"No one has ever described American democracy with more accurate insight or more profoundly than Alexis de Tocqueville. After meeting with Americans on extensive travels in the United States, and intense study of documents and authorities, he authored the landmark Democracy in America, publishing its two volumes in 1835 and 1840. Ever since, this book has been the best source for every serious attempt to understand America and democracy itself. Yet...

On August 16, 1824, an elderly French gentlemen sailed into New York Harbor and giddy Americans were there to welcome him. Or, rather, to welcome him back. It had been 30 years since the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette had last set foot in the United States, and he was so beloved that 80,000 people showed up to cheer for him. The entire population of New York at the time was 120,000. Lafayette's arrival in 1824 coincided with one of...

Late in 1664, the musketeer D'Artagnan rode beside a carriage as it left Paris, carrying his friend Nicolas Fouquet to life imprisonment in a cell next door to the Man in the Iron Mask. From a glorious zenith as Louis XIV's first minister and Cardinal Mazarin's protg and eventual protector; builder of the stunningly opulent chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte; and patron of the arts and lover of beautiful women, Fouquet had suffered a wretched decline. The...

"Some believe that our country is in decline, that the worst is yet to come, that our civilisation is being wiped out. That only withdrawal or civil strife are on our horizon. That to protect ourselves from the great transformations taking place around the globe, we should go back in time and apply the recipes of the previous century. Others imagine that France can continue on a slow downward slide. That the game of political juggling - first the...

In a narrative both panoramic and intimate, Chaffin captures the four-decade friendship of Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette. Thomas Jefferson first met the Marquis de Lafayette in 1781, when the young French-born general was dispatched to Virginia to assist Jefferson, then the state's governor, in fighting off the British. The two could not have seemed more different. When Jefferson moved to Paris three years later as a diplomat, speaking...

An account of Marquis de Lafayette, a young French nobleman, who helped bring victory at Yorktown and became a lifelong friend of George Washington.