Lafayette: The Making of an American Icon

In 1824 and 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette made a triumphal return to the United States, greeted by adoring Americans offering parades, speeches, and celebratory toasts. Fifty years after the American Revolution, a new generation of Americans was reckoning with the realities of sustaining a republic and constructing memories of the events that built the new nation.

On October 1, 2024, the American Philosophical Society welcomes Laura Auricchio, author of The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered, to mark the 200th anniversary of Lafayette’s 1824 visit to Philadelphia and the American Philosophical Society with a discussion of his life and legacy. Dr. Auricchio will be in conversation with Michelle McDonald, Director of the APS’s Library & Museum and they will discuss the Marquis’s reputation in the United States and in France, the ways that narratives of the Revolution were forming during this period in the Early Republic, and the Lafayette-mania that gripped the country in the wake of his return. 

Laura Auricchio is Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center and Professor of Art History at Fordham University. She received her BA summa cum laude from Harvard College and her Ph.D. with distinction at Columbia University. Laura joined Fordham in August 2019 after spending 17 years at The New School in Greenwich Village, where she served most recently as Vice Provost for Curriculum and Learning.

A specialist in the art and history of France and the United States in the Age of Revolution, Laura is an active scholar whose work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Fulbright, Whiting, and Earhart Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the New York Council for the Humanities, and the New York State Council for the Arts. In addition to dozens of articles, book sections, exhibition catalog entries, book reviews, exhibition reviews, op-eds, and other short-form writing, she has published one co-edited volume and two single-author books: Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2009; and The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered, published by Alfred A. Knopf, which won the 2015 American Library in Paris Book Award. She is currently working with the Chateau de Versailles on the first-ever exhibition dedicated to Labille-Guiard, and serving on the scientific committee of France in the Americas, a “collaborative bilingual digital library...which is the fruit of the cooperation between the National Library of France and 18 French, Canadian, American, and British cultural institutions and universities.”