A Guide to La Fayette’s Papers: Code
La Fayette was never one to write too much in code, but we see two episodes during his life where he relied on partially encoding his messages. The first one was in 1782 when he had just returned to France and his letters to Washington had to make the long (and potentially dangerous) journey across the ocean. His last letter in America was written on December 21, 1781, just off Boston, and does not use any code. His first letter back in France was written on January 18, 1782, in L’Orient. Both letters contain words that he would translate into ciphers in later letters. The first coded letter to Washington was written on March 30, 1782.
In a third letter, written between January 18 and March 30, 1782, La Fayette wrote:
the Next time I write to Your Excellency it Will Be in Cyphers and More particular.
“To George Washington from Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, 30 January 1782,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-07755. [This is an Early Access document from The Papers of George Washington. It is not an authoritative final version.] (04/13/2024)
Most editors have translated La Fayette’s codes and printed the text as it should be read, either with the ciphers written next to it, or without it or any other mentioning that code was used in the letter. To make this list, I relied mainly on the book The Letters of Lafayette to Washington, 1777-1799, edited by Louis Gottschalk (second printing, edited and revised by Louis Gottschalk and Shirley A. Bill, 1971) because here the cipher as well as the translation are printed side by side and this saved me a lot of going back and forth. When reading La Fayette’s correspondence, you actually do not really need to know his code, because, as I said, he seldomly wrote in code and his editors already did the translation for us. BUT – maybe you desire a deeper understanding of his writings, maybe you find an unpublished letter somewhere in an archive that uses code, maybe you want to up your roleplay and sound more like La Fayette – or maybe code is just your thing! If any of this applies, this post is for you.
The code La Fayette and Washington used in 1782 looks as follows:
We see La Fayette rely on code a second time in 1785 when he was discussing matters of religious tolerance in France (a matter dear to his heart) with Washington. The ciphers employed this time were a little different:
