An exceptional autograph letter by Lafayette on the nature and pursuit of liberty.
 
Autograph letter signed by Lafayette, written from La Grange, July 3, 1830, to Toussaint Joseph Borély, President of the Court of Appeals in the Southern French town of Aix-en-Provence.
 
Lafayette opens by thank Borély for his correspodence and exchanging their thoughts on a chamber candidate M. Thomas.
 
He then turns to the general mood of the country on the eve of the July revolution:
“I regret above all the state of the public spirit in a country in which I have seen such zeal for the cause of liberty, and in which the zeal was so often pushed to such exaggeration that it afflicted its true friends. We must hope that your beautiful region will repose itself one day in the true principles and veritable practice of this legal liberty, which in the end will triumph.”
 
In 1830, Lafayette was the last surviving general of the American revolution, but the values he had fought for were under threat. In the 1820s he had re-visited the United States and toured the growing and progressing Republic. But when he returned to France, Louis XVIII was dead, and Charles X was on the throne, trying to restrict civil liberties, censor the press and restore absolute rule.
 
By the summer of 1830 France reached fever pitch; the King had dissolved parliament, Chamber members were hostile, and the July Revolution loomed.
 
Among the men sympathetic to Lafayette’s cause of liberty were Toussaint Borely, President of the Court of Appeals in the Southern French cultural center of Aix-en-Provence, and a candidate for the representative in the chamber representing the South, M. Thomas.
 
However, as much desirous of the freedoms associated with representation, justice, and press freedoms, Lafayette feared the anarchy and chaos he had seen before in the French Revolution, the overthrow of the monarchy that led to bloodshed and a generation of war.
 
Letters such as this, where Lafayette speaks directly about freedom and revolution, are uncommon in commerce.