#1304 To France

Listening to America

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2018

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

"This period was, in some ways, the most satisfying period of Jefferson's life, and in some ways it was the most radical."

— Clay S. Jenkinson

This week, as promised, and in anticipation of Clay's upcoming cultural tour of Jefferson's France in October 2019, we devote an entire show to discussion of Jefferson's time as Minister to France from 1784 to 1789.

Jefferson spent five of the most extraordinary years of his life in France. He fell in love with French people and French culture, but he also got to witness a second great revolution in a single lifetime: the beginnings of the French Revolution. It was one of the most formative times of Mr. Jefferson's life, and he carried what he called the little flame of liberty across the Atlantic in the summer of 1784. Jefferson was thrilled to see that the principles that we had fought for and established in our new system were now being used to change the world — that all of Europe he thought was going to follow the path of the United States. It didn't quite work out that way, but that was his optimism.

Find this episode, along with recommended reading, on the blog.

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You can learn more about our Cultural Tours & Retreats with Clay S. Jenkinson at jeffersonhour.com/tours.

Thomas Jefferson is interpreted by Clay S. Jenkinson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good day Thomas Jefferson, now are listeners and thank you for listening as I always say without you we are nothing.
0:06.5	So this is a program this week about France because I'm going there.
0:09.5	I'm taking a group in the October of 2019 to Jefferson's France. I did this twice before earlier in my life.
0:16.0	Pretty soon we're going to get emails from people saying,
0:18.0	enough with the France already, but you know in your defense I must say I just know how...
0:22.0	You put me up to this or I know how
0:23.8	excited you are the mail has been heavy I know how excited you are and it really is
0:27.6	just a fascinating period of Jefferson's life I every time we talk about it I learned something new.
0:35.0	Well you know what I've been doing is I think I told you is re-reading key
0:38.0	episodes in Jefferson's life from a number of different biographies.
0:41.0	You talked about Fon Brody's, I can't even say what I mean, but I need to go back and
0:46.2	reread that.
0:47.2	You know her incendiary biography published in 1974, oh boy in her lifetime. She was savaged about this.
0:56.0	She's been vindicated in almost every area of her work.
1:00.0	But at the time in 1974 you could not talk about Sally Hemings.
1:05.6	But every biographer has to take a little bit of license in their own interpretation.
1:11.7	That's what makes them all fun to read.
1:13.2	And you learn new things by somebody else's perspective.
1:16.8	Well, as you heard in the Jefferson Watch, the essay for this week,
1:20.5	these major establishment biographers are always trying to make Jefferson less radical than he was.
1:27.0	That's not... I don't think it's true.
1:30.0	I think... So let's look at the word radical for a minute it comes from a Latin
	...

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