The first time Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, arrived in the United States in 1777, the defining characteristic of both the French nobleman and the new nation for which he’d come to fight was their paucity of years, the one but a babe and the other barely more than a youth. When he returned for the last time, in 1824-25, just before its 50th birthday, America had matured into a sturdy, even rude adolescence and stood on the precipice of what would prove to be a boisterous and vigorous adulthood. But plain Gilbert du Motier, as he now was, had become an old man. Coming back all those years later, he and the country he’d helped birth hoped to prove to themselves and each other that the toil and sacrifice, the blood and tears shed, had been worth it and had not been in vain. As historian and National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser explains in The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution, his finely sketched, pleasingly lapidary, and economical study of Lafayette’s triumphant return to America, in this homecoming, host and visitor alike would be honored by his presence.

Inside Scoop: Big Beautiful rebrand, ‘Nixon-maxxing,’ Burnham’s burden

Mamdani’s bait-and-switch underscores perils of socialism’s promises

Inside Scoop: Genuinely un-American, fight for female sports, California chooses failure

President James Monroe’s invitation to Lafayette, extended on behalf of Congress, to venture across the Atlantic, arrived at a propitious moment. The erstwhile aristocrat’s political fortunes were at a low ebb. The revolutionary spirit was in retreat across the continent. The forces of reaction, particularly in the form of the hated Holy Alliance, ascendant. The French government, led by the restored Louis XVIII, had finally succeeded in driving Lafayette, one of France’s leading liberal political figures and a........

© Washington Examiner