic, had first sailed to America in 1777 to fight for the country's independence as well as his own ideals of the Enlightenment. There he had met such famous Protestants as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. A few years later, Lafayette would take a leading part in the siege of Yorktown (1781); upon his return to France he was given a triumphant reception when Louis XVI admitted him to the Assembly of Notables. Two pastors of the Reformed Church, Paul Rabaut and his son Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne, became Lafayette's Protestant contacts in France - a connection that would be instrumental in persuading Louis XVI to issue the edict of Versailles, granting religious tolerance especially for the Huguenots. After his role in the American Revolution, Lafayette was an important statesman in the early the French Revolution: on 11 July 1789 he presented to the French National Assembly the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen", which had been drafted in consultation with his close friend Thomas Jefferson, then a diplomat in Paris.