Bataille de Yorktown by Louis-Charles Auguste Couder
The original of this painting, depicting Rochambeau, pointing, and Washington, to his left, giving their final orders before the battle of Yorktown, hangs in Versailles. The man over the shoulders of the two commanders is Lafayette and the one on horseback is believed to be the duc de Lauzun. It was of these men, and their fellow officers, that the Society of the Cincinnati was born. Lauzun, Lafayette and others carried the ideals of the American Revolution back to France and threw them into the brewing cauldron with others' less altruistic motives, and the many problems of Eighteenth Century France, and produced a far different Revolution than that of the Americans.
It is of their descendants that today's Society of the Cincinnati is composed.
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