In 1777, a 19-year-old French aristocrat disobeyed his king. The young man, who had socialized at Versailles, bought and outfitted a ship on which to cross the Atlantic, to North Carolina. His purpose was to fight with the Continental Army that had risen up against British Colonial rule. Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, better and more simply known as the marquis de Lafayette, became an aide-de-camp to General Washington, performed well in battle, then commanded an American division. In 1779, Lafayette returned to France to persuade the king to send official French forces in aid of the Americans. The king briefly imprisoned Lafayette for his earlier disobedience, then saw the wisdom of the now 20-year-old’s request. Lafayette returned to America in 1780 in command of French troops, and the next year led American soldiers against General Cornwallis in Virginia, where the British were pinned down at Yorktown with Lafayette on one side of them and Admiral de Grasse’s French fleet on the other. Lafayette proved decisive to American victory. The young republic, however, had little sense of an overarching national identity or destiny — the Constitution notwithstanding. We lived still in the time when transportation and communication were synonymous words (not to be separated until the introduction of the electric telegraph in the 1840s), and the new nation had virtually nothing of a roadway system. “French Founding Father: Lafayette’s Return to Washington’s America” at the New-York Historical Society tells as well as it can be told the story of Lafayette’s visit to America in 1824, 40 years after he had last been here.

Curator Richard Rabinowitz convincingly makes the case that Lafayette’s visit provided the occasion for a coalescing of an American national identity. As a wall text explains:

Lafayette’s return visit and the forms of patriotism that it inspired helped fashion a popular identity of America as both exceptional and exemplary. American liberty was to be synonymous with universal human rights. The nation would be a beacon and standard-bearer for freedom everywhere.

Lafayette had embarked upon a political career in France, where he sat in the Chamber of Deputies between 1818 and 1824, a leader in the opposition to the ultra-royalist kings Louis XVIII and Charles X. But his loss of his chamber seat brought to an end his political influence just when, as fate would have it, President Monroe invited Lafayette to come to America to tour the country and see what it had made of itself since the revolutionary days. For Lafayette, this was a tremendous opportunity for publicity and to remind the world of his crucial role in American independence. For Americans, it was an opportunity to thank Lafayette, at times a bit fulsomely, and to show off a little.

“French Founding Father” presents material on the whole of Lafayette’s trip, which covered 13 months and 24 states, and included a steamboat explosion and arduous trekking through the practically uncharted South, but focuses on his stops in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. He came to New York from Le Havre, and the exhibition begins with a dazzling panoramic view, with judicious multimedia effects, made from a period print showing Lafayette’s landing, amid jubilation and fireworks, at Castle Garden off the Battery. (Today, Castle Garden is called Castle Clinton and has been joined by landfill to Battery Park.) He then became one of the most intensively banqueted men in history. Everyone wanted a piece of Lafayette, and with utmost charm and courtesy he obliged his adoring public. Mr. Rabinowitz says that he and his American History Workshop team tried hard to find materials, anything at all, that ridiculed or satirized the visit, but they turned up empty. Both the honorers and the honoree stood to gain too much from this visit.

Lafayette lauded and flattered his hosts at every turn. According to Mr. Rabinowitz: “Today, when Europeans — and especially the French — complain of the American habit of self-congratulation, perhaps they can trace some of that way of thinking back to the visit of our ‘French founding father.'”

George Washington, whom Lafayette called his adoptive father (his real father died in the Seven Years’ War), had been dead for a quarter of a century by 1824. Still, it was as though the president accompanied Lafayette (who visited Mount Vernon) on his tour, so closely were the two men’s names linked. At the New-York Historical Society, a whole room contains various items emblazoned with Lafayette’s portrait. These range from cups and bowls to children’s shoes to snuffboxes to leather gloves, not to mention the imposing portrait painted by Samuel F.B. Morse on loan to the exhibition from New York’s City Hall.

In addition to the highly informative and entertaining gathering of prints, newspapers, maps, paintings, and artifacts, “French Founding Father” makes superb use of multimedia. Generally, I find sound and video in museum exhibitions to be distracting and grating. But American History Workshop knows exactly how to do it. In addition to the beautiful panorama of Castle Garden, the visitor may, through headphones, listen to what toasts, which at the time were an extremely important form of oratory, sounded like, and the music, performed on period instruments, that Francis Johnson — America’s first African-American composer in the classical tradition — wrote for the Lafayette Ball at Philadelphia’s New Theatre. This is how multimedia may provide crucial enhancement to an exhibition without being in the least distracting. As the wall text from “French Founding Father” explains:

News of his reception circulated from one newspaper to another. The tour became a national geography lesson. People who had never seen a real general, or a Revolutionary War survivor, or an official representative of the United States, became connected through Lafayette to national identity and American history.

Soon Pennsylvanians and Virginians and Tennesseans would feel like Americans. All across the country towns were named Lafayette, or Fayette, or Fayetteville, or — after Lafayette’s French estate — La Grange. In New York, we remember him in the name of Lafayette Street, where the old row of stately houses now known as Colonnade Row was originally named La Grange Terrace, in the early 1830s. A statue of a rather foppish Lafayette stands in Union Square; its artist was Frédéric Bartholdi, who also gave us the Statue of Liberty. In Park Slope, Brooklyn, a splendid Lafayette Memorial on Prospect Park West at 9th Street was designed by Daniel Chester French and Henry Bacon, who also did the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The memorial in Park Slope became a rallying symbol for American aid to the French in World War I.

One thing that comes out of “French Founding Father” is how much the two nations owe to each other, how close their historical relationship. Largely, though, “French Founding Father” is a little less about Lafayette than it is about his idolaters, the Americans who used the occasion of his visit to fashion for themselves a national identity.

Until August 10 (170 Central Park West at 77th Street, 212-873-3400).