He served brilliantly under Lafayette in America, and was the officer who concluded the capitulation of Yorktown in 1781. He was elected to the Estates-General in 1789. On 4 August 1789, during the French Revolution, he began the famous "orgy", as Mirabeau called it, when feudalism was to be abolished, and with the duc d'Aiguilion proposed the abolition of titles and liveries in June 1790.