Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast introduction to this week's program David

this is Jefferson 101 we've been waiting for this we've been neglecting it a little you've done a lot of work on this

oh not so much it's fun

spent five years in France and they were really amongst the

great years of his life. And we try as we might we we didn't even make it to his

actual duties in this show we just we set the stage really well.

We did I hope and we'll do another program on Jefferson and France and that one will include

the Sally Hemming story the Maria Cosway story, his diplomatic duties, his trip to England

with John Adams, the coming of the French Revolution, and maybe most particularly the series of

letters that he wrote to Madison from Paris

which are really the kind of foundation of Jefferson's mature political

philosophy. We may have to do more than one more show. So that's today and it's so interesting because it makes us think about how a very

highly refined but naive and provincial American responded to this glittering world of France and Paris on the

eve of the French Revolution.

The Ancien regime, as it sometimes called, this the last gasp of pre-revolutionary France and Jefferson

was there to see it and he said that the great masses are starving to death and can't

literally put a loaf of bread on the table for their families,

but the people, the halves, are living like gods on earth.

And of course he traveled in the company of the halves and he got to enjoy this salon culture and the arts of

conversation and music taken to its highest pitch and urban walking and book stalls

and so on. But he did react and I know this only because you've taught me. He did

react to the plight of the poor in France. You've told this story beautifully about this peasant woman that he met and

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