The practice of naming places for Lafayette began even before the Revolutionary War officially ended. On May 15, 1783—four months before the Treaty of Paris was signed—the General Assembly of North Carolina gave the name Fayetteville to a new town in Cumberland County, making it the first city in the United States to honor the Marquis. As the United States expanded west and residents of Fayetteville followed the frontier, they brought the town’s name with them. Fayetteville, Tennessee, adopted the name in 1810, and Fayetteville, Arkansas took it in 1829. In 1846 the French name moved to the other side of the continent when Lafayette, Oregon was founded by a settler who had relocated from Lafayette, Indiana.

Lafayette, Indiana had adopted the name in 1825—a year when the United States was in the grip of Lafayette-mania. Between July 1824 and September 1825, the beloved Frenchman completed a triumphal tour of all 24 states in the Union at the invitation of President James Monroe. Politicians burnished their patriotic credentials by appearing alongside the Nation’s Guest, and municipalities vied to outdo their neighbors with parades, dances, and dinners in his honor. Men, women, and children turned out in unprecedented numbers to catch a glimpse of Lafayette—a link to the nation’s founding—and entrepreneurs made a tidy profit selling commemorative memorabilia (evening gloves, baby shoes, loaves of bread) emblazoned with Lafayette’s name or face. As Lafayette toured the country, more and more localities began naming stretches of land in his honor. President’s Park, facing the White House, was re-christened Lafayette Square in 1824. Place Gravier in New Orleans, Louisiana became Lafayette Square in 1825.

Lafayette Hose Company Cape, mid-19th century. Image courtesy of Division of Home and Community Life, National Museum of American History.

In the years that followed, memories of the triumphal tour inspired dozens of towns, parks, and schools to adopt names including Lafayette, La Grange (Lafayette’s chateau, about 30 miles east of Paris), and variations on the theme. In Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, local lore has it that an attorney named James Madison Porter was among the throng welcoming Lafayette to Philadelphia in 1824. During a brief conversation with the general, Porter had been moved to learn that the aging hero remembered Porter’s father and uncle as “good soldiers” during the Revolutionary War. Two years later, when Porter spearheaded the establishment of a college in Easton, Pennsylvania, the institution took the name Lafayette College.

When the United States came to the aid of France by entering World War I, another round of Lafayette commemorations began. In 1916 a group of American pilots fighting in the French Air Service dubbed themselves the Lafayette Escadrille. Most famously, perhaps, on July 4, 1917, Colonel Charles E. Stanton made it clear that the United States was repaying its revolutionary-era debt when he stood at Lafayette’s graveside in Paris’s Picpus Cemetery and declared “Lafayette, we are here!”

As the 20th century wore on, Lafayette’s name spread into nearly every corner of American culture. Lafayette cars were manufactured in Indiana in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1970, a basset hound named Lafayette appeared in the animated Disney film The Aristocats. And, on a 2015 visit to George Washington’s Mount Vernon, I bought French fries at the Lafayette Grill.

Thousands of French soldiers and sailors fought and died in the American Revolution, so why is Lafayette the first French name on every American tongue? His high rank and great wealth certainly had something to do with it: Lafayette was living, breathing evidence that the old European order had faith in a young country on the other side of the Atlantic. More important, though, might have been his earnest enthusiasm for the American cause and his unflagging determination to contribute to its success.

Lafayette Motors Co. radiator emblem, ca 1921. Image courtesy of Division of Work and Industry, National Museum of American History.

It all started on June 13, 1777, when the 19-year-old Lafayette reached North Island, South Carolina with some 20 officers and servants on a ship he had optimistically christened the Victoire—Victory. Lafayette had never seen a day of battlefield action and knew no English before he set sail, but he came filled with a burning desire to help 13 American colonies wrest their freedom from Great Britain, France’s age-old enemy.

Explaining his actions in a shipboard letter to the wife he had left in Paris, Lafayette described himself as a “defender of this freedom which I venerate” and insisted that “the happiness of America is closely tied to that of humanity.” More practical motivations had also influenced his thinking. Hailing from a line of men who fought and died for their country, Lafayette had dreamed of martial glory since childhood. But the French army quashed his hopes in 1776 when a wave of reforms removed from active duty hundreds of young officers who, like Lafayette, had risen through the ranks thanks to money and connections. Fighting under George Washington in the Continental Army represented a second chance.

Lafayette had been granted the rank of Major General by Silas Deane, one of Congress’s envoys to France, and expected to be awarded a command upon his arrival. But Congress and Washington hesitated; surely the rank was meant to be honorary. They had grown wary of the French officers who had been sailing across the Atlantic to join the American army. Although many were fine soldiers, some were mercenaries or troublemakers who had been driven from the French army. Others expressed open disdain for the American military.

Lady’s glove with a portrait of Lafayette, 1825. Image courtesy of Division of Political History, National Museum of American History.

On July 27, 1777, the same day that Lafayette and his shipmates reached Philadelphia, Washington wrote a letter from Morristown, New Jersey complaining of the influx of Frenchmen: “Almost every one of them,” he wrote, harbored “immoderate expectations” and became “importunate for offices they have no right to look for.” Massachusetts Congressman James Lovell was even more pointed in his criticism, explaining to Lafayette’s group that Deane had recruited no useful men in France, but only “some so-called engineers … and some useless artillerymen.”

America would soon learn that Lafayette was an exception. Of the officers who arrived on the Victoire, he was the only one invited to stay, with Congress evidently persuaded of his value by a letter from Silas Deane that praised not only Lafayette’s uncommon “zeal,” but also his “noble lineage, his connections, the high dignities exercised by his family at this Court, his ample possessions in the Kingdom, his personal worth, his celebrity.” As it happened, Lafayette was an exceptionally wealthy orphan who had allied himself with one of the most influential families at the French court when he married Adrienne de Noailles in 1774. What he lacked in experience he made up in funds and influence. It helped that Lafayette was immensely likeable: His straightforward demeanor and self-deprecating sense of humor sometimes rendered him out-of-place in the perfumed halls of Versailles, but they endeared him to Americans. If he was willing to forego a salary, he would be welcomed in the army.

Lafayette joined Washington’s closest circle of officers and was one of more than 10,000 American troops who awoke on the banks of Pennsylvania’s Brandywine River on the morning of September 11, 1777, awaiting a British attack. The Battle of Brandywine—Lafayette’s first—would end in a loss for the Americans, but it inaugurated the young Frenchman’s lasting American celebrity. In an account of the battle written that night, Washington mentioned the names of just two officers, reporting that “the Marquis de Lafayette was wounded in the leg, and General Woodford in the hand.” In the weeks that followed, as Lafayette was nursed back to health by the Moravian Brethren of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Washington’s letter made its way into patriot newspapers throughout the colonies. Lafayette was introduced to the American people as the French aristocrat who had shed blood on behalf of their freedom.

Thanks to careful guidance from Washington, who gently shepherded Lafayette through positions of increasing responsibility, the young man’s skills as a leader increased. In March of 1778 Lafayette put his enthusiasm for the American cause and his personable disposition to use in recruiting a group of Oneida men to fight under his command. And on June 28 his quick thinking was instrumental in salvaging a narrow victory at the Battle of Monmouth after General Charles Lee gave a disastrous order to retreat. Even more significant were the contributions Lafayette made away from the field of action. Taking every opportunity to write letters to France praising the Americans, and assuring Americans at every turn that France was on their side, Lafayette became the unofficial spokesperson for the French-American alliance.

Equestrian statue of Lafayette. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

When France pledged open support for the Americans by signing the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, Lafayette rightly took some of the credit. Hoping to be named commander of the French troops who would soon be sailing to the New World, Lafayette returned home to make his case. Although that role went to the far more senior Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau (1725-1807), Lafayette carried the news to Washington that guns, ships, and men would soon be on the way. Taking up an American command once more, Lafayette played leading roles in the Virginia campaign of 1781 and in the Siege of Yorktown that marked the last major hostilities of the American Revolution.

Lafayette returned to a political career in France, but throughout the 1780s he devoted himself to furthering America’s political and commercial interests. Sometimes working with America’s emissaries in France and sometimes acting on his own accord, Lafayette lobbied for a diplomatic post with the American government, advocated for favorable trading relations between France and the United States, and generally did what he could to help the young nation conquer the herculean task of establishing a new system of government while digging out from crushing debt. It was also important to him that the people of the United States learn of his efforts; as he put it in a 1783 letter to the American Secretary for Foreign Affairs Robert R. Livingston, “I have a great value for my American popularity.”

Around the world, Lafayette’s name became synonymous with liberty. In France, where the Revolution and Napoleon’s reign would tear society asunder, his reputation suffered ups and downs over the course of his long life. Things were different in the United States, though, in the 1820s and today. Thanks to the scores of places that bear his name, his American popularity lives on. As Lin-Manuel Miranda put it in his 2015 hit musical Hamilton, Lafayette remains “America’s favorite fighting Frenchman.”

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We’re at a Dodger game and I’ve decided to just mumble that part of the national anthem. I see it as a victory that I don’t have to look at the Jumbotron for most of the lyrics, though my ignorance might shock or offend many Americans. How does an 18-year-old, born and raised right here in California, not know the entire “Star-Spangled Banner”?

That was two years ago. While I have since learned that it is perilous fight, I still don’t know the Pledge of Allegiance or the words to “God Bless America.” My knowledge of American history does not extend past the American Revolution.

But I’m not poorly educated. I go to an Ivy League school. And there are things I know that you do not. I can list all the regions of France (the past 22, not the newly condensed 13) and can sing countless German Christmas carols and nursery rhymes. I know all the words to “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of France, as well as the significance of their national symbols, including La Marianne and the Gallic rooster. I can recite German folk tales, prayers, and poems. I also know the names of all of the French presidents and which Republic they were a part of (there were quite a few false starts), beginning with Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon’s nephew and an eventual emperor himself. I speak French and German fluently.

I’m not a French citizen (although I do know the process one must undergo to become one) and have no French heritage, and I was educated in Los Angeles. But in French. My elementary, middle, and high school, Lyceé International de Los Angeles (LILA), taught almost all of its classes in French. At the start of fifth grade, I distinctly remember counting how many hours of French I had a week: 12. That’s not including Art, P.E., or Math, which were also all taught in the language. By comparison, I only had six hours of English.

Jones (far right) on a school field trip with LILA to the Griffith Park Observatory.

My relationship to German is the opposite. I’ve never taken a German class, but my mother and her relatives are German, and much of my large extended family still lives in Germany (our last family reunion took place in Kiel, on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and boasted 98 attendees). It is for this reason that German is my first language and I spoke it exclusively to my mother until I was 12. She refused to respond if I spoke to her in English, to ensure that I learned the language well and wouldn’t forget it when I grew up.

This determination is also why she sent me to French school. Not only did she believe that the French educational system was the best in the world, but also that an immersion school would guarantee I became fluent in yet another language.

It wasn’t until my brother and I were in the car with her, en route to our kindergarten interview, that my mother informed us that the school taught its classes in French. Despite not having any say in the matter, we were, apparently, unfazed. Another language, why not?

Indeed, I am grateful for my trilingual upbringing; it has enabled me to look at things from different angles and it has enriched my understanding of the world. But it also gave me a cultural affliction: I am an American whose entire perspective was shaped by a German heritage and a French education. Because of this layered detachment from the U.S., I’ve become a foreigner who is not remotely foreign.

I never joined the Girl Scouts or had a lemonade stand (although the latter may have more to do with my heavily trafficked Los Angeles street than my curious upbringing). I played soccer as a child, but I didn’t know the rules of American football until this year. The bedtime prayer I’d learned as a child was in German and told the story of 14 angels who protected me by standing at various places around my bed. I did listen to the Harry Potter books on tape in the car when I was little, and I did see one of the more recent Batman movies, but in both cases they were translated into German.

At my International Lycée (a term which refers to a secondary school that follows the French curriculum), where exotic nationalities were rampant, I was known as “the German kid. ” On one level that made sense—I speak German like a native and am well-versed in traditional songs and fairytales. But as a practical matter it was a stretch. I don’t know all that much about the German government or everyday life there, and—family reunions aside—my connections to the actual nation are minimal.

Jones (left) wearing a LILA t-shirt with a friend.

My knowledge of, and affection for, France, on the other hand, is borderline excessive. At the moment all I can think about is how this current U.S. election mirrors the French 2002 presidential election, and the ways in which Donald Trump resembles Jean Marie LePen. And when I recently read an article on “laïcité”, the oft-criticized French practice of imposed secularism, my thoughts immediately went to how endearing I find the policy. Rather than viewing it as an attack on religious freedom, I see it as a holdover from the French Revolution. In 1799 the French were doing everything in their power to separate themselves from the monarchy; they went so far as to invent their own calendar! Laïcité is their way of fighting against a tradition of religion used as force. It is the French trying to maintain equality, all these years later.

Sometimes I blurt out words like “flou” and “pechvogel”, which roughly translate to “imprecise and vague” and “someone who attracts bad luck”, respectively. I use them not because I’m trying to be pretentious, but because they express sentiments for which I have not found precise English translations.

This isn’t to say that I don’t love the English language; it’s actually my chosen college major. I also don’t dislike America, and I love California and Los Angeles. L.A. is a mixture of bewitching glamour and harsh reality, and I am lucky to have grown up here. But, on its own, it’s not home.

Truthfully, I’m a little lost. As I grew up my languages and my worlds became jumbled, and as a result I no longer fit into any of them. I’m not German enough to be German, I’m not French enough to be French, and I’m not American enough to be American. I have lived in the same L.A. home since I was two, but I didn’t speak English until I was at least three. My childhood was so filled with German that I dreamt in the language, but I know little about the realities of the nation. I have an American accent when I speak French, and of these three countries I have spent the least amount of time in France, but I know the most about its origins, politics and society.

Sometimes I wish I had a more clear-cut connection to a single place and culture. There is safety in having a true home. A place that, however boring or fast-paced, you know like the back of your hand, an expression, which, interestingly, has no direct translation into German or French. The closest you can get is “wie deine Westentasche,” or “comme le fond de ta poche,” which both roughly translate into knowing something like the inside of your pocket.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I don’t have this exact relationship with a place, and that I may never. I need more than a place to feel whole. Los Angeles is only truly home when I’m with friends from my French school community laughing about Louis XV. When my mother makes bratkartoffeln and tells me about the German mystery that she’s reading. Or when I go to a small French restaurant in L.A. with my family on Bastille Day and we speak German the whole time. This I know, like the inside of my pocket.

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And—they butcher ducks.

One of the most important parts of France’s national culinary heritage is the production of foie gras, the liver of a specially fattened duck or goose. It has long been prized as one of the greatest and most traditional delicacies of French cuisine. In 2005, it was even enshrined in law as part of the country’s “officially-protected cultural and gastronomic patrimony.” This protection was more than symbolic—it was also economic.

Foie gras belongs to the “terroir,” or taste of place, of Southwest France. According to French folklore, this localized practice is centuries old, and knowledge of it dates back even further to ancient Egypt and Rome. Today, about 80 percent of the world’s foie gras production occurs in the Southwest, which uses a European Union food labeling program to claim a “protected geographical indication” for foie gras. When I first traveled there nearly a decade ago, I observed professionally designed billboards for large foie gras companies lining the main highways. Signs inviting travelers to visit small foie gras farms—often hand-drawn to evoke rustic charm or showing cartoon ducks wearing bowties or playing musical instruments—peppered the countryside’s narrow, winding roads and picturesque rolling hills. Tourism information offices in historic town centers distributed fliers from nearby artisanal foie gras farms, entreating visitors to stop by and enjoy a tasting.

Fattening of ducks for the production of foie gras in France in 2012.

Since the early 2000s, however, the production of foie gras has become hotly contested on moral grounds and has even been outlawed in other European Union countries. The fattening process, called gavage, involves force-feeding the duck or goose with a tube (typically made of metal). This rapidly enlarges the liver six to 10 times in size and increases its fat content to 80 percent over the two-to-three week gavage period. Today, there are two types of gavage used in France: artisanal and industrial. The first method allows farmers to hand feed the birds, while the latter uses a feeding machine. The industrial method is usually contracted by large companies that distribute their brands around the country and world.

Opponents to gavage say it is cruel and inhumane because it causes the birds immense pain and suffering and inflicts disease upon their bodies. Foie gras producers and enthusiasts, on the other hand, argue that gavage takes advantage of specific biological features of ducks and geese, which overeat and store fat in their livers prior to long journeys and whose tough esophagi lack nerve endings and gag reflexes that would cause pain.

What does it mean for a food to be celebrated and marketed as part of national heritage when it is also morally polarizing worldwide?

Many French citizens told me they perceived attacks, symbolic or otherwise, against their nation’s celebrated food practices as assaults on its heritage, culture, and identity. When I asked about bans and critiques of foie gras outside of the country, almost everyone—from everyday consumers to the president of the national industry group—responded doggedly by calling it traditional, authentic, and a part of French heritage.

But it’s not quite that simple. How foie gras is marketed to the French public today conveniently obscures the industry’s expansion from a seasonal specialty item into a year-round, multi-billion euro industry. It ignores the fact that the industrial model, spurred by capital and state investment, now accounts for about 90 percent of the country’s total foie gras production. And it was only in the 1980s and 1990s, when France was growing into a larger role in European integration politics and markets, that the country’s southwestern regions also began establishing extensive agri-tourism activities celebrating “fat ducks” and decisively working to craft foie gras as a national treasure—one that needs state protection in the face of outsiders’ vociferous opposition—using the framework of terroir tourism.

Municipalities throughout the Southwest have created activities to encourage people not just to visit, but to also partake in the artisanal foie gras experience. If timed right, visitors to these foie gras farms are welcome to watch gavage and butchery. Visitors can also stroll through amateur-designed foie gras museums, shop at newly-created “fat markets” to purchase whole carcasses and livers, and attend “foie gras weekends,” staying in farm guest rooms where the main activity is butchering your own duck or goose to take home. Local officials use these campaigns to acquaint the French and foreigners alike with the production and the producers of foie gras, to increase consumption, and to prove foie gras’s national cultural value. But what is crucial to recognize is that this public face of foie gras—the picturesque, romanticized farms that are conspicuous and welcoming—only accounts for about 10 percent of total national production.

Interestingly, local histories and residents reveal that while tensions between artisanal and industrial foie gras producers were common in the past, both kinds of producers are now, for the large part, mutually supportive. Many are neighbors, some even friends, and see themselves as targeting discrete consumer markets. And each benefits from ongoing demand for the other.

Despite global opposition to foie gras, French producers of all sizes seem aware of needing to feed a “heritage mentality”—to safeguard this food as an endangered symbol of French national identity and cultural wealth, whether or not traditional production methods are used. French people become complicit through active participation as well as consumption. The work of preserving and promoting foie gras—by artisanal and industrial producers, consumers, and the French state—has become a small but significant way to defend the taste and place of “Frenchness” in the 21st century.

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