Lafayette, we are here!
Being and Nothingness“Lafayette, we are here!” is the famous sentence through which the United States made its participation in the European war of 1914–1918 signify not merely a pursuit of profitable transactions but the repayment of a debt of honor to France. In the book’s account, the phrase demonstrates how a present political project can make a past into shared history.
Context and Historical Meaning
The passage distinguishes utilitarian action from historical action. American capitalism’s decision to enter the war because it offered opportunities for profitable transactions is, by itself, only utilitarian. The decision becomes historical when the United States recovers its earlier relations with France and interprets them as grounds for repaying an obligation. The sentence gives that interpretation its memorable public form.
A Past Reorganized by the Present
The expression does not simply recall an unchanged inheritance. The passage argues that a society becomes historical by reassuming its past and making it a memorial: a project selects and illuminates elements that can justify its present course. In this instance, the invocation of France supplies a shared account through which economic interests and the affinities between two democratic capitalisms can be understood together.
That account is contingent rather than inevitable. Had the United States judged its interests differently and sided with Germany, the passage observes, it could have recovered other past elements, such as the proportion of nineteenth-century German emigrants to America, and invoked “blood kinship.” The contrast makes the phrase an example of how a political project organizes historical memory, not proof that one predetermined past compelled the choice.
Political Use and Significance
The phrase matters because, in the passage’s analysis, the masses require a political project that illuminates and justifies their past. References to earlier relations cannot be dismissed as mere publicity: they help secure popular adherence by placing present action in a meaningful historical narrative. “Lafayette, we are here!” thus names both a declaration of solidarity with France and the act of making a common French-American past—one joining American economic interests with the actual affinities of the two democracies.
