Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 46, November 13, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL A Declaration of Independence from the New British Empire: Donald Trump Won the Election—Don’t Let Them Steal It

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 46, November 13, 2020

- I. Biden Can’t Be Allowed To Steal the Election

- DEFEATING ELECTION PSY-OPS Hammer, Scorecard and Speaking the Truth

- HELGA LAROUCHE AND BARBARA BOYD Election 2020: If You Defend the Republic, You Will Keep It!

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST Trump Can Prove There Is an Attempt To Steal the Election

- His Royal Highness’ ‘Great Reset’: The Evil Green Dictatorship by Claudio Celani and Marcia Baker

- II. What is Leadership, Really?

- Worse Than ‘Weimar’! by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (2013)

- Think Like Beethoven: Fidelio, Lafayette and LaRouche—or, the Big Elephant in the Room by David Shavin

Defeat the British Coup

In the United States

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EDITORIAL

A Declaration of Independence from the New British Empire:

Donald Trump Won the Election—Don’t Let Them Steal It

Nov. 9—The growing rallies and “Trump Train” car caravans now spreading across the United States, in protest of the attempted theft of the Presidential election, have profound motivations to which LaRouche PAC and EIR are contributing clarity and purpose.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the fetters by which an oligarchy has bound them, and to assume their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to this action.

The elite oligarchy of the City of London banks and the British financial empire are now seeking to impose upon the United States their thoroughly plagiarized candidate, Joe Biden, as President. By doing so, they are continuing “a long train of abuses” destroying America’s industry, attacking its technological progress, maligning its scientific optimism and its missions in space, controlling its banks, and undermining its currency and credit in the world.

They have acquired control of American media by conglomerates based in the financial capitals of their Commonwealth or by their Anglophile partners in America. They have set cartels upon us to control our food and the very farmers who produce it.

They took away America’s Glass-Steagall Act, which regulated banking so as to provide our citizens and businesses with credit and which was an example to the world. Thus they visited us with a punishing financial crash which left us unemployed and unrecovered for a decade.

They have denied us a national bank, since the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, to build our infrastructure and stimulate our industry. They long ago destroyed the gold-reserve monetary and credit system which President Roosevelt initiated at the end of World War II, and by which our economy grew vigorously, we became more productive, our industrial skills and our middle-class standards dramatically improved. We have suffered from their financial speculation ever since.

They have denigrated all countries’ efforts for human exploration of space, especially America’s. They have promoted to us energy technologies so backward that even the founders of the republic would not have used them in their day—solar cells which blink out in night and fog, and claptrap windmills which fail in storms and calms alike. They have compelled us to use our natural gas in powering turbines to support the faltering electric supply of these throwbacks.

They have caused to rise up among us Wall Street banks of monstrous size, which take in our money and refuse to lend it out, and strike us with repeated ruin by their uncontrolled speculation. They control our central bank, which always reimburses these monsters for their losses, but not us for ours.

These abuses now threaten all sovereign nations: A global combination of central banks is moving to seize complete control of currencies and credit, and use that control to reverse the technological advance of humanity—to sacrifice the human population to “save the planet.”

Our President Donald Trump, almost alone among leaders of nations, has consciously and completely rejected this dictatorship of central banks over their sovereign governments, and has removed the United States from the Paris Climate Accord which is a major weapon of it. That Accord of 2015 was planned by the British Royal heir Charles, Prince of Wales, and his close friends and collaborators—former British central banker Mark Carney and City of London/Wall Street billionaire Sir Mike Bloomberg.

Now Charles and these associates of his, pulling along the IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and other central bankers, have in June of this year declared this Green New Deal to be the “Great Reset” of all financial and monetary affairs. British government officials across the spectrum, to deceive citizens, have given it the name of “Build Back Better”—as if from the COVID-19 pandemic. They have dictated this slogan to their always plagiarizing, would-be President Joe Biden, who faithfully adopted it for his halting campaign.

We will seize our rights, nonetheless. We will take back our right to regulate our banks, to have national banks for productive credit. We will drive our missions of space exploration to the utmost. We will negotiate with other nations for a new international credit system that will leave London’s financial oligarchy out and will bring industrialization to underdeveloped regions of the globe. We will especially work with China and its Belt and Road Initiative, and with other leading nations, such as Russia and India, to bring about these international changes and work on urgently needed global infrastructure projects.

We see that the nations of Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, Belarus, and others have all faced stolen elections, “color revolutions,” and outright coups like this in very recent years, and have defeated them; Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, is fighting an attempted color revolution against its President right now. We ask other nations to support a fair and lawful outcome to this American Presidential election, which President Trump has in fact, clearly won.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 46, November 13, 2020

Cover This Week

CGTN

One of dozens of ongoing rallies around the country protesting election fraud against President Donald Trump.

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DEFEAT THE BRITISH COUP IN THE UNITED STATES!

2 EDITORIAL

A Declaration of Independence from the New British Empire:

Donald Trump Won the Election—Don’t Let Them Steal It

I. BIDEN CAN’T BE ALLOWED TO STEAL THE ELECTION

5 DEFEATING ELECTION PSY-OPS

Hammer, Scorecard and Speaking the Truth

9 HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE AND BARBARA BOYD

Election 2020: If You Defend the Republic, You Will Keep It!

14 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Trump Can Prove There Is an Attempt to Steal the Election

21 His Royal Highness’ ‘Great Reset’: The Evil Green Dictatorship

by Claudio Celani and Marcia Baker

II. WHAT IS LEADERSHIP, REALLY?

23 Worse Than ‘Weimar’!

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

November 12, 2013

26 Think Like Beethoven: Fidelio, Lafayette and LaRouche—or, the Big Elephant in the Room

by David Shavin

I. Biden Can’t Be Allowed To Steal the Election

DEFEATING ELECTION PSY-OPS

Hammer, Scorecard and

Speaking the Truth

The following are excerpts taken from the LaRouche PAC Fireside Chat of Nov. 5, 2020 with guests Kirk Wiebe, a former senior analyst with the National Security Agency, and LPAC’s Barbara Boyd. The full video is available here.

LaRouchePAC-TV

Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, NSA.

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Kirk Wiebe: If you understand the seriousness of the nature of what the other side is doing, none of it is happenstance. This is all planned, orchestrated, and was planned a long time ago. I would also tell you there are some new aspects to it, because they’re hidden from the open source information that most of us are privy to. But there are some parts that have been well known, but not used in the public domain. Let me refer to something called psy-op; PSY, standing for psychological, and OP standing for operations. Some people say psy-ops. Psy-ops, I’m going to read to you the military, Department of Defense definition; it’s not long. But where I use the word “foreign,” audience, I want you to substitute the word “Republican” or “conservative,” whichever one you’d like. Here’s what it says:

Psychological operations, or psy-op, are intended to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences [again, conservative audiences] to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments [read Trump administration], organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce attitudes or behaviors favorable to the originator’s objectives.

That is precisely what we’ve been seeing going on in the media. Some people call it propaganda. But this is directly extrapolated from the Department of Defense definition. Now a component of psy-ops is information operations, and that is the media. So, just to put all that into context, so that people can get a sense of just how diabolical and purposeful all of this—all of it during Trump’s last four years—has been purposeful.

Another point. I just mentioned that some of the efforts being used by the other side are clandestine or hidden from public view. One very important effort that people are working on right now to bring to the attention of the Trump administration, is an information technology capability that operates via the internet, called the Hammer, and an application that works with the Hammer, called Scorecard. Hammer does a lot of things, including calling up computers and downloading files without a user ever knowing it. But the part I want to emphasize to you tonight is Scorecard, because it was designed with the express purpose of changing vote totals on the fly. Meaning, not pre-loaded anywhere in a computer, but actually targeting the reporting of precinct data upward to the state level over the internet. There’s no way to air-gap it at this point. This is the way data is transmitted; we all use the internet.

When the packets are recognized, and the packets are little bits of information that make up a report of voting between two candidates, or a group of candidates. It can be defined as small, large, whatever. The packets that make up that transmission over the internet can be opened, looked at, recognized for who they’re going to and what they contain. The data inside each packet can be switched; it can be changed, in microseconds! Zipped back up, so to speak—imagine putting a jacket on and zipping it up—and sending it on its way. So that the receiver never really perceives a delay. There’s always a little delay. Somebody sends you an email; it takes a few seconds before it gets to your computer. So, nobody’s the wiser. But the data has been changed.

CGTN

The Trump re-election campaign is challenging ballot fraud in key battleground states. Shown, ballot-counting in Georgia, November 6, 2020.

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Scorecard works based on an algorithm that needs a 3 percent or less disparity or difference between two candidates. So that if there is a 20-point difference, or a 10-point difference, it’s not going to function. Why? The designer of this did not want to be obvious. If you go around instantaneously changing totals from 10 percent to nothing, or even losing, people are going to notice that and say what the heck is going on? But if I open that window to just a little bit, a 3 percent difference, then any change that comes in is more acceptable to observers and less suspect, if you will.

This is the way Scorecard works. Scorecard is working right now in Georgia, in Nevada, in a number of these states. And it’s not the only tool that’s being used. Another one is that fake logon authorities have been implemented in the counting control systems, which are Windows computers, where the votes are counted. So that a remote user having the right password, can log on and change data that way as well.

What I’m trying to say is, yeah, ballots are being dropped off at the Post Office, and backdated to 3 November, even though they arrived on 4 November. A lot of that ballot manipulation is going on, but this [the computer manipulations] is the less-visible aspect that I want people to be aware of. It is extremely powerful, and it needs to be stopped.

The good news is, it records data, and if we can bust this open with the help of the administration and the tools of some agencies, we will find the evidence that votes were changed. So, it’s another great boon to the team of lawyers if we can get this available.

CC/Mark Taylor

Dick Morris, former advisor to former President Bill Clinton.

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And finally, I’d like to read to you some wisdom that I came across earlier today by Dick Morris, who happened to show up on Newsmax. I ran across an article—by the way, for those of you who do not know, Dick Morris is a former advisor for former President Bill Clinton. He’s been appearing on Newsmax on our side, so to speak, and he reminds us of this important Constitutional fact: The people who are in charge of elections are not governors, they’re not even Secretaries of States. Secretaries of States are just supposed to carry out election law in a state. The actual laws are defined and laid out and implemented by the legislature of each state. I’m going to read you what he suggests,—an action point—and I just think it’s very clever and it’s very important that you hear it. Here it is:

We have to move the fight from the Executive branch of the states to the Legislative branch of the states. In all of these four key battleground states [and he lists North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin] there are Democratic governors interfering in the process. But both houses of the legislature in those states are Republican! Those guys need to wake up!

And if you live in those states, you need to call your State Representative and your State Senator—not Federal, but State—and say, “Get on the ball! Get your butts in gear! Get to the state capital; demand that the legislature be called into session and take over the counting process in your state for which you are ultimately responsible.”

Question: I want to ask this question on behalf of two different people. How does Trump prove in court, that (1) Scorecard exists? and (2) is manipulating this election?

And then the other person put it, how do you know that it’s currently being used?

So those were the questions that were directed at you first.

Wiebe: The reason I know is that I have communication with the guy that invented it, for the government. It was invented in the early 2000s, to be used in the war against terrorism. A copy, at least, was taken out of authorized usage, moved to a clandestine location, and used for political purposes: namely, the gathering of information that could be used to help people who wanted to blackmail other people. We know that the Trump family was surveilled by this illegal surveillance mechanism. We know that many members of Congress, the Supreme Court, members of churches, synagogues, various religious organizations all over the country; over 400 law firms; over 5 million businesses worldwide. It’s just extensive and the list goes on and on.

So, the question is, how do we get it, such that the data, or the evidence of what it is doing can be presented in court? And therein lies the challenge. We’re trying to inform the administration about the existence of this capability. In order to position it so that it can be used, we need to get the inventor, who at one time did work for the Department of Defense, the intelligence community—get his clearances reinstated, and brought back into government quickly. This can be done in one day. This is not a long process. The President could order and make it happen very, very quickly.

EIRNS

Pro-Trump rally at the Michigan statehouse in Lansing, November 7, 2020.

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He will need a team of technical people, to help him put together the right information in a form that a lawyer can understand and present in court. And then there’s the data from the device, the storage of its operational history, a log, if you will, a log of its activities would be part of that evidence. And it would show, without a measure of doubt, the proof that numbers were changed, and where they were changed, in what state, what precinct, all of that.

So this is a work in progress, and something we’re trying to do. And wish us success in getting it done.

Question: I’ve got a question for Kirk on this Scorecard. I guess Wisconsin is one of the states that’s supposed to have a recount. Could that Scorecard be used on that? And would it be noticeable right up front?

Wiebe: On the issue of—can Scorecard be used during the recount process?—and I can think of no reason that would stop it, because a recount is going to be just that: It’s a simple recount, and totals again are going to be sent up, somewhere. And as they travel over the internet, the Scorecard can pick ’em off, change ’em, and let ’em go on their merry way.

So, yeah! It’s a concern, it’s a worry. And we’ve got to disable it. Stop it.

Barbara Boyd: Let me raise just one issue, where I think it becomes kind of interesting: There’s this kind of screen shot from the Secretary of State of Wisconsin during that critical four hour period, reflecting precincts and wards in the black areas of Milwaukee, about 14 or 15 wards, in which the screen shot that was taken by people of what was on the Secretary of State’s website showed that in those wards you had many, many, many more votes than you had registered voters, sometimes by a quantity of over 200-400 percent more votes than voters. In other words, registered voters in this ward is 200 people, you had 400 votes.

That obviously is extremely problematical and probably was an open admission of what was going on, in terms of stuffing the ballot box. There was a great deal of outrage: People noticed it, they called up the Secretary of State; they said, “What the hell is going on here?” And by the morning, in fact, the numbers were altered, to bring the vote in line with the registered voters. The figures were completely changed.

Do you think that Scorecard could have been used in that particular instance, to sort of make everything “add up”?

Wiebe: It doesn’t sound right to me. Someone would have to show me that that would be feasible. But because the system is not programmed to work in that way, which is kind of a reversal rather than an add, it’s kind of subtraction.

Question: This is Karen from Columbus. I want to know why it’s so difficult to get ahold of the Trump organization, because I would think that if you’re going to the people who have his ear, there certainly are a lot of them. Why is it so difficult?

Wiebe: I’ve lived it for a year and a half. We have been trying to get the attention of the administration for a year and half. I am not personally, or wasn’t until recently, in a communications path that would get me close to the White House inner circle. I have spoken to Sidney Powell a couple of times. We have her attention. But who she has to go to, I don’t know. And I don’t know if there’s yet another inner, inner circle that she has to break through.

So it’s kind of like the Temple Mount: How do you enter the gate? How many guards are there? I’ve noticed this. Even in my career at NSA, I would tell you that the higher you go up in any organization, there are guards built in, to prevent you from getting there. And then you have secret agendas and personal agendas, because people in the midway might be afraid of something you might say to the Big Guy, and pretty soon you have people even filtering what the Big Guy hears, because they don’t want him to get too excited—so you get humans interfering with communications at so many levels. It is just difficult!

I don’t have a simple answer for that.

Question: How do we overcome the psy-op and how do we boost the morale of people, particularly conservatives, right-wingers, pro-Trump people, Republicans—how can we improve the morale of those who have been affected by it? I notice that a lot of this is going on in social media, especially Facebook and Twitter.

Wiebe: Thank you for the question. To me it surrounds the word truth. Morale, I think comes from people who are being told the truth. It derives from that, because people then have a sense of confidence and well-being. People can’t deal with intangibles and obscure things, and things that aren’t quite right, because you never can explain what the motive is.

So, Bill and I and a couple of other people, have talked about the need for a truth outlet. It would be a kind of a news organization, that would filter, measure the quality of organizations putting out information, and then filter—kind of like what Facebook is doing, but we would do it with a public algorithm, which would expose how we’re doing it. As long as we stay ahead of the bad guys, you know, information has got to be in the public sphere.

So I think LaRouche is trying to be just such an organization, and it’s why they’re holding these events such as tonight. There’s so much bad information out there and so many hidden agendas, as you know. Morale, I really believe, if a result of getting the truth. And then, also, connecting to organizations, or people who form organizations, who value the truth as you do. Then you can build camaraderie, trust; you can have conversations that you know feature 99.9 percent truth. That builds morale. We need to come together. We’re too fragmented. And LaRouche is helping to get that done.

HELGA LAROUCHE AND BARBARA BOYD

Election 2020: If You Defend the Republic, You Will Keep It!

These are edited transcripts of presentations made to the LaRouche PAC National Town Hall, by Barbara Boyd of LaRouche PAC and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, President and founder of the Schiller Institute, on November 7, 2020. The meeting was moderated by Dennis Speed. Subheads have been added. A video of the entire meeting is available here.

C-SPAN

Sidney Powell, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, broke into the major media with the story of the domestic use of the Hammer and Scorecard vote tampering technology in this election cycle.

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The Vote Fraud Operations

Barbara Boyd: First, let me update you on the present situation as it stands on the vote fraud operations.

You all probably saw that yesterday Sidney Powell, who is Michael Flynn’s attorney, broke the story on Hammer and Scorecard on Lou Dobbs, a widely watched Fox program. We’re putting up Kirk Wiebe’s exposition of this from Thursday in a Zoom conference call hosted by your hosts here today. I hope that Kirk will tell you more about that if he can today.

Another voting systems case being examined involves a company called Dominion Voting Systems, which may have been caught—as they say—in flagrante, in the act, in both Michigan and Georgia, changing votes, getting caught. Then, what happened is, votes mysteriously went back and forth between Congressional candidates, and between Biden and the President. It’s presently unclear to me how this operation intersects with Hammer and Scorecard, although Kirk [Wiebe] may have something more to say on that.

In Nevada, which sent mail-in ballots out to every registered voter, the Republicans did a survey in which they proved that at least 3,000 out-of-state voters or dead people voted, and they’ve referred their case on that to the Department of Justice, which presumably can undertake the relatively tedious task of examining voter rolls filled with dead people and people who have moved, but somehow managed to vote. Although the campaign may have to do that themselves. That is the tack which we found, as [moderator] Dennis [Speed] referenced, in 1976 going way back, where registration rolls are simply never cleaned up, because every time you try and clean them up, it’s alleged by the Democrats that you’re involved in voter suppression.

The major cities in each of the battleground states—Milwaukee, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Detroit—are famous for traditional vote fraud practices, such as the one I just mentioned. Dead people voting, late-night ballot stuffing, and other forms of fraud, aided and abetted this year under the cover of the emergency conditions of crisis created by the COVID epidemic. As I said on the Thursday night LaRouche PAC Fireside Chat, such emergency changes in the law under conditions of economic or pandemic-type crises in this case, psychological shocks to the population, is exactly how Hitler assumed power in Germany under emergency conditions.

One hypothesis on the patterns here which I think is worth entertaining, is going way back to the Iowa Democratic primaries of this year. Normally the way it happens in the United States is, the Iowa caucuses precede the New Hampshire, at which point, more or less, one candidate achieves front-runner status, and money flows accordingly into his or her campaigns. If you recall, Bernie Sanders was widely thought to have won the Iowa caucuses. Somehow, there was a complete computer glitch, which ended up in the caucus not being called until way into the New Hampshire season. They said it was a software problem. I think a question which has to be raised is, was Bernie Sanders defrauded in the same way by the Democrats, as they are attempting to defraud Donald Trump right now? In Iowa, what happened was, surprisingly after all of that, the guy I call “the upstart from Mackenzie Consulting,” Mayor Pete [Buttigieg], ended up being the announced winner, which was a highly irregular occurrence.

CC/Michael Vadon

Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, was defrauded by his own party in the Iowa caucuses.

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The Political Backdrop

The other thing I want to focus on in my short report today, but what I want to emphasize, is the political situation which is the backdrop to all of this, and has been the backdrop to the coup.

Last night—and all day yesterday, really—Joe Biden had his campaign calling every single media book in the world; particularly AP, who they pounded, demanding that the Associated Press, the traditional media caller of the election, regardless of whether the vote is counted or not, to demand that they announce right then and there—which they did—that Biden was the new President of the United States. That call was being made all through the afternoon, according to various reports. Finally, at 11 p.m. last night, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris appeared, to talk to a bunch of cars. This is sort of how coups work, and a coup in the COVID environment—that’s how this turns out to work. You’re trying to create an overwhelming psychological warfare operation in which the result seems obvious, completely intact. There’s no way to resist it; this is really what happened. So, people feel isolated, overwhelmed, or they resort—which is part of the scenario which is being run here—to a frustrated flight into violence, and wipe themselves out.

Gage Skidmore

Media-declared “President-elect” Joe Biden is part of a psywar operation telling us that resistance is futile.

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At the press conference, as significantly, Biden announced that what his mandate was, was for the Green New Deal, his approach to COVID, and overcoming systemic racism. Today, when Rudy Giuliani was trying to hold a press conference about how every Republican poll watcher was effectively barred from the polls in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, despite a court order allowing them in, the Associated Press called the Presidential race yet again for Biden, and that call was actually affirmed by Fox. Giuliani got completely drowned out, trying to tell people what exactly was going on.

On Thursday, I called attention to the simple fact that Joe Biden’s campaign slogan—“Build Back Better”—like everything else with this guy, was stolen. It was stolen from a slogan of the World Economic Forum, otherwise known as Davos. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum has adopted Biden’s campaign slogan for using COVID as a cover to impose what they call a new regime of “reinventing capitalism in the face of COVID.”

If it isn’t clear to you by now, these are the people who actually own the Democratic Party in the United States, lock, stock, and barrel. This is Bloomberg; Mark Carney from England, who’s running this through BlackRock; this is Google, with Eric Schmidt. This is [New York Governor] Andrew Cuomo, who said exactly the same thing: “We’re going to reimagine the state of New York in the wake of COVID.” That’s another term which is being used explicitly in the Davos publicity campaign. I would assert for you that the Democratic Party, to the extent that it wasn’t that already, has now become the party of overt fascism.

To give you just a taste of what I’m talking about here, [Ezekiel] “Zeke” Emmanuel, from the Obama administration, the guy who was the death panel guy for Obamacare, is the main advisor to Joe Biden concerning COVID. I’m willing to bet that if you actually listen, you’re going to wonder how many older folks will get prioritized for a vaccine, which will not be fully produced until significant numbers of the same older people have died off. If you recall, Zeke Emmanuel uses this metric which he calls the “quality of life metric,” how many good years do you actually have left.

Mike Bloomberg, who’s essential to this whole thing, got caught on videotape saying virtually the same thing. He was sitting shiva as mayor of New York, and he told people outright:

We’ve reached a limit as to what we can afford under our model of the economy in terms of the Baby Boomer population which is about to hit its older segment and older stride in numbers which are untold. We simply can’t afford to treat them. We can’t afford to deal with their diseases.

Clockwise from top left: YouTube; CC/New York National Guard; Gage Skidmore

The Democratic Party has become the party of overt fascism: Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (top left) with his Death panels; New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (top right) and his central bankers’ “reimagining” America under their own dictatorship; and former New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg (bottom), who tells us, “We’ve reached a limit as to what we can afford.”

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These mechanisms have already largely been put in place, through the City of London, through BlackRock, through Mark Carney, through Mike Bloomberg, and other central bankers. So that any entity or industry which wants to exist in the world, has to conform to Green standards if they’re going to get any money.

To give you a flavor of this, I highlight just one statement from the quote—and this is up on the World Economic Forum’s website. “To Build Back Better, We Must Reinvent Capitalism,” that’s the statement I’m quoting from. They claim that the riots in the United States took the form that they did, because they represented a discontinuity created by COVID. Strange statement. Then they say, “Other possible COVID-induced discontinuities ahead range from a full-blown financial crisis to a steep change in the rate of global energy transition. Some analysts now reckon that fossil fuel demand may have peaked in 2019 for good.” Don’t need a lot of energy if people are dying.

On the good side, I can report to you that people are out in car rallies throughout the nation, and that part of the peaceful protests we have called for, and which must increase massively, are really underway. Our job right now will be to massively publicize the building and resounding case as to the stealing of the election, and to demonstrate to people the deeper implications of the world fascist program at the heart of the coup against this President, and why Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws for Economic Recovery must become the battle cry for saving the republic right now. So, we’ll be working further on this through the week.

The Nation-State vs. the Globalists:

Some History

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Hello all of you, and all the people watching.

Since you, [Dennis Speed,] mentioned Nikolaus of Cusa, who may not be familiar to many people, he was a great thinker of the 15th century; he was the first person to develop the concept of the nation-state. In most of history, especially in European, Western history, but also many other cultures around the world, up to the 15th century globalists were in power. I mean, an early form of globalist. This was the international oligarchy, the top aristocracy, the monarchs, who would all hang together, they would all serve each other’s interests, and would be very little concerned with the people of the region they happened to be the king or the baron or whatever of. They thought of themselves as a privileged class who would have a big effort to keep the mass of the population backward, because stupid people are easier to rule over. That was just the normal condition over the entire period until the 15th century.

Left: Andrea Bregno; right: engraving by Jacques Etienne Pannier

Nikolaus of Cusa (left), the first to develop the concept of the nation-state, implemented first by King Louis XI of France (right).

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And then, there was a coincidence of several developments: In France, Louis XI, the first monarch of a different character; the writings of Nikolaus of Cusa who developed, for the first time, after many struggles—and this is a very rich and complicated story—how the concept of sovereignty of the nation-state developed through many battles, which we have written about in the past.

Now, why is the nation-state something different than this globalist conception? Nikolaus developed the idea that the governor has to have the consent of the governed, and that it is the reciprocal relationship between the government and the representative who represents both the government and the interests of the people, and the large number of people voting for these representatives. So this was the first time you had any kind of participation of the individual in government. Before, it was all decided by the ruling elites, by the privileged aristocracy and so forth.

Emmanuel Leutze

“George Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth,” in 1778.

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The American Revolution

So this was a very important concept, because that is what was then the dividing issue for the next 600 years, up to the present time, and the American Revolution, which was, as you know, not an accidental occurrence, but a conscious project of the most progressive Europeans who wanted to escape the idea of that oligarchical system in Europe, because the different monarchies were so entrenched that it was not really possible to change.

When the American Revolution occurred, which was explicitly against the British Empire, which was basically going crazy over the loss of their most important colony, this was a breakthrough. It was a complete watershed in universal history, because the American Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, established for the first time this idea that the government is devoted and obliged to the governed, to the common good, not only of the present generation, but of all future generations.

In the Declaration of Independence, you have this beautiful conception of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This idea of “happiness,” came from Gottfried Leibniz. It was not just being “happy,” like feeling good, but happiness in the Leibnizian sense, means that every individual has the right to a fulfilled life, to develop all potentialities of all the gifts given to him, and that he has the right to develop all of them, again, to the service of the common good of the present and future generations.

The American Revolution was recognized as something absolutely incredible by all the republican forces in Europe. Friedrich Schiller, for example, after whom the Schiller Institute is named, was absolutely convinced that this was the concept that had to be brought to Europe. The beginning of the French Revolution was intended to replicate exactly the ideas of the American Revolution. Unfortunately this failed, in large part through a manipulation, intelligence methods like the ones Dennis [Speed] and Kirk [Wiebe] were talking about, in the form of the Jacobin Terror, which was a reign of terror, leading to the decapitation of people by the guillotine and so forth. The French Revolution, unfortunately, failed.

Schiller, at one point, even wanted to emigrate to the United States, because he thought that that was where the future of humanity was really occurring.

George Peter Alexander Healy

President John Quincy Adams promoted a system of alliance of perfectly sovereign nation-states around the world.

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Now, at that time, the American Revolution was known to be the “beacon of hope, the temple of liberty,” and when John Quincy Adams was President, he wanted to promote a system of an alliance of perfectly sovereign nation-states, around the world. This was so precious, that the British Empire, naturally, did everything possible to reverse that: in the War of 1812 and then the Civil War in which the British Empire was allied with the Confederacy.

When they realized they could not win the American colonies back militarily, they started to subvert the establishment by saying, we have to convince the American elite that we run the world together in the form of a British Empire: Create a unipolar world—this is what Harley [Schlanger] was referring to with the PNAC, the Project for a New American Century. And essentially, what the Bush, Obama, and now Biden, apparatus represents; it’s in the tradition of these old globalists, it’s just a different, modern version, but they think they run the world; they think they rig the system such that the speculators make money and that the interest of the masses you can forget. So this is really what is at stake.

Civilization’s Future Is at Stake in this Election

The significance of this incredible election fraud right now, is historic. I encourage everybody listening to go back to the spirit of the American Revolution. This is the same fight. Because if this can be done to the United States, if a method that has been developed by this apparatus, to manipulate elections around the world, to make the world’s democracies a farce, if there are no more [genuine] elections, then what is democracy? What are human rights? This all becomes completely farcical.

If this can be allowed in the United States, there will be no freedom, no democracy, no human rights anywhere in the world if these people succeed. That is very clear. Look at their policy statements, look at the intention of Obama, and what Hillary Clinton was up to at the point she was fortunately defeated. These people have been, and continue to be, on a rampage of war confrontation against Russia and China. We would have war pretty soon if they were to come back to power.

At stake here, is really the future of civilization. Go back to the spirit of the American Revolution. Keep the fight going until President Trump has the time to bring this to the Supreme Court; get all the state legislators into the act, because that’s actually their duty in all the contested states. And publish the documents of this incredible treason! There is absolutely the time and the chance to turn this around.

It’s very important not to capitulate, not to be intimidated by this incredible apparatus, but to really be courageous right now—like my husband was! He was a presidential candidate eight times: He got close several times to making a major breakthrough. They stole the votes every time from him! Did that mean that he gave up? Absolutely not! Because he knew what he was fighting for, was the soul of America and the good of the entire human species, and that is agapē, the love for humanity which you have to mobilize in yourself right now.

The Role of Optimism

Boyd: I think what Helga just said is the driving philosophic standpoint, which is how we raise the level of the battle for people, so that they can get through this thing. In war, you have to have an optimistic outlook if you’re going to win. The other side depends upon cynicism, pessimism. And it’s in the very ideas of the American Revolution, the conspiracy of the American Revolution, the fact that the American Revolution, through an educated populace, stood up against the dominant power in the world, the people who controlled everything, against overwhelming force. If you looked at a battle map then and asked, “Who’s got control, here?” you would not necessarily say, just looking at arrays of forces, “the Americans are going to win, here.” But we won, through the ideas of the American Revolution, the ideas that stretch, as Helga said, back to the European Renaissance. It was that superior form of thinking and optimism, never giving up—like the President is talking about—which won the day. So I think that’s essential.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Trump Can Prove There Is an Attempt To Steal the Election

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s November 5, 2020 interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche by Harley Schlanger. Subheads and embedded links have been added. The video of the webcast is available.

CGTN

Ballot-counting in Georgia, November 6, 2020.

Left: LaRouchePAC-TV; right: Karl-Theodor-Molinari-Stiftung

Left: Roger Stone; right: Willy Wimmer

EIRNS/Don Clark

Pro-Trump rally in Trenton, New Jersey, November 8, 2020.

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Harley Schlanger: It’s now two days after the U.S. election. Things are still very unsettled in the United States. The line is coming out that Joe Biden is on the verge of getting the electoral votes needed to win the Presidency. However there have been a lot of irregularities. President Trump is filing some lawsuits. I know you have the latest picture. What’s the latest that you can tell us?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: If everything goes right, President Trump should be able to prove that there was an unbelievable attempt to steal the election from him. Many people have come out, Paul Craig Roberts, Willy Wimmer, Roger Stone, and several others, all pointing to the incredible event in Wisconsin and Michigan, where Trump had a lead, and then, all of a sudden, the Biden vote jumped, in one case by 130,000 votes, and 0 in the Trump column!

Then there was a phenomenon that was quite unusual for a U.S. national election. The rural results usually come in late because it’s more tedious to collect. In this election, the rural election result in the swing states, the crucial states in deciding the vote, came in first. In many larger cities, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Atlanta, and in Pennsylvania, the urban vote came in late, after a certain delay factor. So, it was as if whoever was rigging the vote had to see by how much of a margin Trump was ahead, so they could decide how many additional votes were needed to tip it for Biden.

These things are blatant. They’re obvious. And one can only characterize it in one way: That the coup attempt that has been going on against first, candidate Trump in 2016, and then throughout the entire four years of his Presidency, this attempt to steal the election from him is just the latest phase of this coup.

When you listen to the mainstream media, the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, CNN, all of these media show an amazing degree of Gleichschaltung [lock-step]. The international media is portraying Trump as an out-of-control populist making things up. When you look at the details, there is no question that this is what’s going on. I really urge our international audience to not fall for this gleichgeschaltet, the imposition of conformity from above. This is what the media were like under Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels’ rule.

White House/Tia Dufour

Neither President Trump nor those who voted for him are giving in to the vote fraud against him, as demonstrated in the continuing “Stop the Steal” mass rallies and car caravans in state capitals across the country, including this one in Trenton, New Jersey on November 8, 2020.

EIRNS/Don Clark

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The polls that predicted, especially in the last period, a major victory for Biden, were, to say the least, caught off guard, again—like they were in 2016. One can read this in several ways. Was it that the pollsters were, again, so arrogant and did not think, or that because of the hysterical anti-Trump mood being whipped up, that people would not openly express their actual vote preference? Or was it part of an effort to demoralize the potential Trump voters by getting across to them that “it’s not worth your effort, Trump is going to lose anyway.” In any case, the polls were utterly wrong—again—like they were in 2016.

This is a fierce battle. We know that this was planned way back. The Project Integrity crowd predicted this. I think that you have a 50/50 split in the American population. You cannot eradicate the people who voted for Trump! So there is actually a very good chance that this battle can be won, and I think you should all be part of helping to accomplish exactly that.

Harley Schlanger: There are already legal challenges that have been filed in a couple of states. And I think the point you just made about this being pre-planned is really worth emphasizing: That we were told, weeks before the election, that the mail-in voting would create a change, that Trump would be ahead on election eve, which is exactly what happened; but then, as the mail-in ballots were counted, it would turn it around so that Biden would be on top, and that Trump would then claim fraud. So they all had this pre-planned. But they also were preparing for the possibility that they would have to put “boots on the street,” whether it’s Antifa or Black Lives Matter, to create chaos.

Rigging of Media Coverage for War

Now, Helga, I think one of the things that’s really interesting is the contrast between what Trump did, with a whole series of rallies, of very large crowds, versus Biden, who was basically talking to his staff members, and barely came out of his basement. I don’t think this has been covered in Europe at all, has it?

Zepp-LaRouche: No. There was no reporting about the caravans, the mobilization of the Trump base. And just today, after the election, the Münchner Merkur, the newspaper in Munich, had for the first time the story that Biden obviously has lost it, because he mixed up his granddaughter and his son, he couldn’t remember Trump’s name, he mentioned “George, George something”—so there is a clear awareness, and all the politically interested people, who did watch the videos of the campaign, naturally, knew about it. But there is very clearly the game-plan that Biden is not supposed to be President—except maybe for a couple of weeks—then Kamala Harris is supposed to become the President, and with her, naturally, the entire apparatus of the Obama/Hillary Clinton crowd. And that would mean clearly an escalation toward war against Russia and China.

Both photos: Gage Skidmore

Even if the election fraud is successful, Joe Biden will still not function as the President. Instead, Kamala Harris will take over, bringing back the Obama-era apparatus to destroy the Republic and prosecute war with Russia and China.

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You should remember—and this is also something which is lost on the international audience, because of this incredible rigging of the media—that the most important strategic issue is the question of war and peace. Anybody who is facing reality, must understand that in the age of thermonuclear weapons, if you have any kind of superpower confrontation, that means the extinction of civilization.

I think many people, also on the left of the spectrum, like former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel, understand that. I was just listening to a program with him on Consortium News, and he made the absolutely correct point that if you were to have a Biden Presidency, a war with China is almost certain. Look at the war deployment encircling Russia, encircling China, the effort to expand NATO into the Indo-Pacific, the confrontation around Taiwan, the South China Sea—a Biden Presidency would go to strategic confrontation very rapidly.

CC/Brookings Institution

Norman Eisen, a Brookings Senior Fellow, served on the legal staff of the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment of President Trump. Here he chats with the World Bank’s Sheila Khama.

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It’s important that people really re-study, and think, and not be ideologically opposed to Trump, because that’s what the media are telling you to do. The real issue is: With what President of the United States do you have a chance to have a peaceful relationship with Russia? Hopefully, Trump would also be able to walk back on his accusations against China, which have been completely unfounded. That that has to be remedied. But with the Biden-Harris crowd, there is absolutely no way to have peaceful relationships with the other major nuclear powers.

People have to really re-think this whole thing, and not be manipulated by the biggest media manipulation I have seen in my life.

Harley Schlanger: Helga, one of the interesting points that we’ve raised, was also raised by Roger Stone—the fact that the people running the Transition Integrity Project and the Voter Integrity Project are the same people who were involved in regime change and color revolutions. One person in particular, Norman Eisen, wrote a book called, The Democracy Playbook: Preventing and Reversing Democratic Backsliding which reads like exactly what they’re doing with the Trump-Biden election, but they already ran this in Ukraine. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Embassy of Ukraine in Washington

Victoria Nuland, former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, shown with Andriy Parubiy in Washington on February 26, 2015. Parubiy was rewarded with the chairmanship of the Ukrainian parliament for leading actions against the legitimate government in the 2014 coup.

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Zepp-LaRouche: Yes! I think that the Maidan scenario, which was applied against the legitimate government in Ukraine, with the attempt to put in a neo-Nazi government, with the help of Victoria Nuland, and Biden, who at that time was the point man. Biden was then also in cahoots with the Obama interventionist wars in the Middle East. That was the model of the color revolution, which was attempted in many countries around the world. In Eastern Europe, it was attempted against Russia and failed; it was attempted against China, first with the Yellow Umbrellas and then later with Hong Kong. It’s now being done in Belarus and was attempted with the Arab Spring—that same method, according to the playbook of Gene Sharp, which is now being played out inside the United States.

Anybody who studies the method of destabilization, of financing the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), of having endless resources to give people funds for posters, travel, whatever they need, can see that that’s the method being deployed right now.

Maybe it’s not exactly related, but the George Soros machine has now also been successful in decriminalizing drugs in Oregon completely, so that you have now heroin, opium, it’s all legal, or it’s not criminal any more, to use. That is a method of empire, of trying to control the population, and the apparatus which is behind it is really that of world government. It’s not something limited to one country, but it is the effort to impose a global dictatorship, where the populations are being manipulated, the populations are supposed to be docile, through drug use and entertainment, and so forth—it’s a method behind that, and I think people have to really study that in great detail.

A Global Digital Currency: the ‘Great Reset’

Harley Schlanger: What you just mentioned in terms of world government becomes very interesting, because there’s been little or no discussion in the campaign, especially from the Biden side, of economic policy—what would they do—other than the Green New Deal. And yet, in the background, there’s a very distinct and serious move toward this global digital currency policy, which is precisely a “regime-change in finance,” as they call it themselves: How dangerous is this, this move toward a global digital currency?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think it’s fully operational, and it’s something which people really should oppose. Because it is the instrument of,— it goes along with the NSA/GCHQ total surveillance state.

Right now, they are talking openly about how to maximize the profits of the speculators. The show was given away by JPMorgan Chase, which put out in a newsletter to their clients that more lockdowns because of COVID-19 are very welcomed—it’s not so bad if the industries collapse, because then the governments will have to give more stimulus packages. And these stimulus packages, naturally, will go to the big banks, and therefore, they make the stock market and securities market go up, and therefore, people can make more profit. That’s the basic message which they have put out.

That just shows you that they have zero concern about real production. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons why they don’t like Trump, is that Trump represents the potential that he would go back to a real industrialization program for the United States, and eventually work with other countries doing the same thing.

ECB/Alessia Di Padova

Christine Lagarde, formerly Chair and Managing Director of the IMF and now President of the European Central Bank (ECB), has just announced that the ECB is fully prepared to create a digitized euro.

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Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank (ECB) and former head of the IMF, has just said that the ECB is fully preparing to create a digitized euro, and that all the other major central banks, the seven largest central banks in the world, are moving at high speed to prepare digital currencies to go on the market by spring of 2021, and that is then supposed to be the “Great Reset.” And naturally, they say, this will not immediately mean the elimination of cash, but that is just a temporary means of putting people at ease.

China has already very much digitized payment via smart phone, to pay all your bills, order taxis, all of this in China is already much, much further developed than in the West.

But the difference is that China has an economy which is geared toward the common good, to increase the average income, without anybody being able to debate that they have pulled 850 million people out of poverty. They are right now—and Xi Jinping has taken personal charge of this—trying to alleviate all the rest of severe poverty in the farthest corners in China. And China is the only growing economy under COVID-19 conditions. While all the other major economies are collapsing this year, China has managed to get its economy back on a growth path. It’s moving to increase the middle class, to increase the buying power of its own population. If you have then such a thing like digitization of currency, it’s not detrimental, or it doesn’t have to be detrimental to the interests of the people.

But if you have a society where the speculators are supposed to get everything, and the middle class is being destroyed—just contrast this idea of digitizing all the currencies, for regime change to what the central bankers and main leading financial players discussed already last year at Jackson Hole, Wyoming—a regime change whereby the central banks would basically take over from the governments. They want to have not only monetary expansion—because it turns out that quantitative easing is not enough to keep this bubble going—now they want to have fiscal stimulus, meaning that the governments themselves have to put in money basically to keep the profits of the big banks and speculators going.

We have a pandemic, still going on, basically out of control. Infection rates have resulted in almost all European countries going into lockdown again, or at least a severe reduction in what people can do.

Then the hunger crisis: Seven million people have died already this year of hunger. David Beasley, the Executive Director of the World Food Programme, said that if there is not an immediate change, meaning providing at least $5 billion, which is the proverbial “peanuts,” 30 million more people will die in the next several months. Next year, if this is not reversed, there is the danger of 260 million people dying of hunger!

Right now, nothing of that is being addressed by these monetarist schemes. Digital currencies just mean a complete depopulation policy.

The Great Reset in this context means that all financing into anything but green technologies will be stopped: You will only have financing of solar, wind, biomass, and similar things, and it would be, basically, the implementation of world government through the control of all financing. And that is the Great Reset!

Now, just to mention that, there is a big debate right now among people who have conspiracy theories about COVID: The big mistake they make, is they somehow link these two things together as if the Great Reset would mean to basically impose “vaccination dictatorship” and all of these things. These are two completely separate things. We have discussed many times that the pandemic would not be a pandemic if the IMF, the World Bank, and the leading financial institutions would not have lowered the living standards of especially the developing countries, over decades in the last 50 years. If every country had a modern health system, like the Chinese demonstrated they have in Wuhan, it would not be a pandemic! Why otherwise is it that certain Asian countries have been able to control the situation so much better?

The LaRouchian Solution

It is really extremely important to not go in the direction of this digitization of the currencies, but there is only one remedy, and that is what my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, has prescribed since many years: Namely, you need to end the casino economy. You need to impose Glass-Steagall, the separation of the banks; you need to, in the case of the Federal Reserve, nationalize the Federal Reserve, turn it into a National Bank, a kind of Reconstruction Finance Corporation, what Roosevelt did; and then start to issue long-term, low-interest credit for real investment in industrial production, but especially in high energy-flux density areas, such as a crash program for fusion power, space development, international space cooperation, to increase the productivity of the economy.

That obviously is absolutely the opposite of the Green New Deal, and that is being fought out right now. This is not something which can wait until next year. We have to start to educate the population right now. Because these central banks are not waiting for what comes out of this election dispute—war—in the United States; but I think this danger of a global dictatorship through the central banks is something people have to wake up about right away.

Harley Schlanger: I think one other point we can make is that the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, is now talking about a “New Bretton Woods,” taking the words from your husband, from Lyndon LaRouche, but meaning the “Green New Deal,” meaning the digitization. When was the International Monetary Fund concerned with actual development in these poorer countries? So I think people have to really take what you said seriously, and study this, and become part of the fight to get a real New Bretton Woods.

Now, as we have the election situation unfolding in the United States—this bankers’ dictatorship—there’s something else going on, which often is a distraction from taking on these other issues: And that’s terrorism, which we’ve seen now rising up again in Europe, the “strategy of tension.” What can you tell us about that? What’s going on now?

Zepp-LaRouche: We have clearly a pattern. You have the unbelievable event with the French teacher, Samuel Paty, who was decapitated in an unbelievable act of cruelty, because he discussed the anti-Mohammad caricatures. Then you had the incident in Nice, where three people were killed by somebody who had entered Italy as a migrant on September 20. He was clearly radicalized already then, and pretended to be a migrant. Then he went to France and three weeks later, he committed this atrocity in Nice. Now that should also cause people to think, because he entered Italy before this incident with the caricatures even occurred!

Then you had the next incident or attack, in Vienna, where somebody, a person of 20 years of age, who was already known to the authorities, had wanted to emigrate to Syria in a group of 90 people, which was stopped by the police. Then he went to Slovakia and tried to buy weapons; the Slovakian authorities informed the Austrians about this incident—it was ignored. And so now, several arrests have been made in Austria and Switzerland in the context of this, so it’s obviously a network of Islamists linked to networks in the Balkans and also in the North Caucasus.

A ‘Strategy of Tension’

We should remember, the strategy of tension always has been applied when there were major other events to be implemented. It has everything to do with what we discussed before—both, the aim of the British Empire, the oligarchy, to steal the election from Trump, which has to occur in an arena of complete distraction; but then, especially also, underlying all of these things is the fact that the financial system of the British Empire is bankrupt and can only be pumped up by these incredible liquidity injections, what we have seen over 10 years or so, actually 12 years, since the crash of 2008.

So the strategy of tension always has been used as a way to cause regime change, to cause changes in government by creating an atmosphere of panic, to get the population to accept things. And we should remember that the Gladio networks of NATO that were responsible for the terrorism wave in the 1970s and ’80s in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, was clearly aimed at making sure that the German unification did not result in realizing the incredible historical opportunity which that great moment of history meant, by having a “third generation” of the Baader-Meinhof Gang assassinate Deutsche Bank Chairman Alfred Herrhausen. There were documentaries, even on German TV, that this “third generation” never existed, no one was ever able to establish its existence. Then, Detlev Rohwedder was killed, the head of the Treuhand, which was then used to go for completely shutting down industries in East Germany after the unification.

Look at the string of assassinations, the JFK assassination, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, these were all part of the kind of strategy that always has to do with trying to cause paradigm shifts. The present terror wave that has hit France and Austria, the British have put the United Kingdom on high terror alert, not because they claim to have any concrete evidence, but they say a terrorist attack is very likely. And now, the former head of the FSB anti-terror unit of Russia, Vladimir Lutsenko, just wrote a very important article, saying that people should not just look at these incidents, but rather should look at the headquarters of these terrorist events, pointing to Saudi Arabia and the City of London.

This is something one should absolutely be aware of. When Trump won in 2016, Lyndon LaRouche was emphatic that it was not simply a national event, but an event of strategic importance, and in the context then of the Brexit, soon to be followed by the Yellow Vests in France, the revolt in Italy against a change of the Constitution. And then we had similar rebellions against this globalist order in Chile, in Lebanon, in many other countries in North Africa. It is still the battle. There is clear recognition by an increasing number of countries, or political groupings in these countries, that this globalist world order totally violates their interests. That’s why you have such movements as the Trump movement.

To Trump’s credit, he made a statement, saying, he did not ask Wall Street for money—he could easily have asked for $25 million from several large firms, which Biden apparently did, and outspent Trump by quite a margin. Also some Senate races were financed big time by Wall Street. So Trump said he didn’t do that, “because if you take their money, you can’t deal with them in a proper way.”

I think we should be aware of it, because the actions which need to be taken may come much earlier than people think. Trump will be President, for sure, until at least January 20. We may see financial developments that will require him to act much, much earlier, in concert with other countries. The summit should not wait—a summit with, at minimum, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. China is proposing a new world economic system, following the COVID crisis. There are urgent issues that need to be addressed, and the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche fortunately provide an absolute wealth of programs and concepts that address what needs to be done.

Harley Schlanger: Helga, this report you’ve just given, including the move toward a bankers’ dictatorship, the strategy of tension, and how it fits it into this picture is absolutely essential for anyone who’s going to participate in the fight to overturn the attempted coup via the vote fraud. People should be very thankful that you brought this forward.

His Royal Highness’ ‘Great Reset’: The Evil Green Dictatorship

by Claudio Celani and Marcia Baker

Nov. 7—In early June, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and HRH Charles, Prince of Wales, launched the Great Reset initiative, aimed at promoting policies to tighten elitist global financial and economic control—presented as a way to rebuild from the pandemic. On June 3, the keynote speech was given by Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Other speakers included the chief executives of Microsoft, BP, and Mastercard.

Since then, the WEF platform has conducted a series of Great Reset conferences, involving hundreds of speakers, to promote their “rebuilding” theme, while in fact, spelling out specifics of their worldwide Green New Deal—cutting power, industry, agriculture, infrastructure, and other means of life, wrapped up as commitments to goals of Zero Emissions and “new systems.”

All the while this evil campaign is underway, some have mischaracterized the Great Reset threat as a “global health dictatorship.” Some clarification on that is in order, given below.

It must be noted at the outset that the Great Reset is just a pandemic-period continuation of the pre-COVID-19 green, anti-development perspective of banker elites centered in London/Wall Street networks, and Prince Charles in particular, who, after all, is a close collaborator of Klaus Schwab, founder and Chairman of the World Economic Forum. The WEF supports Charles’ Sustainable Markets Council for developing ways to decarbonize the world. Charles gave the keynote on a green future at the 2020 WEF Davos meeting in January. In September, at the time of the UN General Assembly in New York, the WEF held a forum on “Realizing a ‘Great Reset’ for Sustainable Development,” where Charles held forth on how the scale of the Great Reset requires a worldwide green “Marshall-like plan” to decarbonize the behavior of consumers, businesses, agriculture, investors, and all.

The enforcement arm of this is Green Finance, and among its principal figures is Mark Carney, another pal of HRH Charles. Carney was Governor of the Bank of England (2013-2020), and is on the Foundation Board of the WEF. In 2018, on Charles’ 70th birthday, Carney gave a speech in which he said that, “His Royal Highness has provided inspirational leadership” for decades, on the need for a green horizon.

Today Carney—besides doing private banking in his home country of Canada—serves as UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. After the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, an agreement for reducing human existence in the false name of saving the planet from emissions-death, Carney and his banker and billionaire cronies, including Michael Bloomberg, set up a new association to restrict credit so that it goes for only select green purposes, and not for high-tech energy, industry, agriculture, and infrastructure. It is the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure.

On November 9, Carney will be on the opening panel of a WEF Great Reset event titled, “Green Horizon Summit—The Pivotal Role of Finance.” It runs through November 11, and is co-sponsored by the City of London Corporation, in collaboration with the Green Finance Institute and the WEF. Other speakers on the first panel, which is titled, “Cartography of Post-COVID-19 Green Growth,” include Christine Lagarde, Chairman of the European Central Bank; Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England; and the IMF’s Georgieva again. On November 10, Bill Gates will speak, along with Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock.

Just as the Great Reset features bankers and billionaires, in their own name, issuing their dictates on what they say is permissible to happen under their green rules, so other leading cartel and financial figures are active in many economic sectors for the Reset. For example, at a Great Reset summit on “Bold Actions for Food as a Force for Good,” November 23-24 (online), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is a co-sponsor of a panel asserting the perspective that, unless their activity is limited, humans degrade the Earth. The panel is titled, “Boosting Nature—Positive Production.” This conference is the public relations side of WWF activity around the world, in league, for example, with Cargill—the huge agro-commodities cartel, McDonalds, and others, to dictate how food is produced.

Three Pillars of the Great Reset

In her June 3 speech at the launch of the Great Reset, Ms. Georgieva stressed three pillars of the initiative. She said, “From the perspective of the IMF, we have seen a massive injection of fiscal stimulus to help countries deal with this crisis, and to shift gears for growth to return, it is of paramount importance that this growth should lead to a greener, smarter, fairer world in the future [emphasis in the WEF transcript]. She ended her remarks saying, “And I want to say—loud and clear—the best memorial we can build to those who have lost their lives in the pandemic is to build a world that is greener, smarter, and fairer. ...”

Translated into reality:

With “greener growth,” the intent is to bail out the bankrupt financial system with measures creating a Green Bubble generated by massive government spending for an “energy transition” into a “carbon-free” economy. The blueprint for that is the Green Deal policy of the European Commission. Mark Carney is its champion.

Under “smarter growth,” special emphasis is given to the digital economy, and overcoming the digital divide among countries in the world. Digital technologies, although important, cannot replace energy, transport, industrial and agriculture improvements, and other basic infrastructure, without which economic growth is impossible, but which the Great Reset ignores.

The third pillar, “fairer growth,” emphasizes the “expansion of social programs.” Behind the nice words, however, is the intention to manage increased poverty with handouts, rather than eliminating poverty worldwide.

In sum, the Great Reset is just a newer version of the Keynesian policy adopted by Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s Finance Minister, to streamline the financial system in such a way as to bail out the assets of the super-rich, ruin the middle class, and destroy the poor. As John Maynard Keynes specified in the German edition of his work in 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, such policies are best implemented by authoritarian regimes.

Missing the Target

Rather than exposing and rejecting this evil policy in those terms, some have adopted a distorted version of the Great Reset, claiming that it aims at a “health dictatorship” run by Bill Gates and the Chinese, to force vaccination on the population and threaten with expropriation those who refuse.

While trans-Atlantic governments have failed to control the pandemic, and are restricting liberties in order to stay in power, it is dangerously misguided to present mandatory vaccination as part of a health dictatorship. Vaccination is an achievement of humanity. It existed well before Bill Gates, and to oppose it because of Bill Gates is like being against motorways because Hitler built them. The no-vax movement is a product of the same “factory of irrationality” that has produced radical movements to stop global warming and other imagined threats.

II. What is Leadership, Really?

November 12, 2013

Worse Than ‘Weimar’!

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the November 22, 2013 issue of EIR, Vol. 40, No 46, pages 4-6.

Note from the editor: At this particular moment, a special reason for reprinting this article by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., from the Obama years, is the catastrophic historic effects of the John Kennedy assassination, as LaRouche portrays them. Were Joe Biden’s fraudulent theft of the Presidential election from Donald Trump to be accepted, the result would be far worse. Fortunately, the American people are not accepting it; they are active both in the courts, and in mass, peaceful protest in the streets against this travesty all across the nation.

I was born on September 8, 1922, at the beginning of the process of the infamous, 1923 hyper-inflationary collapse of the economy of the Weimar, Germany republic. Now, the threat to the trans-Atlantic economy as of this date is a far worse, and virtually immediate threat for as long as current U.S. President Barack Obama remains in the Presidency. That is not even a good guess, but one about to come crashing down upon the trans-Atlantic economies as a whole soon, unless the necessary corrective actions are taken very soon.

As long as the current U.S. President, Barack Obama, remains in office, that already onrushing calamity is virtually unstoppable. In the fewest words possible, either Obama and Wall Street are both put through an urgently needed moral as well as financial reform, or the deadly catastrophe is virtually certain for virtually the entirety of the trans-Atlantic region sometime very soon. At the present date, both this President and much of the Congress have each remained increasingly hysterically impotent, through their own cowardice in refusing to face a future for which immediate remedies do exist, rather than face their own presently systemic errors.

The insanity is, essentially, “all about money.” Dump “Wall Street” and its lunatic swindles, and relatively immediate solutions are available, as could have been the case in the immediate Versailles-crafted crisis which had led into the Adolf Hitler, Germany regime. Who brought Adolf Hitler into power in Germany? Who was to be blamed for the infamous 1929 Wall Street and London crisis? In both cases, it was the financial centers of London and Wall Street, then, as it is now.

The befuddled citizens became too eager to gamble their way into hoped-for riches while gambling in financial speculations, and not enough really caring to do good for mankind, especially since the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, for their emphasis on science-driven technological progress at work. That is “why and how” the Anglo-American financial swindlers of London and Wall Street wished the assassinations of John F. and Robert Kennedy. It was not so much because they hated John or Robert; it was the fear of the specter of a possible new President Franklin Roosevelt, or, for some others, such as a new Benjamin Franklin, a genius such as Alexander Hamilton, a James Monroe, a John Quincy Adams, an Abraham Lincoln, a Franklin Roosevelt, or, in an alternative, the selection of the mythical oysters of Warren G. Harding.

Despite all writhings and groanings in protest from Wall Street and London, those are the facts of the matter to be faced, if you, personally, wish to enjoy a prolonged and actually productive and enjoyable life.

The U.S., under President Obama, is staring in the face of a 1923 Weimar-style hyperinationary collapse of the economy. This photo shows a refuge for homeless and jobless men in Weimar Germany, following the crash.

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The center of this crisis is not actually the United States’ present crisis as such. The trend which led the United States (and Europe) into this presently onrushing collapse, was all about Wall Street and London, back then, and right now. What caused it? The immediate cause was the margin of our foolish voters who elected Presidents George W. Bush, Jr., and Barack Obama into office, for what is now approaching a span of fourteen very ugly years.

During the recent weeks, the trans-Atlantic world has been plunging into a general economic breakdown-crisis of the present trans-Atlantic region of our planet. What we are presently experiencing on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, is a hyper-inflation for as long as the current U.S. President, Barack Obama remains as President of the United States; not only the United States itself, but also the trans-Atlantic region of western and central Europe is now being plunged ever more deeply into the worst economic collapse since the Fourteenth-century plunge into a new dark age, probably one even much worse than that of Fourteenth-century, medieval Europe.

There is an alternative:

If the will is there to take the necessary action, there is an option, under our U.S. Federal Constitution, by which not only can our United States be brought into a genuine economic recovery, but our immediate action under our Constitution, taken now, could bring our republic into genuine recovery from the plunge into darkness which has been under way since the rejection of my July-August 2007 “Home Owners & Bank Protection Act” submitted for adoption by the Federal States of our Republic at that time.

Instead, the members of the U.S. Congress and the Federal Presidency had acted, at that time, and since that time later, to plunge our republic into a spiral downward into policies which have now dumped our republic into what has been the greatest economic crisis of the trans-Atlantic group of nations. Now, as of this past weekend, beginning this past Monday, the economy has fallen, thus far, into the steepest financial breakdown-crisis of modern trans-Atlantic history.

Fortunately, our republic could still be rescued at this time. As many know, I have a record of being among the leading economic forecasters for our United States during the recent decades, as in my uniquely successful forecast of the 1971, Richard Nixon depression, and also the deep 1980 recession, the steep depressions launched by the George W. Bush, Jr. recession, and, now, the economic horror-show brought to you by the Barack Obama depression. Now, the violations of our U.S. Federal Constitution by the Obama government, are combined with Obama’s plunging our United States into a form of depression from which our United States, could never recover in its present form.

The necessary action at this moment, is to prevent the current President of the United States, Barack Obama, from relying upon “dirty tricks” of the type already enjoyed by President Obama, to block that action, the revival of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, from being successfully presented for a vote of the Congress, now.

Without the removal of President Barack Obama from office, the situation of our republic has now reached the point, that the continuation of President Obama in office, would mean the end of our United States under its present Federal Constitution.

Fortunately, there is an alternative, if we act very soon to adopt those needed Constitutional options. The remedy is available, and fully constitutional, if we find sufficient leaders among us with the guts to do what is constitutionally legal, and is already the only visible, constitutional course of action needed to save our nation from what is, now, virtually national economic suicide, unless we act immediately to save our nation. I am now putting myself on the block as one who has shown himself as leading among the leading economists and others of our republic, who is willing, and more than fully qualified to present that option, publicly, here and now.

Consider the following measures most urgently needed at this time.

There are two absolutely indispensable actions which must be adopted and urgently implemented, if our United States can be rescued from the presently accelerating plunge into a virtually hopeless plunge into a general economic breakdown-crisis.

First, we must expel President Barack Obama from office, immediately. There are chiefly two available options for doing so. The first of those two is the President’s impeachment on such available grounds as his violation of the war powers provisions. The second, is removal from office under existing Constitutional provisions of the U.S. Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

Only with the suspension of the President from office, were it likely that the United States could be rescued from what is already the careening into virtual economic death of our United States and its economy. However, the doubtful mental health of this President, and the sheer hatefulness of this ostensibly sick President, show both the case for the President’s urgent removal from office for reason of known impeachable offenses, and the arguably faulty mental health of that President, both of which were a just means for rendering him politically harmless to the general welfare of our republic.

Once we have considered these sources of available remedy as to be used for the rescue of our republic from what would be, otherwise, it’s virtually immediate political death at the hands of President Obama and his British imperial masters, we will have soon secured the measures needed to organize a process of general economic recovery of our republic.

Measures of the Rescue

I. Incapacitate President Obama’s power to sabotage legitimate measures for removing that President from the position of power he might attempt to use to prevent lawful support for the re-enactment of the original Glass-Steagall law as it had been crafted under the guidance of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

II. That measure should be sufficient to hamstring a corrupted President, to the effect of blocking the use of the power otherwise available to him for reason of his illicit blocking of the necessary, immediate reenacting of the original Glass-Steagall Law.

III. This legitimate action against him separates the legitimate qualities of indebtedness from the forms of speculation associated with such agencies as “Wall Street” and its foreign likenesses.

IV. The U.S.A. law must be improved, to replace the notions of monetarism, that done by a system of U.S. Constitutional Federal credit.

V. Since the residue of salvageable monetary credit in the U.S.A., as within the bounds of the left-over balance of U.S. monetary credit, will not be sufficient to launch a recovery, the medium of U.S. dollar-denominated credit, shall be employed for such included missions as:

A. The recovery of the essential functions of each of the Federal States,

and,

B. The capitalization, in terms of the credit system, of medium- to long-term investments in higher orders of per-capita and energy-flux intensity than are supported presently, with an emphasis on ending the present suppression of the higher intensity of thermonuclear fusion needed for a truly modern economy: a space-age level of intensity of principal applications.

Think Like Beethoven: Fidelio, Lafayette and LaRouche—

or, the Big Elephant in the Room

by David Shavin

In memory of Donald Phau

Prelude—Introduction—And the Composition in Four Movements:

I. The Story of the Lafayettes

II. The British Role—Whether ‘Pizarro’ Is William Pitt

III. Through Beethoven’s Eyes

IV. Fidelio—Beethoven’s Secular Mass for Humanity

Part I follows. Parts II-IV will appear in the next of issue of EIR.

This year, 2020, is indeed the occasion of the 250th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven. A lot of his music is being performed. Many are being moved by forces deep within their being, reminding them of the depth and universality of their humanity—accompanied by a marked uptick of honest tears and laughter. That’s lawful. However, Beethoven, similar to his colleague, Friedrich Schiller, viewed his creative work as even more, a moral mission with the power to effect necessary and permanent changes for good in their audiences. The question is posed: Might those temporary experiences of reconnecting to one’s humanity transform the civilization’s thinking from that of an adolescent to that of a mature adult. That is, it may be time to consider an appropriate birthday gift for the fellow.

Left to right: Joseph-Désiré Court, 1834; Adélaïde Labille-Guiard; Willibrord Joseph Mähler

Left to right: Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette; Adrienne de Noailles, the Marquise de Lafayette; Ludwig van Beethoven

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PRELUDE

Beethoven’s First and Only Opera:

Fidelio, or Married Love

Beethoven was a passionate and devout republican, nowhere better displayed than in his first and only opera, Leonore, or Married Love—later renamed Fidelio. The opera, we will show, demonstrates that he knew in the fiber of his being that the element of the soul that experiences a universal love was also the source of true statecraft, and also even of his powerful and concentrated capacity for the re-shaping of musical thought itself. In a word, he thought, as did Plato, in the realm where art and science are one, where the poetic meets the noëtic.

As such, the human race has, within itself, the power of creative mentation, capable of recognizing and addressing any and all problems it might need to face—whether it be backsliding feudal oligarchies, systemic financial gambling frauds, public health disasters, or, for that matter, an eventual burning out of the Sun. Beethoven both recognized and celebrated this Promethean quality of mankind.

In 1803, just prior to beginning his first opera, Beethoven’s central focus was his revolutionary Third Symphony, known today as the “Eroica.” At that time, in a messy political situation, Beethoven thought that Napoleon Bonaparte could be the great man capable of standing between a feudal Europe, and the mindless Jacobinism and terror of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre. His symphony was to be both dedicated to, and an intervention upon, Napoleon.

Joseph Sonnleithner, librettist of Beethoven’s opera, Leonore.

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At that time, Beethoven contracted with Emmanuel Schickaneder and his Theater an der Wien to write an opera. However, he was not satisfied with the libretto provided him and, instead, near the end of 1803, he decided upon Bouilly’s Leonore, ou L’amour conjugal—a play based upon the outrageous imprisonment of Lafayette and the heroic, historic, and successful intervention of his wife, Adrienne, to save him. Beethoven’s collaborator, Joseph Sonnleithner, prepared a German-language libretto.[fn_1] Beethoven was excited, writing on January 4, 1804: “I have now quickly got an old French book edited and am now starting to work on it.” His “Leonore” project was part and parcel of his thinking on his “Bonaparte” symphony project.

While Bonaparte, under pressure from America, had been instrumental in 1797 in getting Lafayette freed, he had also spent the next seven years assiduously keeping Lafayette out of French politics. Then in May 1804, Napoleon promoted himself from “First Consul” to “Emperor.” Beethoven’s close friend, Ferdinand Ries, who was the first to tell Beethoven the news, reported that Beethoven famously ripped out the title page with its dedication to Bonaparte, declaring: “So he is no more than a common mortal! Now, too, he will tread under foot all the rights of Man, indulge only his ambition; now he will think himself superior to all men, become a tyrant!” The symphony was eventually published, in 1806, as the Eroica with Beethoven’s terse notation: “Composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.”

Tamino and Pamina from W.A. Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute, portrayed in a fresco in the Vienna State Opera House.

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Though Beethoven had already chosen, months earlier, the subject for his opera, now it became the center of his republican intervention into France and Europe. His opera was not about glorifying a celebrated figure, Lafayette, but about the actions of his wife, Adrienne—that is, it was about how an assumedly non-political figure makes history. And more importantly, it was about how the human emotion of love, one available to every human, is powerful enough to make history. It was not accidental that this was also the specific intervention that Mozart had attempted a dozen years before with his last opera, the Magic Flute—at the same Theater an der Wien, and for Schickaneder. Beethoven studied Mozart’s Magic Flute in some detail while preparing his opera.

Adrienne and ‘Married Love’

What has love got to do with it? The new republican form of government, as launched with the American Revolution and the 1787 Constitutional Convention, would be a sick joke, were it simply a matter of asking the passengers on the ship of state every four years what their preferences were as to who should be their next captain. To surpass the previous system of inherited rulers, the very weakness of that system—the untapped potential of serfs, slaves, and subjects—had to be mobilized. Citizens had to be able to deliberate upon actual policies; and the success of such policy initiatives for revolutionary upshifts in production, hygiene, education, etc., was contingent upon that very same upwardly-mobile, future-engaged population.

Mozart had seized upon the radical notion that the leadership of the future was somehow born of the true love of a man and a woman, Tamino and Pamina; and that all mankind had been created with the capacity, not for giggly love, but for real love. Hence, each and every one was a potential genius, and qualified for citizenship. Beethoven’s Leonore, otherwise an unlikely figure to make history, rises to the occasion, not because she is a good wife in love with her husband, but because she actually loves that which made her husband qualified to be a political prisoner.

Friedrich von Amerling, Emperor Franz II of Austria.

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Adrienne Lafayette herself had been imprisoned by the French radicals in late 1792—shortly after her husband had been imprisoned by the anti-French, reactionary Coalition. She was still there in July 1794, when her sister, her mother, and her grandmother were taken from her one day and guillotined. She only escaped the same fate due to pressures exerted by America—from George Washington via his representatives in Paris, Gouverneur Morris and James Monroe. When finally released, a few months after the fall of Robespierre and the subsidence of the Terror, she proceeded to organize a personal confrontation with the Austrian Emperor, Francis II—demanding that he release her husband or that he imprison her in the same dungeon. Her willingness to go back into prison saved Lafayette.

The Elephant in the Room

So, six years before Beethoven selected “Leonore” for his first opera, there really was a woman who faced the guillotine; who watched as her sister, mother, and grandmother were taken away to have their heads chopped off; whose husband, the international symbol for freedom and progress, was imprisoned in a dungeon; and who, when given her freedom, volunteered to join her husband in his dungeon in an effort to free him. Further, it was no secret. There were plays and poems and newspaper articles published regarding her bold actions. Beethoven, a passionate republican, chose to compose what would be his only opera, based upon one of the plays celebrating just such developments—and no one is supposed to notice the connection between his opera and Adrienne’s actual actions?

Perhaps even worse, forty-two years ago, a young, passionate republican, Donald Phau,[fn_2] dared to break the silence and publish the simple and straightforward case, that Beethoven’s opera was based upon the actions of Gilbert and Adrienne Lafayette—and his groundbreaking article was greeted with a deafening silence. Not even an “Oh, just a silly conspiracy theory in a LaRouche cultural journal.”

EIRNS/Gabriela Ramírez-Carr

Donald Phau

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This author has located, over the years, only two blips on the radar screen, faintly threatening to break the silence. One was a blogger, who had seen Phau’s article, and had clearly wanted to write of the possible Beethoven/Lafayette connection—but rather tentatively, and only after first issuing a standard disclaimer against conspiracies. Next, the blogger proceeded to provide no traceable link to the “conspiracy-theorist” that had excited him. (In fact, the blogger simply twice provided the misspelled name “Pfau” without any mention of the actual article that he had read, nor any way for his readers to locate Phau’s article.)

The other blip involved a private communication in 2008 from one scholar to another, about the planned publication in 2010 of an article on the Lafayette/Beethoven connection entitled, “Lafayette: The Musical Fabrication of a Political Myth.”[fn_3] Curiously, the article seems to have vanished into thin air, and inquiries to both of the authors as to the fate of that article have yielded silence.

And, to end this folly on a note both ironic and most ludicrous, consider: A musical company named “Opera Lafayette” has gone to some pains in researching and staging Beethoven’s original Leonore opera—evidently, with nary a clue that it might be based upon the actual Lafayette! When the artistic director was asked directly about the “interesting parallel between the name of their company” producing the Leonore opera, and the actual Lafayette being imprisoned, he simply responded: “It is ironic ...”—end of story. This from a man who prides himself on, and has proven himself capable of, accurate historical reconstructions of the circumstances of opera of the period—even including the earlier Bouilly/Gaveaux version. What should we make of these curiosities? Could it really be that there is, indeed, no elephant in the room?

Perhaps a look through Beethoven’s eyes would address this problem, while simultaneously getting us more into his thinking. For now, and simply put, enjoy living in the paradox: (a) there is no document where Beethoven writes that his opera is centered upon the case of Adrienne Lafayette, and (b) there is no way that his “Leonore” is not centered upon the case of Adrienne Lafayette.

Bouilly: Who Is This ‘Lafayette’ Fellow?

First, before addressing the body of our concerns, a moment for a little housekeeping is warranted. Let us dispense with the silly hurdle that academics erect against any connection between the Lafayettes and the opera. Jean-Nicolas Bouilly writes that the opera is simply based upon an anonymous woman whose husband was in a French jail and whom Bouilly himself had aided. Hence, it must be mere fortunate coincidence that his opera was arranged and performed in the four months after the Lafayettes were freed—when both the Lafayettes and the opera were the “talk of the town.” [Box: Bouilly’s Story Undercuts Bouilly]

Yet, even were Bouilly’s claim accurate, it would still be irrelevant. In the winter of 1797/8 in Paris, the events of the time, including the enthusiasm over Adrienne’s role and of the victory of the long-desired freedom of the Lafayettes would overwhelm any other experience or interpretation of one attending Bouilly’s Leonore production. More on this later. For now, it is farcical to imagine that Bouilly could have avoided the comparison.

Next, Bouilly’s account is, in large part, his attempt to date the composition of his libretto several years prior to Lafayette’s liberation. However, in attempting to do so, his account is internally inconsistent, as it runs up against not only known facts, but also his own statements. Bouilly claims that the play is based upon “a sublime deed of heroism and devotion by one of the ladies of the Touraine, whose noble efforts I had the happiness of assisting.” Researcher David Galliver’s important and careful work on Bouilly’s claim, concludes: “No record of occurrences in the Touraine during the Revolution has been found to support his statement.” Rather, his recollection is “an imaginative synthesis of Bouilly’s own experiences and fantasies.”

Finally, Bouilly’s claim was made almost four decades after the fact, in the mid-1830s, shortly after Lafayette’s death. It was in a reactionary period when one did not gain by praising Lafayette, and Bouilly certainly was one who could bend with the prevailing winds. One must take into account that Bouilly was a severely compromised figure. In 1792, Bouilly had been a constitutional monarchist, opposing threats to the life of the king, someone who might have appreciated Lafayette. By the summer of 1793, he was the host of a public bonfire to burn the paintings of all French kings. During the 1794 Terror, he was the President of the “Commission Militaire,” the local body in the Tours region that tracked down and punished opponents of the Revolution. He ordered at least five victims to be put to death within a three-month period.

Thus, being one capable of going along to get along, Bouilly was certainly a candidate for riding on the Lafayette train in good times, and disclaiming any association in bad times. Indeed, were his attempted dating accurate, in his late-in-life Mes Recapitulations, he would have been writing his libretto at the same time, 1794, that he was executing prisoners. Rather than his portrayal of his aiding prisoners, he was then more like a real-life Pizarro. That his reconstruction has been received at face value by academics is symptomatic of the problem, as it speaks not so much to their scholarship as it does to their desire to sweep history off the stage.

INTRODUCTION

The Simple Story

Lafayette was the epitome of Friedrich Schiller’s “a patriot of his country and a citizen of the world.” He represented the “American” solution for Europe—defending both the humanity of the down-trodden against the powerful, and the principles and lawfulness of statecraft against the would-be revolutionaries. The former would seize and imprison him, while the latter would seize and imprison his wife—under suspicion of collaborating with her husband’s enemies! The Coalition of Britain, Austria, and Prussia held Lafayette, outside of any rules that applied to prisoners of war, simply because he represented the American solution for Europe and was a threat to the established rule of Europe. Hence, they titled him a “prisoner of state,” deserving of special treatment outside of the rules for prisoners of war.

Lafayette titled himself an American citizen, illegally detained while in neutral territory, while on his way to America. His imprisonment was directed to eliminate the fresh “America” option from a desperate Europe. As we shall see, the mobilization to free him involved the networks of Alexander Hamilton, Gottfried Lessing and Lazare Carnot. The Lafayettes, from prison, repeatedly identified Britain’s William Pitt as the source for the actions of his underlings in Prussia and Austria.

Beethoven recognized the horrors of both the feudalist oligarchs and the bloodthirsty Jacobins, and associated himself, between 1798 and 1804, with French constitutionalists who hoped to win over Bonaparte. Failing that, in 1804, Beethoven escalated the effort with Leonore, his only opera—using the remarkable case of Adrienne Lafayette to bring alive and catalyze the universal hopes and capacities of every man and woman. In the process, Beethoven revolutionized the stage, fashioning a cultural weapon unlike anything seen before or after. Nothing makes this case more than a listen to Beethoven’s music, both the Leonore and the Fidelio versions. Otherwise, the historical record is not as simple, but it is a rewarding one—one that both should be known and is long overdue to be brought to light.

This report is organized in four movements.

I. The Story of the Lafayettes

II. The British Role—Whether ‘Pizarro’ Is William Pitt

III. Through Beethoven’s Eyes

IV. Fidelio—Beethoven’s Secular Mass for Humanity

The aftermath of Lafayette’s failed escape attempt from Olmütz prison, November 8, 1794.

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I. THE LAFAYETTES

Lafayette’s Attempted Flight to America

In August 1792, the Jacobins moved aggressively, manipulating the rage of the French in their seizure of government, ending the tenuous constitutional monarchy of 1789-91. Lafayette, who was the Commander of the Army of Northern France against the threatened invasion by Prussia and Austria, made a quick trip back to Paris to warn the Assembly of the attempted coup. He succeeded, temporarily, in calling to task the Assembly and rallying a majority of them against the Jacobins’ class-warfare. The Jacobins countered, attempting to indict Lafayette for dereliction of duty for even coming to Paris, but the Assembly voted by a large margin against this ruse.

He was back at his post, when, two days later, on August 10, the Jacobins recklessly plunged ahead. They launched a coup, seized King Louis XVI, and slaughtered the defenders of the Tuileries.[fn_4] On August 17, their new “Provisional Executive Council” summoned Lafayette back to Paris to explain his anti-revolutionary actions. On August 19, Lafayette, and about forty others under him, quit France and headed for the American Embassy in The Hague. That same day, the Jacobins ordered Lafayette’s arrest.

The next day, Lafayette’s group was detained by Austrians near Rochefort, Belgium, in a supposedly neutral area. At first, the captain of the guard there granted the normal rights of transit for the group. Then Lafayette’s presence was noticed, and the normal rules and procedures went out the window. The group was detained and put under guard. Count Franz von Metternich, the chief minister of the Austrian Netherlands, asked Vienna for instructions, while Lord Auckland, the British envoy to The Hague, notified Lord Grenville, the Foreign Minister.

Left: Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III. Right: Prime Minister William Pitt, the Younger.

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On August 26, George III’s wife, the British Queen Charlotte, in a letter to her son, gave the game away: “Wee see the very man who wanted to crush England, proves the curse to his own country, & I am sure he will meet with his reward.”[fn_5] She could be sure of this because their Prime Minister, William Pitt, made it a top priority over the next five years to so reward Lafayette. All the while, Pitt repeatedly claimed that the British Crown and government were uninvolved, having no interest in the unimportant Lafayette one way or the other.

Weeks later, Lafayette’s first letter was sent to George Washington on October 8, 1792, reporting that he was taken “alone to the Citadel of Spandau between Berlin & Potsdam. … He was taken by the Troops of the Emperor although it is the King of Prussia who retains him a prisoner in his dominions.” He asks that the U.S. send an envoy to make “the necessary engagements to emancipate him. ...” Lafayette would be moved around various Prussian prisons for almost two years, frustrating efforts to free him, before finally being handed over to the Austrians in May 1794, for their infamous dungeon in Olmütz.[fn_6]

What Lafayette Fled

Meanwhile, that August, France’s new Minister of Justice, Georges Danton, explained to the Jacobin Club that Lafayette was the “vile eunuch of the Revolution.” Danton’s mental state was such that he actually imagined he could discover proof, amongst the papers of Louis XVI, that Lafayette had betrayed France. However, as Gouverneur Morris, the U.S. representative in France, wrote to President Washington about Lafayette (10/23/92):

His Enemies here are virulent as ever and I can give you no better Proof than this. Among the King’s Papers [in August] was found Nothing of what his Enemies wishd and expected except his Correspondence with Monsieur de la Fayette which breathes from beginning to End the purest Sentiments of Freedom. It is therefore kept secret while he stands accus’d of Designs in Conjunction with the dethroned Monarch to enslave his Country.

While Danton might have experienced a bit of frustration at the lack of any evidence of Lafayette’s guilt, his sense of justice found expression in the rounding up and mass slaughter of the French. Anyone who failed to swear loyalty to the Jacobin coup risked arrest and death. Danton’s colleague, Jean-Paul Marat, was even more explicit in urging the “good citizens … to seize priests, and especially, the officers of the Swiss guards and their accomplices and run a sword through them.”

Left:Georges Danton; right:Jean-Paul Marat

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On September 2, Danton escalated the violence, calling for direct action by the population against the foreign invaders: “We ask that anyone refusing to give personal service or to furnish arms shall be punished with death. … [We sound] the charge on the enemies of our country. To conquer them we must dare, dare again, always dare, and France is saved.” For Danton, Lafayette was the central “enemy image” of France. The dare was to eliminate anyone thought to oppose the Jacobins. That day, and through the night, over a thousand prisoners were murdered; and so began the September Massacres. The next day, on September 3, Jean-Paul Marat sent out the call to the countryside that citizens should rush to come defend Paris—only that they should remember, before departing, to first execute their home-town counter-revolutionaries. This is what Lafayette had fled, two weeks earlier.

Washington’s Knowledge of Europe’s Decay

Morris briefed Washington:

[The character] of France has ever been an enthusiastic Inconstancy. They soon get tird of a Thing. They adopt without Examination and reject without sufficient Cause. They are now agog of their Republic, and may perhaps adopt some Form of Government with a Huzza; but [it is unlikely to be a good government, or even adhered to]. The Factions here are violent and among those who administer the Government there is not I am told that Degree of Character which lays Hold of the Esteem and Respect of Mankind, but rather the contrary.

And what of the enemies of France?

[The Austrian Emperor] is now much influenced by Manfredi a Statesman of the Italian School who takes Insincerity for wisdom. ... [And] there is such a Mixture of Lust and Folly in the Chief [of Prussia] that no one Man can keep Things steady. …[fn_7]

There were no heroes on either side. It was a profound and paramount concern of Washington’s not to let the young American republic get enmeshed.

Morris’s next report read:

You will find that Events have blackened more and more in this Country. Her present Prospects are dreadful. [Worse than the enemy forces and the exhausted resources,] … the Disorganized State of the Government appears to be irremediable. … [I]n Short the Fabrick of the present System is erected on a quagmire. … The different Parties pass away like the Shadows in a Magic Lanthorn, & to be well with any one of them would in a short Period become Cause of unquencheable Hatred with the others. Happy Happy America governd by Reason, by Law.… Your cool and steady Temper is now of infinite Consequence to our Country.

Gilbert Stuart

George Washington in 1796.

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On March 25, 1793, Washington articulated to Morris his general approach:

I can however with truth aver, that this Country is not guided by such narrow and mistaken policy as will lead it to wish the destruction of any Nation, under an idea that our importance will be increased in proportion as that of others is lessened. We should rejoice to see every Nation enjoying all the advantages that nature & its circumstances wd admit. … Upon this ground the prosperity of this Country wd unfold itself every day—and every day would it be growing in political importance.

To avoid taking sides, and yet still attempt to free Lafayette, Washington, along with Alexander Hamilton, arranged a series of private, non-governmental actions.

John Trumbull

Alexander Hamilton

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Alexander Hamilton’s ‘Free Lafayette’ Operation

Hamilton served as the link between the official and unofficial operations to free Lafayette. Officially, Hamilton coordinated updates for, and deliberated with, Washington—which resulted in both the Marshall mission to Prussia’s King Friedrich William II (see below), and a private letter to Emperor Francis II. However, even in these two cases, Washington was appealing as a private citizen and friend of Lafayette, not as the official action of the United States government. Washington and Hamilton worked from Philadelphia, along with Gouverneur Morris in Paris, Ambassador Charles Pinckney in London, Ambassador William Short at The Hague, and Consul John Parish in Hamburg.

The bulk of the effort was unofficial. Hamilton worked on two different escape attempts—in Prussia in 1793, and at Olmütz in 1794—primarily through his in-laws, John and Angelica Church. (Angelica Schuyler Church was the sister of Hamilton’s wife, Elisabeth Schuyler Hamilton.) John Church was in the House of Commons in London, working with Charles Fox’s Whigs, the opposition party to William Pitt’s government. Angelica channeled French republicans to Hamilton in the United States, where Hamilton debriefed and aided them. The first was Adrienne Lafayette’s brother, Louis Marie, the Vicomte de Noailles, sent by Angelica to Hamilton on February 17, 1793. Others included, in Angelica’s words to Hamilton:

• “[T]he Duke de Liancourt, he loved liberty with good sence and moderation, and he meant so well towards his country as to introduce into France a better system of Agriculture and to soften the situation of the Lower class of people there…besides many good qualities, this gentleman is the friend of the Marquis de Lafayette.” This is the duc d’Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Francois-Alexandre-Frederic. His son, Alexandre, was the French ambassador to Vienna in 1805, and very likely attended the premiere of Beethoven’s Leonore. (Years later, another son, Sosthenes, would organize Beethoven concerts in Paris with a man who certainly had attended the 1805 premiere, the composer Luigi Cherubini.)

• “Dr. Priestly, a man dear to virtue and to science. … You my dear Brother will receive with distinguished kindness this worthy stranger, (if he whose breast teems with the love of mankind may anywhere be called a stranger).”

Joseph Priestley was the well-known chemist and discoverer of oxygen.

Otherwise, Lafayette’s own son, George, joined Hamilton’s household during the 1795-97 period when both of his parents were in the Olmütz dungeon. Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, and Washington coordinated monies both to assist Adrienne and for the rescue of Lafayette. John and Angelica ran a salon in London that included regular attendance by Pinckney and Morris. John was the prime funder of the rescue attempts made by the young Dr. Justus Erich Bollmann,[fn_8] while Angelica received and transmitted Bollmann’s reports on his ongoing efforts of 1793-96.

Bollman had followed Lafayette’s efforts in France during the Constitutional period of 1789-91, while he completed his medical degree at Göttingen University. Of note, Bollmann then spent time in Mainz with Reinhold Förster,[fn_9] who had just written the introduction to a 1790 biography of Lafayette (Lafayette, als Staatsmann, the German edition of Berenger’s French biography of Lafayette). The work is replete with Lafayette’s dealings with Washington and Hamilton. Bollmann wrote to his father: “My best company is in Förster’s home. I spend every evening in this family, where several clever and interesting people have free access.”

Förster also had connections with Hamburg’s Elise Reimarus, dating back to the period of Gottfried Lessing’s work with the Reimarus family. Two years later, in 1793, Bollmann would be deployed by the Churches to work with Elise’s Hamburg group in the first rescue efforts; but it is likely that he was already acquainted with them from his time with Förster.

Lafayette’s Lifeline:

The Hamburg Republicans

The coordination of the largely underground communications with Lafayette, and the publicizing of his case, centered upon a group of republicans in Hamburg—otherwise known to history from the Lessing/Reimarus controversy. (Gottfried Lessing’s publication in the mid-1770s of the philosophical and religious writings of Dr. Hermann Reimarus was the occasion of various attacks upon Lessing.)

In his last few years, Lessing worked closely with Reimarus’ son and daughter, Johann Albert and Elise—and, later, the two would be at the center of what became the Hamburg “Fayettistes.” Their brother-in-law, August von Hennings, a Danish official (and close collaborator of Lessing’s dear friend, Moses Mendelssohn), published on Lafayette. And then there was Johanna Reimarus, the daughter of Johann and Sophie (née Hennings) Reimarus. She married Georg Sieveking, a leading republican and activist in Hamburg, uniting these networks.

The Reimarus/Hennings/Sieveking grouping maintained contact with republicans throughout Europe. Wherever Lafayette was transferred to, during his twenty or so months in Prussian prisons, and during his forty or so months at Olmütz, this grouping managed to maintain an underground communication system with him. What they smuggled out was published, from 1792 to 1797, in French, English and German, for Beethoven and other republicans to follow. One key, early “Fayettist” smuggler was Christoph Girtanner, an associate of Förster and another graduate of Göttingen University.[fn_10] He arranged cooperation from one or more military officers at the Magdeburg prison. Evidently, there were more than a few guards and prison employees who respected and were willing to help Lafayette. This group coordinated with the American consul in Hamburg, John Parish.

The Hamburg group was also affiliated with the famous author, Friedrich Klopstock, who reported on an early visit to Lafayette. Adrienne wrote Klopstock a letter of appreciation for his visit and his article. Either of the German-language articles on Lafayette’s imprisonment, from Minerva or from Klopstock, might have been Beethoven’s first news of the matter. While Beethoven is known to have read much of Klopstock, there is no known record as to what actually was his first source.

Friedrich Georg Weitsch

Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz in 1789.

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A large portion of the publicity was done by Baron Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz. The February 1793 issue of his Minerva magazine featured his major article on Lafayette’s situation. It was smuggled into Lafayette’s cell in Magdeburg, providing much-needed moral support. (Archenholz’s magazine was a major source of political events for German-speakers, probably including for Beethoven.) Lafayette’s response to Archenholz, smuggled out by an unidentified American with the help of a prison guard, was the first the larger world heard from him, published after more than six months of imposed silence:

Having been informed of an American consul being in Hamborough, I will, upon the claim of a fellow citizen, and with the confidence of a friend entreat your assistance—You know, Sir, the preparations, beginning, and progress of the French Revolution down to the time when I thought it inconsistent with the rights of the people at large, the sentiments of the majority of their representatives, and the true notions of liberty, to unite with partial acts of violence, and was of course obliged momentarily to seek for a neutral ground—You also have heard of my falling in with an Austrian detachement, whereby I was made a prey to the governing powers on this side of the Rhine—By what principles, professions, and acts, I have from my early youth to this period deserved their animadversion it is my boast to remember, theirs to resent—Let it suffice to say that I have … been dragged through horrid confinements, to a most unpleasant, narrow hole, digged under the remparts of this citadel … where I am shut up from all company, all kind of news, and every means to hear from, or write to my friends. Under these circumstances, I have had the unhoped for good fortune, to steal a letter out of my den to be forwarded to you. ...

Lafayette received Archenholz’s Minerva every month, and Archenholz reported back to Pinckney. Amongst other matters, Pinckney’s pressure on the Prussians finally succeeded in getting Lafayette out of his cell for a one-hour walk. Lafayette wrote: “Finally, after more than five months, I felt the contact of outside air, not without a shiver. I saw the sun again, and felt quite well”—a treasured experience. To recreate such a moment, one could not do much better than to hear again the “Prisoner’s Chorus” in Beethoven’s opera.

Communications throughout 1793 involved planning for an escape from the Magdeburg prison. Pinckney secured Lafayette’s funds, 6,000 livres, for the rescue effort. Archenholz smuggled in maps covering the pertinent territory from Magdeburg to Hamburg, along with details on Prussian military protocols and the like. However, before the escape attempt, Lafayette was transferred yet again. This time he was sent to a prison in Neisse, closer to the Austrian border.

The Prussian king had decided to hand Lafayette over to the Austrian, as he was pulling out of the war on France. (Friedrich Wilhelm II, far from a pacifist, was merely redeploying his forces eastward, so as to defeat the Polish republic of Kosciusko and grab land there.)

Dr. Justus Erich Bollmann

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Bollmann, aside from the escape plans, was also involved with the pressure exerted upon the Prussian court to free Lafayette. In early September 1793, he met with the King’s uncle, Prince Henry, who advised Bollmann to avoid the King’s chief minister, Girolamo Lucchesini, and go to the foreign affairs minister, Count Heinrich von Haugwitz. Yet, Lucchesini still managed to intervene, blocking the American documents (on the illegality of Lafayette’s detention) from being passed to Haugwitz or to be considered. Bollmann retreated to Hamburg, socializing with the Reimarus grouping there during Christmas.[fn_11]

At this point, Hamilton arranged for a new mission to the Prussian king, to be carried out by James Markham Marshall, the brother of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall. Hamilton discussed the type of letter to be sent with Marshall at a Cabinet meeting on January 14, 1794. He sent Marshall (as reported in his December 27, 1793 letter to Angelica) to visit the Churches on his way to Berlin, with Washington’s personal letter of January 15. This mission, first directed toward the king’s uncle, Prince Henry, superseded the efforts of the more aristocratic “Henin/Lally” grouping.[fn_12] (The latter were then directed to refund the balance of their monies for redeployment through the more republican networks of the Churches.)

The mission, however, was still-born, as King Friedrich Wilhelm II was already in negotiations with Austria to take over Lafayette’s incarceration. Prussia’s Foreign Minister, Count Finkenstein, would confide later to Britain’s Lord Grenville that some mysterious American (Marshall) had appeared in Berlin with two letters from Washington, one to Prince Henry and one to the king, but the British could be assured that the king had refused to see Marshall or to even accept the letter.

Olmütz: ‘As If He No Longer Existed’

On May 17, 1794, Lafayette was handed over to the Austrians, taken to the Olmütz prison, and placed in isolation. He was allowed neither contact nor exercise—nor even his own name. Rather, he was assigned the number “2” and placed in a cell where uncovered latrine gutters lay below his window. The architect of Lafayette’s new imprisonment was one Franz Anton, Count d’Arco, the commander of the Olmütz Fortress. Two weeks earlier, he had defined the mission: “[T]o treat such a dangerous person as if he had been transferred completely out of the world while retaining only his life, as if he no longer existed and has been forgotten.”

The Olmütz Fortress hosted Arco’s Galician Infantry Regiment #56, the “Wenzel Colloredo” Regiment. Count Arco, it turns out, was the brother of Karl, a different Count d’Arco, whose claim to fame is that he fired Wolfgang Mozart by unceremoniously throwing him “out the door with a kick in the arse.”[fn_13]

Karl had performed that service for his boss, Hieronymus, the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, who had called Mozart “a rogue, a slovenly, immoral lout!”[fn_14] This Count d’Arco, Lafayette’s torturer, performed his duties for Wenzel Colloredo, the brother of Hieronymus—indeed a small world. The two Colloredo brothers undoubtedly thought that they obtained quality service from the two underling Arco brothers in dealing with Mozart and Lafayette.

Before dismissing such a curious situation as a mere coincidence, it might better be considered as an excellent example of the modus operandi, or the imbedded sadistic practices, of a feudal oligarchy when threatened.

The Escape Attempt

Bollmann spent some time and effort discovering Lafayette’s new location. Then, in Vienna, he recruited a young American, Francis Huger, for the attempt to free the prisoner. (Huger’s father, Benjamin, had been Lafayette’s initial host upon his arrival in America in 1777.)

Sometime during the summer, when Arco was away, the prisoners were allowed an hour of exercise out of their cells. Lafayette was allowed, under guard, to ride inside a carriage. When Arco returned in October, he noted the new carriage rides, but did no more than add extra security. On November 8, 1794, Bollmann and Huger attempted to overcome the security. Huger was detained. Bollmann’s struggle with a guard resulted in Lafayette escaping on the horse provided him, but without Bollmann’s help to guide him across the border. Lafayette, without a guide or a map, ended up on the wrong road. He was re-arrested by local authorities that night, and returned before dawn to Olmütz.

Three days later, Count Anton Pergen,[fn_15] the Minister of Police (and the originator and head of the Secret Police), submitted his initial report to Emperor Franz II: “It goes without saying how irregularly things were carried out on Lafayette’s drive. … How could it be possible for these foreigners to carry out such a bold operation, for which they had to make trips and rehearsals?” There had to be dangerous forces beyond the two young men, Bollmann and Huger.

Pergen, assumedly with the help of British financial authorities, would track 675 florins sent by John Church in London to Bollmann. Church, Pergen was informed, had sent the money by way of the Ochs & Geymüller exchange house. Franz II agreed to assign the army to work with Pergen, so as to root out the full conspiracy. Otherwise, Pergen was incensed: “Since this incident confirms once again that these state prisoners only think of cunning and deceit, to abuse the good manner in which they are being treated, it is quite right to suspend all the driving that until now has been allowed them for their health.” Within weeks, the prison surgeon found Lafayette to be “emaciated, feverish, congested and prematurely aged … near death.”[fn_16]

Bollmann escaped detection for a week, then was captured, chained to a twenty-pound ball, and put into isolation—save for a healthy contingent of bedbugs. Arco informed Lafayette: “The rogues, who were so bold as to carry you off, are arrested. They shall be hanged. It shall be under your window; and, if there is no executioner, I will do that myself.” (Recall, in Beethoven’s opera, that Pizarro, the fortress commander, without an underling who will murder the “state prisoner” for him, decides that he’ll do it himself.)

Within days, the Fayettistes knew of the attempt and the failure. Angelica Church reported to the London group; John Quincy Adams reported from The Hague back to the United States; and Sophie Reimarus wrote her brother, August Hennings: “Bollmann, a worthy, noble young man, openly wanted to transform his self-interest into a noble act, and rescue Lafayette.” He acted on “commissions from America, and with as much money as he needed …,” but the attempt failed. Bollmann’s full report to Angelica, on August 1, 1795, was published by the Churches as “An Account of the Attempt.”

Francis II and Pergen set up two separate investigations, so as to whipsaw the three prisoners in between them. Pergen’s military panel was a “Lafayette investigative commission” and the Emperor’s “civil” investigation was “the Dr. Bollmann investigative commission.” Franz II ordered the latter to be “proceeding with great precision to discover the intrigues that must have been at work in this affair.” Young Huger was shown the prison’s torture instruments and Arco threatened him with death.

Lafayette tried to take all the blame, downplaying the role of Bollmann and Huger; but he maintained his long-held position, that “… no power is authorized to hold him captive, because he is a citizen of the United States of America and not a prisoner of war.” Pergen’s commission gave Lafayette the bureaucratic response, that unfortunately they “had no authorization to accept his protests here.”

Bollmann and Huger spent eight months in the Olmütz prison before the Austrians yielded to pressure and released them. They both reported back to the Churches on their way to the United States. Angelica sent them to Hamilton, who introduced them to Washington, Adams, and others. Bollmann reflected the Lafayettes’ appraisal, telling Washington: “The inducement which leads to this conduct of the British ministry seems to be personal hatred. …”[fn_17] Washington followed Hamilton’s advice and directed a personal letter to Franz II, though it is not clear whether the Emperor ever received it.

Adrienne, aka Leonore

Lafayette had been in his Olmütz cell for two months, when Adrienne’s sister, mother, and grandmother were guillotined on July 22, 1794. Only an intensive intervention by Gouverneur Morris upon the French government saved her from joining the rest of her family under the blade that day. Adrienne would be imprisoned in Paris from November 1792 until February 1795. She was also visited and supported by Morris’ successor in Paris, James Monroe. Again, pause to consider—both “sides” in the war are imprisoning both husband and wife, as simultaneously enemies of both “sides”—not a lot of breathing room in the middle.

Monroe, along with the U.S. Consuls in Dunkirk and Hamburg, Francis Coffyn and John Parish, arranged for monies and passports for Adrienne’s next mission—to the Olmütz prison. She travelled as “Mrs. Motier” of Hartford, Connecticut, as Gilbert Motier (Lafayette) had been made a citizen there. On the way, she met with Archenholz, who thought her plan for Olmütz too risky. She assured him: “In this my decision is firm, and nothing in the world can bring me from it.” The Emperor would release Lafayette or imprison her. Archenholz took her to visit Friedrich Klopstock, but he declined their request to compose an ode on Lafayette’s imprisonment, only agreeing to write privately to important contacts. It is not clear if he followed up on his pledge.

J.A. Ecker

Johann de Paula, Baron of Thugut

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Upon arriving in Vienna, Adrienne first went to see the Countess Caroline von Rumbeck, otherwise known to history as Mozart’s first student in Vienna. She and her cousin, Count Johann Philipp Cobenzl, were the very individuals who had recruited Mozart to Vienna in 1781, freeing him that Spring from Prince Colloredo and Count Arco. Cobenzl, then the Vice-Chancellor for Emperor Joseph II, had welcomed Mozart to his estate, opened doors for the talented youth, and created the possibility of a livelihood for Mozart without feudal servitude. Now, fourteen years later, Countess Caroline advised Adrienne that they had to manage a meeting with Franz II, yet avoiding Baron Thugut. She arranged for Adrienne to get to Francis II via the grand chamberlain, Prince Franz Orsini-Rosenberg.[fn_18] Hence, the famous October 12, 1795 exchange with Franz II was accomplished, and, importantly, without Thugut’s presence.

‘My Hands Are Tied’

Francis II explained to Adrienne that, on Lafayette’s incarceration, “his hands were tied” as “it was a complicated matter.” But he agreed to arrangements that Thugut would not have allowed, arrangements perhaps later regretted by the Emperor. Adrienne reported that joint imprisonment “was all that he could do, but that he would grant me this permission with great pleasure. …” More on this meeting is covered in Section II of this report, but, for now, Thugut was instructed, afterwards, to make the arrangements; and when they met, he made icy-hearted comments about the executions of her family. Adrienne found Thugut to be “the coldest and most impenetrable of men.”

The next day, the British minister in Vienna, Morton Eden, alerted Lord Grenville that Adrienne had succeeded in her plan. That evening, she was incarcerated in Olmütz prison. It was Lafayette’s 38th month in prison, and 17th month in isolation at Olmütz.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (F. Bolt), 1796

Adrienne reunited with Lafayette.

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Adrienne reported to Pinckney:

… [W]e found him in the most absolute solitude, not knowing our frightful misfortunes; that it had been expressly prohibited to tell him if we existed, his children and I, that his wasting away is frightful, his chest a source of horrible suffering.

Yet, despite his physical condition, she was able to write one of Lafayette’s former military aides, Captain André Pierre Masson:

He is morally as you left him. You know the force and sweetness of his soul, and despite the moral and physical tortures that [his captors] have chosen to heap upon him, there is not the least alteration in his character, nor the least imbalance in his temper.

The prison doctor, Axter, wrote that Lafayette, though still suffering from fevers, asthma and emaciation, began climbing out of mortal danger. Thugut spent months attempting to pressure Adrienne to leave the prison, by making the conditions harsh. Minor requests, such as permission to attend Sunday Mass, were rejected with language such as: “… as you have consented to share your husband’s lot, it will not be possible for you to obtain any change in your situation.”

When she needed medical help beyond the capabilities of the prison, first her condition was allowed to fester for two more months. Then the ultimatum was conveyed to her in person, as it was not allowed to be committed to paper: She would be allowed to go to Vienna for treatment only on the condition that she could not rejoin her husband. She refused, writing afterwards: “They will not tear me away from here except with M. Lafayette, unless, perhaps, they drag me away dead.”

Pergen’s Damage Control Effort

Adrienne’s report of her confrontation with Emperor Franz II was reported in some detail to Bollmann, who made a full report to the London “Fayettistes.” It became the heart of the next intervention upon Pitt in the British Parliament, led by General Fitzpatrick. He focused upon Franz’s admission that “His hands were tied” to point to Pitt as the manipulator. (More of this intervention also is in the next Section.) General Fitzpatrick’s speech in Parliament was publicized in several languages, embarrassing Franz II.[fn_19] The Minister of Police, Count Johann Anton von Pergen, took charge, arranging to publish a cover story.[fn_20] First, on January 2, 1797, he assigned his underling Ugarte to obtain “precise and trustworthy information” on the conditions at Olmütz, but “in the strictest confidentiality.” The latrine/sewage arrangement outside the window of the Lafayettes was finally moved; and for the next two months, Vienna circulated their version of the humane treatment of the Lafayettes in such publications as Vienna’s Magazin der Kunst und Literatur, Leipzig’s Eudaemonia, and Jena’s Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. On March 8, 1797, the campaign culminated with “A Reliable Report of the Treatment of Lafayette and His Family in the Prison at Olmütz,” whereby the reader was assured of clean, dry rooms, properly ventilated and heated, with sufficient light. This propaganda effort backfired.

Tompkins Harrison Matteson, 1850

Lafayette with his wife and two daughters in Olmütz prison.

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In response, Lafayette’s former aide, Philippe Charles d’Agrain,[fn_21] was provoked to publish his Captivité de La Fayette with authentic details and accurate notes on the conditions. It began with an image of prison chains and the motto “Suffer and Die,” and included a poem, “The Castle of Olmütz.” A portion reads, in translation:

In these somber dungeons, image of hell,

Bent down now for five years under the weight of my chains,

Dead to all humanity, entirely so to the natural world,

In this abyss where light barely descends,

Must I, in my wrenching pains without relief,

Die by intervals in the sight of my oppressors?

Then, while contemplating what he had sacrificed, Adrienne appears. This poetic image of the angel Leonore would find its way onto the stage in Paris, in Florestan’s soliloquy—and more powerfully, in Beethoven’s opera. [e.g., “Ein engel, Leonoren” (enters at 5:43)]

The Lafayette Spring of 1797

Spring, 1797, was the beginning of the end of the captivity of the Lafayettes. In early April elections in France, more moderate factions were elected. Now two of the five Directors—Lazare Carnot and François Barthelemey—were overtly for demanding Lafayette’s release, and pressure was mounting upon the other three. Napoleon’s army smashed Austria in northern Italy and pressed upon Vienna itself, forcing peace negotiations. Public discussion of the Lafayettes became much more agitated, including the first play on the Olmütz prisoners, P.A. Prefontaine’s Le Prisonnier d’Olmütz ou le devouement conjugal,[fn_22] dedicated to Adrienne Lafayette. It was a “profound sensation” when it opened on May 20, 1797 in Paris, catalyzing the public discussions.

A song of Lafayette was now circulated in Paris. Friedrich August Baumbach’s Le songe de La Fayette was a musical setting of a powerful 1794 mini-drama, Lafayette’s Dream by Baron Friedrich von Oertel.[fn_23] There, Lafayette, in his dungeon, is “emasculated by the poison of loneliness” and tortured by visions of the guillotines and angry mobs. Then, the guardian spirit of America visits him, revealing to him a celebration of Lafayette in Boston and a warm reunion with Washington. The success in America even spills over into solving France’s turmoil. Lafayette’s dream clarifies his sense of mission and newly invigorates him. This 1794 scene of the guardian angel—here, “America”—would also find its way into Bouilly’s play in Florestan’s inspiration from above. By the time Baumbach set Oertel’s drama to music in 1797, the dream’s “guardian spirit” had taken the person of Adrienne Lafayette.

Prefontaine’s Prisoners of Olmütz and Baumbach’s The Song of Lafayette were certainly timely that Spring. Along with those, there appeared in May 1797, a delightful play by Beaumarchais, calling for an end to the factional warfare in France, in a fashion perhaps only possible by Beaumarchais. This was his La Mere Coupable which he labeled a “Moral Drama.”

Jean-Marc Nattier

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais

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Of note, the previous year, Beaumarchais’ daughter, Eugenie, married Lafayette’s former aide, André-Toussaint Delarue—who was also the brother-in-law of Lafayette’s close ally, Mathieu Dumas. Shortly after Lafayette was freed, he would appeal to Alexander Hamilton on behalf of both the Dumas and Beaumarchais families for the funds owed to Beaumarchais, as both families had lost most of their wealth in their efforts for America:

His brother Delarue, my aide-de-camp in the National Guards, one of the cleverest & best young men I ever knew, has married Beaumarchais’s daughter…. I am bound by friendship to interest myself in the welfare of Dumas & his brother, the more so as the faithful good Will of both, & the exertions of the former in my behalf during my captivity, entitle them to my gratitude. My most affectionate respects wait upon Mrs. Hamilton & Mrs. Church.[fn_24]

Recall also that Lafayette and Beaumarchais were the two leading Frenchmen who had staked their futures upon covert operations in support of the American Revolution, importantly in the period before May 1778, before France’s official alliance with America.

In his typically light vein, Beaumarchais’ new play had the Count and Countess Almaviva (from the two earlier parts of his trilogy, The Barber of Seville, and The Marriage of Figaro) now reappear twenty years later, she with an illegitimate son, Leon, and he with a ward, Florestine—who is, in fact, his illegitimate daughter. (And, yes, months later, Bouilly may even have borrowed the name of “Florestan” from Beaumarchais’ female character, “Florestine.”)

Both Count and Countess have been lying to each other for decades. An unscrupulous fellow, Begearss, exposes Florestine’s bastard status, so as to destroy the marriage of Leon and Florestine; hence, he can wed Florestine himself and get the Count’s fortune. Figaro and Susanne expose him and arrange for the love-birds to marry. How? By exposing that Leon is also illegitimate! (Since there is no consanguinity—that is, they are not siblings—marriage is possible!) The subtitle, “Drame Moral,” is delightfully fulfilled: The lies and shortcomings of both sides will be manipulated by evil third parties, to the destruction of all—unless one can forgive the faults of the other, and laugh at one’s own faults. A very healthy play for a much-abused France.

Beaumarchais had actually written the play in 1791, but its successful six-week run on the Paris stage in the summer of 1792 was cut short that August by the Jacobin coup against the Constitution. Just when Lafayette had to flee, Beaumarchais also had to go into hiding.[fn_25] Now, in the Spring of 1797—and perhaps only in Paris—awful divisions in France could be staged as a comedy, in terms of the sexual peccadillos of the aristocracy and the traps they weave for themselves.[fn_26]

Freedom

All three cultural interventions represented new hope in Paris that Spring and would provide some buoyancy to Carnot’s initiatives. The Austrians stalled—choosing to interpret their initial, April 18th treaty with Bonaparte, whereby “prisoners of war will be turned over…,” so as not to apply to their special “prisoners of state.” Thugut told Colloredo, now the Privy Cabinet Minister, that the release of the Lafayettes would be delayed until the final end of negotiations; and those assurances were given to Eden, the British envoy.

Lazare Carnot, member of the French Directorate.

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On April 24, the Directory sent instructions to Napoleon with their compromise version: Lafayette was to be freed, but only to go to America, not directly to France. Eleven days later, Carnot intervened again, writing to Napoleon’s staff General Clarke:

Obtain provisionally, if possible, the liberty of Lafayette, Bureau-Pusy, and Latour-Marbourg. It is a matter of national honor that they leave behind the dungeons where they are kept because they began the Revolution.

Napoleon passed along the demand to the Austrians, though it is not clear what priority he assigned to their release. A joint letter to Napoleon, from Andre Masson, Joseph Masclet and Victor Maubourg,[fn_27] warned that the British envoy George Hammond had arrived in Vienna with secret instructions on the prisoners, along with more gold.

Negotiations dragged on, and by early July, the Austrians told Napoleon that they were fine with getting rid of their prisoners, but that they’d received a formal request from Russia’s Tsarina Catherine II, to keep them. Bonaparte agreed with the Fayettistes that Pitt had arranged for this ruse of Catherine muddying the waters. Carnot, yet again, on August 1, pressed Napoleon , reflecting the public pressure:

[T]he new requests that people are making to the Directory about the prisoners of Olmütz…. Citizen General, the Directory reminds you of the desire it has expressed to you to see that their captivity ends as soon as possible. It doubts not that you share the concern their misfortune inspires.

James Gill Photography

Beethoven’s “Prisoner’s Chorus,” celebrating the light and fresh air.

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With decreasing room to manipulate, in late July, Vienna begins preparations to disengage with the prisoners. Thugut sends a representative, General Chastelet, to Olmütz to secure signed statements from the prisoners that they had been treated well. Lafayette throws cold water upon their fantasies, explaining that the publicity of their bad conditions had understated the reality. He emphasized particularly the lack of fresh air, the “disgusting” sewage, and the denial of any news of his family “while they were under the knives of the Jacobins….”

Chastelet reported back to Vienna that the prisoners had “an immense detail of small inconveniences” which were “too long to report…”—and that Lafayette rebuffed any condition from Francis II that dictated where he could live, insisting that he had been seized “on neutral territory in violation of international law….” Chastelet explained to Lafayette that a “state prisoner” had no such rights against such seizure—which began to delineate what this special term, “state prisoner,” meant and how it was used.

General Jean-Louis Romeuf, another former aide-de-camp to Lafayette and the French special envoy to Vienna for the Olmütz prisoners, was then told by Thugut that it was Lafayette who was holding up an agreement. A compromise was reached whereby Vienna could save face by turning the prisoners over to the Americans as an act of grace by the Emperor, instead of having to turn them over to the victorious French military.[fn_28] No cover stories would be signed by the prisoners. This was all agreed to by August 9, though Vienna temporized for yet another six weeks. On September 19, the prisoners were transported out of Olmütz prison to Hamburg, still under guard, and finally released there on September 29, 1797.

Parts II to IV will appear in our next issue.

[fn_1]. Sonnleithner had first worked in the private office of Emperor Joseph II and, later, in the Austrian Chancellery. Of note, he had spent the previous three years on a tour of Europe, in search of rare old manuscripts for a music-publishing concern he had established. The firm, Bureau des arts et d’industrie, would specialize in J.S. Bach’s works, at a time that they were not so well known. Sonnleithner was Beethoven’s main publisher from 1802 until 1808. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2] See “Fidelio: Beethoven’s Celebration of the American Revolution,” Campaigner magazine, Vol. II, No. 6, August 1978, pp. 42-46. The author, Donald Phau, would himself become a “political prisoner” a few years later. [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3] While the title intimated that the article would counter Phau’s contention, the citation suggested it might have abutted it. Spalding’s footnote reads: “In an article forthcoming in 2010, ‘Lafayette: The Musical Fabrication of a Political Myth,’ Laurent Ferri and Damien Mahiet cite Lafayette and Adrienne Lafayette as inspiration for Beethoven’s opera Lenore. ... (notes to author from Ferri, 24 September, 27 October 2008).” It is note 29 on p. 358 of Spalding’s Lafayette: Prisoner of State. [back to text for fn_3]

[fn_4] Gouverneur Morris reported to George Washington (January 10, 1793) of the event:

I shall mention some Things which may serve as a Clue to lead thro Misteries—Those who plannd the Revolution which took Place on the tenth of August sought a Person to head the Attack, and they found a Mr [Francois-Joseph] Westermann whose Morals were far from Exemplary. He has no Pretensions to Science or to Depth of Thought, but he is fertile in Resources and endured with the most daring Intrepidity.

Of note, Westermann, allied with Danton, would become famous and win honors for his ruthless slaughter of French women and children. However, in due course, he was himself out-radicalized, prompting his own trip to the guillotine. [back to text for fn_4]

[fn_5] Paul S. Spalding’s Lafayette: Prisoner of State, p. 45. The author is most indebted to Spalding’s extensively researched work. Further, many quotations and translations of the “Fayettistes” cited here are to be found therein. [back to text for fn_5]

[fn_6] Lafayette’s two fellow prisoners, also detained for the whole five years, were César de Latour-Maubourg (military leader and friend of Lafayette) and Jean Bureaux de Pusy (military engineer under Lafayette). Hamilton recommended Pusy to be the head of a future military academy. Later, César’s brother married Lafayette’s daughter, Anastasie, and Jean’s son married Lafayette’s grand-daughter, Mathilde. [back to text for fn_6]

[fn_7] Morris’s “Manfredi” is likely the Marchese Federico Manfredini. The Prussian King Frederick William II had at least twelve children out of wedlock, though the actual total is lost to history. [back to text for fn_7]

[fn_8] Curiously, Bollmann was a rare American at the 1814 Congress of Vienna when Beethoven intervened with his re-worked Fidelio. The U.S. ambassador to France, William Crawford, wrote of Bollmann: “This philosophic and science-loving man … is going to Austria … to establish steam-boats on the Danube.” While there, he worked with Count Philipp Stadion, the Minister of Finance, attempting to form a National Bank in Austria. Until 1796, he had worked to free Lafayette. He then moved to America. The ugly side of his career, from 1803-07, included a demoralizing bankruptcy, a consequent association with Aaron Burr, and, most eerily, the role of Burr’s second in the 1804 duel in which Burr murdered Hamilton. [back to text for fn_8]

[fn_9] Förster, the Halle Professor of Natural History and Mineralogy, had been the naturalist on James Cook’s 1772-75 circumnavigation of the globe. He took his 17-year-old son, Georg, with him. Georg’s 1793 book (on his 1790 travels with Alexander von Humboldt) included an account of his 1777 meeting with Benjamin Franklin, the man “who stole lightening from the heavens and the scepter from the tyrant.” Praising the U.S. Constitution, he summarized Franklin’s message for turbulent Europe:

You, children of Europe! Honor the divine spark of Reason within you, and perfect it through its use. Freedom can be achieved by virtue alone. Virtue is possible only through reason. Anger and hatred will produce only blood; and with blood alone no man will ever purchase his freedom.

In early 1793, Georg became the vice-president of the short-lived Mainz Republic. Emperor Franz II declared him an outlaw with a prize of 100 ducats upon his head. [back to text for fn_9]

[fn_10] Girtanner studied chemistry, physics and medicine at Göttingen in 1780-82 and was closely associated there with Georg Lichtenberg, Benjamin Franklin’s collaborator. (His research included work on the electrical decomposition of various substances, including in relation to color.) Girtanner’s Historical News and Political Considerations About the French Revolution covered 1789-92 in seven volumes, advocating a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature. It included a biography of Lafayette, along with many sharp observations, especially on the manipulations by the duc d’Orleans prior to the assault on the Bastille. [back to text for fn_10]

[fn_11] Evidently, Archenholz criticized Bollmann for bragging about the rescue operation, as he tried to impress the ladies. Years later, he would call him “a wind bag and scatterbrain.” At some point, likely during his 1803-07 breakdown, Bollmann would recall Archenholz as “a rough, physically and morally ugly would-be politician, and besides that, also a true Jew and absolutely nothing at all besides!” [back to text for fn_11]

[fn_12] The couple, Princess Adelaide d’Henin and Count Trophime de Lally-Talendal, were at the center of French royal émigrés in London, willing to have a constitutional monarchy. Henin was a lady-in-waiting for Marie Antoinette. Her estranged husband was guillotined. Lally was imprisoned in August 1792 by the Jacobins, but was released hours before the September 2, 1792 massacres of the inmates. [back to text for fn_12]

[fn_13] June 9, 1791 letter from Mozart to his father, Leopold. [back to text for fn_13]

[fn_14] May 9, 1791 letter to Leopold. Mozart responded to Colloredo, “[S]o is Your Highness not satisfied with me?” to which Colloredo answered: “What, are you threatening me?” [back to text for fn_14]

[fn_15] Colloredo, Arco, and Pergen had been the core of the “Get Mozart” grouping. Five years earlier, Pergen had attempted to entrap Mozart and his particular Masonic lodge grouping, using a police agent to provoke sympathetic actions for the Jacobins in Paris—a ruse rejected by the lodge. However, the circumstances of Mozart’s premature demise in 1791 were fully within Pergen’s means and motivation. One is hard-pressed to find a Lafayette-torturer who didn’t train on the Mozart case. See David Shavin’s article “Mozart and the American Revolutionary Upsurge,” reprinted from Fidelio magazine, Vol. I, No. 4, Winter 1992. [back to text for fn_15]

[fn_16] Quote is Spalding’s summary of surgeon Andreas Axter’s report, from his Lafayette: Prisoner of State, p. 118. [back to text for fn_16]

[fn_17] Letter to George Washington from Justus Erick Bollman, April 10, 1796. National Archives, Founders Online. [back to text for fn_17]

[fn_18] Orsini-Rosenberg was no “Fayettiste,” but Caroline managed to arrange the meeting as a personal favor. Adrienne’s uncle, the Marquis Emmanuel de Noailles, had been the French ambassador to Vienna in the 1780s and was well-known to Orsini-Rosenberg. [back to text for fn_18]

[fn_19] Evidently one “Fayettiste” who published in German was the composer J.F. Reichardt, in his Frankreich magazine. In 1794, his sympathies for Lafayette ended his employment with Friedrich Wilhelm II’s court. Later, in 1808 and afterwards, he would have discussions with Beethoven in Vienna on the topic of the Bonapartes, and possibly also on the Lafayette case. [back to text for fn_19]

[fn_20] In 1790/91, Pergen had been the author of the infamous cover story on the American Revolution. In brief, he found that all Masonic and irregular formations can be useful instruments for imperial controllers, but anything connected with the American Revolution had to be stamped out. He particularly targeted the networks of Moses Mendelssohn and Gottfried Lessing. His intelligence operation would spawn the 1797 Proofs of a Conspiracy: Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies by Edinburgh’s John Robison; the 1798 U.S. Alien and Sedition Act; and generations of hyperventilating “Weishaupt/Illuminati” conspiracy theories. However, the only salient point about Weishaupt’s little Bavarian lodge was that it was founded in 1776, and, hence, to be understood as an “American” virus. [back to text for fn_20]

[fn_21] Adjutant General Agrain had been part of Lafayette’s original contingent detained in 1792. Full title: Captivité de La Fayette, héroïde, avec figures et des notes historiques non encore connues du public sur les illustres prisonniers d’Olmütz en Moravie. [back to text for fn_21]

[fn_22] In the play, Napoleon is the rescuer. It is cited in Charavy’s 19th century General La Fayette, p. 366: “La deliverance des prisonniers d’Olmutz causa en Europe une sensation profonde; leur captivite avait fourni le subject d’une piece de theatre, ‘le Prisonnier d’Olmutz,’ jouee a Paris, le 1st prairial an V (20 mai 1797), et dediee par son auteur, Prefontaine, a Mme de La Fayette. On y louait l’intervention de Bonaparte.” [back to text for fn_22]

[fn_23] Oertel was the translator for the first U.S. novel ever published in German, Brockden Brown’s Ormond: Or the Secret Witness, a fascinating novel on French and American intrigues of the period. Baumbach had directed the opera and music theatre in Hamburg, and then moved to Leipzig in 1789. In 1792, he set to music “Die Forelle”—the poem by Christian Schubart, also imprisoned for supporting the American Revolution. (Franz Schubert’s famous setting of “Die Forelle” was done a generation later.) [back to text for fn_23]

[fn_24] Hamilton had supported Beaumarchais’ claim when he was Secretary of the Treasury. Dumas also wrote to Hamilton that same day, December 8, 1797:

… The storms of the French Revolution, our efforts to Conquer and secure our freedom, our very misfortunes have often brought me back to those happy times where we were helping to complete the American Revolution. … I could not begin this Correspondence under a more favorable auspice than that of my meeting with our mutual friend Le Gal. Lafayette whom I came to join here after his resurrection from the tomb of Olmütz. ... I will add that in the present state of affairs if this payment was carried out; whatever the values and terms may be, we would not dream of displacing our fortune, but rather of going to enjoy it as good and old adopted Americans, on the native land of freedom, where I would be very happy to See you again. [back to text for fn_24]

[fn_25] Beaumarchais would end up fleeing Paris in October 1794, choosing to live in Hamburg for two years—evidently the haven for the “Fayettistes.” There, in March 1795, Beaumarchais made his first appeal to Hamilton for assistance in resolving the monies owed to him by the U.S. government. (That letter is not yet publicly available, but it may indicate that his introduction to Hamilton was arranged by the Hamburg “Fayettistes.”) The Directory allowed him back to Paris in July 1796, in time for his daughter’s marriage into Dumas’ family. [back to text for fn_25]

[fn_26] Beaumarchais’ Figaro play had a similar history, with the French court of 1775-78, when it was still “toying” with the American Revolution; and as Mozart’s opera, with the Austrian court of 1785/6, when Joseph II had problems getting the aristocracy to join with his “America”-inspired reforms. See the three sections on Figaro in the author’s article from December 2010, “Mozart’s Entschlossenheit, or ‘Don Giovanni’ vs. Venetian Ca-Ca.” [back to text for fn_26]

[fn_27] Masson had been a military aide to Lafayette. Masclet had been a lawyer for the Parliament of Paris in 1788, an enlisted lieutenant for France’s Army up to 1792, and then the actual author of numerous articles on Lafayette in the London Morning Chronicle, under the pseudonym “Eleuthere.” Maubourg was the young brother of Lafayette’s fellow prisoner, Latour-Maubourg. [back to text for fn_27]

[fn_28] Actually, this measure had been proffered by America earlier. John Quincy Adams wrote to his father, President-elect Adams, back on February 16, 1797: “The Emperor by giving him up now to the application of the American government, will only be spared the mortification of being compelled to yield him to the claims of France.” [back to text for fn_28]

Bouilly’s Story Undercuts Bouilly

Was Bouilly’s play and opera simply another “rescue opera” featuring a non-descript prisoner who had been unjustly imprisoned? Here are four elements of Bouilly’s libretto that strongly cohere with the actual story of Lafayette, but have no particular place in what is referred to by musicologists as the type of opera Bouilly put on—the generic “rescue operas” of the period. Otherwise, even the category of “rescue opera” applied to Beethoven’s Fidelio is a 20th-century term and afterthought—that is, it was a way to lump Beethoven’s Fidelio into a mass grave.

1. Bouilly’s cover story would have us believe that one prisoner amongst many, whose wife he helped, inspired his play. However, his play actually describes a completely special cell for a very special prisoner. Below the regular cells are secret dungeons housing “state prisoners”—that is, already a special class of prisoners. But amongst those secret dungeons, there is one special cell to which no access is allowed—and that one is Florestan’s, making him a very special, or unique, prisoner.

2. Bouilly represents the “more than two years” that he’s been there as being an irregularly long sentence; hence, he has major enemies. (The jailer, Roc, asked if the prisoner is a “big criminal,” answers, that “he must have big enemies; that amounts to the same thing.”)

3. Pizare is depicted as being enraged, simply over the matter of the prisoners being allowed out for air. But this is the known incident, being allowed out for air, at the heart of the Lafayette escape attempt, which Bouilly and all Paris would have known. However, neither Bouilly nor the rest of Paris, probably had any way of knowing at the time that Count Pergen flew into a rage over the same incident.

4. Finally, and somewhat speculatively, there is the curiously “fortunate” way that Roc handles Pizare’s rage. He says that the prisoners were allowed out on the occasion of the King’s Name-Day (Namensfest). That is, Roc had the fortunate coincidence, whereby his allowing the prisoners out just happened to be on that day, and it covered for his merciful act. It is a gimmick that stands out as such in the libretto. However, the Namensfest of Emperor Franz II was October 4, 1797—not exactly Lafayette’s liberation day, but only five days off (September 29, 1797). Bouilly’s gimmick might have been quite acceptable to his audience, a few months after Lafayette’s liberation. [back to text]