Freelance writer Linda Myers recently discussed the Marquis de Lafayette with Steven L. Kaplan, the Goldwin Smith Professor of European History at Cornell and Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. His book "La Fin des Corporations" [The End of the World of Guilds] won the 2001 Prix Littéraire Etats Unis-France for the best book by an American on a French subject.

Why, on the 250th anniversary of his birth, does Lafayette continue to be important to Americans?

Lafayette's name has a powerful symbolic charge because of a great "mythification" surrounding his legacy. He was tasked by Louis XVI in 1779-80 to help Americans in their revolt against England, not out of any affinity for liberty but in order to avenge the French against the English, who had humiliated them in the Seven Years War (1756-63). For the king it was a war of national self-interest in which Lafayette was an agent.

Ideologically, Lafayette was sensitive to the American argument against taxation without representation and hostile to a tentacular central power with a despotic inclination. Concretely, when he crossed the Atlantic, he brought with him a decisive amount of military and naval assistance. What sealed Americans' ongoing admiration for him was his friendship with Washington. He named his son after him, George Washington Lafayette, and he remained a friend of the American republic.

He seemed to be the connector, the bridge that bound together the new world and the old, affirming the new and inspiring people to shake off the chains of the past. It's a myth but it makes Lafayette more popular.

The story about Americans arriving on French shores in World War I and declaring "Lafayette, we are here," in effect announcing they had arrived to save France, in Wilsonian terms, from the Teutonic threat and reclaim freedom for Europe was also a self-interested act, this time in American self-interest.

How do the French view Lafayette?

Lafayette was an arch revolutionary in 1789-90. It made sense because these were the early moments of the French Revolution. He was a liberal aristocrat attracted to Enlightenment ideas, but his role was not without its ambitious and opportunistic aspects. He wanted to transform France into a constitutional monarchy, not a democracy. He had a Burkeian impulse of anxiety about breaking with the roots of the past. As seen by those on the Jacobin left, he betrayed the revolution by abandoning it when he thought it went too far.

Lafayette would never be admitted to the French Panthéon [the edifice in Paris where France's greatest figures are buried]. But if there were an American Panthéon he would be enshrined in it.

Tell me how the Lafayette collection might interest a scholar of French history.

It is a splendid collection -- one of the finest homogenous yet richly diverse collections outside of France, for anyone interested in the 18th century on both sides of the ocean. The papers stand as an emblem of the shared universalist political culture and the commitment to human rights that continue to link Americans and French, despite the tensions between the two nations.