08/06/2026
Remember Me…
The Marquis de Lafayette is buried in one of only two private cemeteries left in Paris, and he isn't there by accident.
Picpus Cemetery holds the remains of 1,306 people guillotined nearby during the Reign of Terror in 1794, including relatives of Lafayette's own wife, Adrienne. When he died in 1834, he was buried beside her, under soil he had personally carried back from Bunker Hill in Boston after his farewell tour of America a decade earlier.
An American flag has flown over that grave every day since July 4, 1917, when a US Army colonel placed it there during World War I and reportedly said the words, "Lafayette, we are here." According to several accounts, it kept flying even during the N**i occupation of Paris, when German forces reportedly never found the cemetery.
Every year on the Fourth of July, French and American officials gather to replace the flag in a small ceremony, honoring a French aristocrat who fought, funded, and nearly died for a country that was not his own.
