08/22/2026
In 1825, during his final visit to the United States, the Marquis de Lafayette returned to the country he had helped fight for nearly fifty years earlier.
Lafayette was a young French aristocrat when he joined the American Revolution. He volunteered to fight alongside the American colonists and became one of George Washington’s trusted officers. He played an important role in the Yorktown campaign, where the British surrender in 1781 helped bring the Revolutionary War toward its end.
Decades later, Lafayette returned to America as an aging hero. During his grand tour of the United States, he visited all 24 states then in the Union and was welcomed by enormous crowds.
During his time in Boston, Lafayette visited Bunker Hill, the site of the famous 1775 battle. The battlefield carried enormous symbolic meaning for the American Revolution, and Lafayette reportedly took soil from the hill to carry back to France.
He later chose to be buried in Paris beneath soil brought from Bunker Hill. After his death in 1834, he was buried at Picpus Cemetery in Paris, with American soil covering his grave.
His connection to America did not end with his death. In 1917, when the United States entered World War I, American forces raised a flag at his grave and famously declared that America had come to repay the debt owed to the Frenchman who had crossed the Atlantic to fight for American independence.
The tradition of keeping an American flag at Lafayette’s grave has continued ever since, symbolizing the enduring friendship between France and the United States.
Lafayette’s story is remembered not only because he fought in a revolution, but because he chose to carry the memory of that cause with him for the rest of his life.
A man who crossed an ocean for America eventually became a permanent part of its history.
