»Vice broods in vain to accuse you of crimes.«

On the parallels between Julian Assange's incarceration and that of General Lafayette. How and why artists make (political) statements on behalf of humanity. Beethoven wrote a whole opera.

Julian Assange is probably the most prominent political prisoner in the world. He has been in solitary confinement for almost 15 years, first in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, from where he was taken to Belmarsh Prion. Assange faces extradition to the United States whose government he exposed for committing War Crimes.

The General Lafayette, having dropped his aristocratic title of Marquis de La Fayette, titled himself “an American citizen” after he had fought in the War of Independence, where he contributed significantly to the victory at Yorktown. He was illegally detained in 1792 while in neutral territory in neutral territory in Europe. His imprisonment was directed to eliminate the fresh “America” option from a desperate Europe.

Both cases are separated in history by some 200 years. One was imprisoned for being a representative of America. The other was imprisoned by the American Government for “espionage against America”. Do they have anything in common at all?

Julian Assange faces his final hearing on his appeal against a decision to extradite him on February 20th/21st. On the surface he is perceived as a danger to the Security of the United States, the very Nation which Gilbert de Lafayette helped decisively on its path to independence. So it seems to be far fetched, even counterintuitive to investigate his detention in Prussian and Austrian prisons and draw conclusions from it for the case of Julian Assange.

However, for anyone who has read

Matthew Ehret

and his brilliant “Clash of the Two Americas” it has become glaringly obvious that the British Empire never stopped subverting American sovereignty. In fact, it is the same oligarchy which has been running England and the United Kingdom since the 17th century, that has gained control over the centers of power in the United States of America. In essence, Assange is a captive of this oligarchy — just as General Lafayette was in the 1790s.

Assange has dared to expose many “inconvenient truths”. Information has been a key asset for the oligarchy since the times of the Oracle at Delphi. Probably even long before that. As such, Julian Assange is a danger not so much to the United States of America, whose laws are now being used to silence Assange. Julian Assange and the right to free speech and journalism is a danger to the global Elites.

So was Lafayette. He was a republican thinker and statesman who had decided to forego his aristocratic privileges and stand as well as fight for constitutional republicanism as for humanity. He was considered an existential threat by the feudalist oligarchy of Europe as a whole, but in particular to Great Britain. Queen Charlotte accused him in a letter to the Prince of Wales in shortly after Lafayettes arrest in August of 1792 of having “wanted to crush England.”

Source: Georgian Papers Programme, The Royal Collection Trust, GEO/MAIN/36393-36394

In fact, Lafayette had nothing against England, or even against Royal Families (after all: he was fleeing France for being called a traitor because he stood for the constitutional monarchy). But Lafayette was deeply anti-imperialist. Britain ruled the world, not by political control but by economic power of the City of London, the British East India Company and other major commercial institutions that dominated trade and industry virtually all over the world. “The Empire”.

The North American colonies had been a major factor for “the Empire”. Therefore the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the founding of the United States of America that was defended during the ensuing war with Great Britain constituted the first major setback for the Oligarchy. Lafayette was instrumental in securing U.S. independence for his military contributions as a general, but also for the diplomatic and political alliance which he helped form between the United States of America and France, even before the French revolution.

Lafayette had returned to France. He had been strongly influenced by neoplatonist, republicanism of George Washington and other founding fathers. Together with Mirabeau he became a leading proponent of the French reformists pre 1789. As a member of the National Constituent Assembly Lafayette was one of the co-authors of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

In 1792 Lafayette evaded his arrest by radical Jacobites in Paris and fled to the Netherlands. He was stopped on neutral territory and taken first to Prussia, and later to Austria. David Shaven in EIR Vol. 47, No. 49, published a detailed course of events documenting the involvement of King George III and the British government in making Lafayette the first “Prisoner of State”.

»(T)he British envoy George Hammond had arrived in Vienna with secret instructions on the prisoners, along with more gold (…) 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.« — David Shaven, Think like Beethoven, Part 1

As Prisoner of State, Lafayette was held in prolonged solitary confinement under most cruel and inhumane circumstances. Two centuries later it is the same, or essentially similar, treatment for Julian Assange, on who’s behalf already two UN Special Rapporteurs on Torture have intervened.

“The risk of being placed in prolonged solitary confinement, despite his precarious mental health status, and to receive a potentially disproportionate sentence raises questions as to whether (…) compatible with the United Kingdom’s international human rights obligations, particularly under article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as respective articles 3 of the UN Convention against Torture and the European Convention on Human Rights” — UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Gill Edwards

The cruelty in the late 18th century certainly may arguably have had an edge over today’s folter. The “Affaire Lafayette” drew a lot of attention, even though media coverage was nowhere near today’s

MINERVA-article about Lafayette from 1793. The Magazine has been a leading source of information on Lafayette’s whereabouts and fate in the Austrian prison of Olmutz. Ludwig van Beethoven, who composed his only opera, “Fidelio”, in honor of the fight for Lafayette’s freedom by his wife Adrienne de La Fayette, got most of his information from this truly republican humanist publication by Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz out of Hamburg. Page 210/11 features an ode to Lafayette by von Archenholz, which applies in its content also to Julian Assange today. (Translation below)

»Some other accounts of my Olmütz-Correspondent mention, that it is the Influence of the Brittish ministry, and almost that alone what keeps the Marquis in Prison. “He suffers, much less because he was the Hero of the French, than because he took a part in the American Revolution!”« — Letter to George Washington on behalf of LaFayette by Justus Eric Bollmann, 1 April, 1796

Lafayette was released eventually in September of 1797. That news spread around Europe. Already since the Spring of 1797 the Lafayette captivity had been turned also into pieces of art, starting with Lafayette Songs, plays and even librettos, such as Leonore, by Jean Nicolas Bouilly.

In 1803 Ludwig van Beethoven was contracted to write his only opera. As Donald Phau in 1978 pointed out, Beethoven chose Bouilly’s Leonore plot for his opera which would eventually be the Fidelio, precisely because he supported the republican cause for which Lafayette had been incarcerated.

»(F)or a century and a half Beethoven historians and musicologists have been engaged in a massive cover-up of Beethoven's conscious relationship to the leading political events of his day. Far from being the solitary, nonpolitical musical genius that their scribblings portray, Beethoven was a member of an extensive, European-wide humanist network which supported the American Revolution and which was actively using the new American government as a model for establishing new governments in Europe.« — Donald Phau, Fidelio. Beethoven’s Celebration of the American Revolution, Campaigner Vol. II, No. 6, August 1978

Indeed, the cover-up continues to this day. Wikipedia completely blacks out the Fidelio/LaFayette parallel, even though it is acknowledged in some classical music studies:

»Leonore’s searching for Florestan might also echo the story of Adrienne de La Fayette joining the Marquis de La Fayette as a state prisoner of Emperor Franz I in 1795 in Ölmutz, (…)« — Esteban Buch, Fidelio or The Musical Prison, FN 68

For a detailed account of the Fidelio / Lafayette connection and more of the cover-up, see David Shaven, Think like Beethoven, Part I and Parts II-IV. Shaven reports extensively also on the important role Lafayette’s wife played in freeing her husband. Here is another parallel between Lafayette’s case and that of Julian Assange, even though Stella Assange, unlike Adrienne de Lafayette, did not get herself locked up.

What has love got to do with it, asks Shaven. Love is the matter which is on an emotional status closely related to the preconscious state of reason. Reason, as Lyndon LaRouche has written, is the capacity which enables creativity to manifest from the preconscious level. Love and beauty and truth are what opens this capacity for us.

Beethoven was well aware that even though Lafayette had been been liberated the struggle to achieve a humanist republic had only just begun. Feudalists and Oligarchs had thrown Lafayette in jail and were actively planning the counter-revolution and restoration. In order to enable an awakening of creative, constructive potentials in the souls of his audience, Beethoven composed a beautiful, loving and truthful Opera.

»The preconscious activity of knowingly creating valid new discoveries is the most intense of all emotions, an ultra-intense expression of the quality of emotion one associates with tender love between a man and a woman, the quality of emotion one wishes might be realized in love between a man and a woman. (…) To love a problem in original scientific discovery is to deliberately effect the creative solution to that problem. The emotion of love is expressed in its most concentrated form in the self-conscious act of deliberative discovery, on condition that one's deliberation is focussed on the preconscious moment of one's cognitive processes. That condition is the condition of reason.« — Lyndon H. LaRouche, Poetry Is The Science of Reason, 1978.

In this respect, Fidelio is a piece of art which applies its power also during the present time of torture for Julian Assange and his soul.

In closing, here is the translation of the ode for General Lafayette, written (presumably) by his friend Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz and published in February of 1793 in his Minerva-Magazin. It might as well have been sent to Julian Assange:

»Noble man!
There are still good souls, and their number is not small,
who are concerned about your misfortune, and to whom the act
that would cast you into a dungeon is a mystery,
or rather not a mystery at all.

You are still young in years, but you have lived long:
for you have saved thousands of families,
and have become the benefactor of hundreds of thousands.
Your virtues stand before us in radiant personae,
and cover your enemies with an indelible shame.

Vice broods in vain to accuse you of crimes.
Impartial men have long since been just against you,
and even better will posterity judge you.

How will your memory be other than
endowed with blessings, as long as virtue will still count
for something among mortals.«

— Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz to Lafayette

Luc Trudel has recognized back in 2022 that Beethoven’s Florestan and Julian Assange are indeed political prisoners.

»Yes, Florestan of Beethoven’s opera and Julian Assange are both innocent political prisoners and they are both dignified by the unwavering support and courage contributed to their outcome by their loving partner, but there’s more.« — Luc Trudel

»Invisible Cages of Fear Imprison Humankind«
— Caitlin Johnstone

In my personal opinion, Caitlin Johnstone has come closest to Beethoven’s Fidelio with her multimedia piece “The Wizard (For Julian)” on the occasion of his 50th birthday. It is not an opera (to my knowledge there has not been such an endeavor undertaken on his case by anyone), but it is wonderfully poetic and beautiful in so many ways.

Below are a (random) collection of other musical renditions calling for the release to freedom of Julian Assange.