Marquis de Lafayette Papers

Correspondence, letterbooks, writings, speeches, reports, minutes, notes, military records, financial and legal documents, family papers, broadsides, and other papers relating chiefly to the marquis’s military, political, and private life, as well as to French and American history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Subjects include Lafayette’s involvement in the American Revolution and in the French revolutions of 1789 and 1830, his imprisonment in Prussian and Austrian jails (1792-1797), and his dealings with French and American political figures and with leaders of revolutionary movements in other countries.
Includes Lafayette’s annotated draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and a holograph ms. of the secret code used by Lafayette and George Washington during the American Revolution. Also includes papers of the Lafayette (La Fayette) family; records of household activities at the Château de la Grange, where Lafayette lived from 1799 until his death; papers of the Lasteyrie family, descendants of Lafayette who also inhabited the chateau; and papers of the allied Jarnac family.
Lafayette’s correspondents include John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Simón Bolívar, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles James Fox, Andrew Jackson, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, La Colombe, Louis XVIII, James Madison, James Monroe, Napoleon I, Thomas Paine, Louis-Philippe Ségur, Madame de Staël, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Pèrigord, Martin Van Buren, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, George Washington, and Martha Washington.

Marquis de Lafayette

manuscript archive

eng

Marquis de Lafayette Papers, Library of Congress.

Library of Congress