Lafayette in Two Worlds

“A valuable book.”—Journal of the Early Republic

“Kramer successfully mixes the biography of one of Europe’s most colorful figures with an insightful and gracefully written analysis of political culture during one of European history’s most exciting epochs.”—Literature and Culture

“Kramer’s sophisticated interpretation is highly readable as well as suggestive of ways in which important individuals both reflect and illuminate the cultures of their times.”—The Historian

“An intriguing effort to rescue the image of the quintessential traditional historical subject, the 'great man,' has come from a self-consciously postmodern historian. Kramer achieves his goal by creating a 'cubist' biography of Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette. . . . Kramer has provided not only a work useful to French and intellectual historians, but also a methodology that others will find attractive.”—CHOICE

“Lloyd Kramer’s innovative study is neither a biography nor the history of a symbol. . . . He examines the hero of two worlds as both a life and a text, and he finds in the relationship between the two some missing links in the history of the age of revolutions.”—Journal of American History

“Lafayette certainly had political enemies, but Lloyd Kramer shows that few of the great historical personalities of his era were so widely and deeply admired as was the 'hero of two worlds.'. . . This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the transition between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, of Lafayette’s life and intellectual milieu, and of the concrete processes of translation and mediation by which identities are forged.”—Journal of Southern History

“This is a fascinating, well-written book, well-researched, based on copious manuscript and printed primary sources and while grounded in the recent work in cultural history, it wears its learning lightly and is remarkably free of jargon.”—Canadian Review of American Studies

“A first-rate piece of provocative scholarship. Kramer situates Lafayette at the confluence of two major political revolutions and at a major turning point in the cultural and social transformation of the Western World. He makes a fine case for viewing Lafayette as a central figure in these processes, as symbol, as mediator, or as actor.”—Seymour Drescher, University of Pittsburgh

“Lloyd Kramer’s methodology is as interesting as his subject: Lafayette as a representative and symbol of major forces of his age. The book is far more than a biography, but it may also be read as an imaginative effort to create a new biographical mode — a kind of historical cubism, which differs from a chronologically unbroken analytic life the way Picasso’s Demoiselles d'Avignon differs from Monet’s Ladies in a Garden.”—Peter Paret, Institute for Advanced Study