The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson by William Howard Adams Yale 320pp, £21 in UK
Lawyer, career diplomat, statesman, amateur architect, farmer, constitutionalist, patriot, aesthete, thinker, wayward do-it-yourselfer and personal spendthrift, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) in 1801 became the third President of the United States, the first to have his inauguration in Washington. His status as a great American endures. He drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776; later, while serving as the American minister to France during the lead-up to the French Revolution, he advised on the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
There are multiple complexities and contradictions to that legacy. Jefferson is still a political force, a liberalising influence who helped create an American social identity while also pioneering a dazzling era of neo-classical architecture inspired by imperial Rome throughout the Southern states, particularly in Virginia, his home state, where he proudly founded a great university, including the magnificent Rotunda and library, which boasts possibly the most beautiful room in the United States.
He was a great humanitarian, and champion of equal rights, whose wealth, however, was founded on and sustained by slavery. While international opinion denounced the brutal excesses of the French Revolution, Jefferson continued to justify the bloodshed, only beginning to question it with the emergence of Napoleon's dictatorship. On the one hand we have a modest, self-disciplined visionary, on the other an aesthete and consummate materialist, tirelessly ac cumulating European works of art for Monticello, the Palladian villa high in the Virginia mountains, which he designed himself. In the spring of 1782, following the American victory at Yorktown, the Marquis de Chastellux visited there and remarked: "Mr Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather." The more Jefferson gathered, the more he sought, accumulating massive debts with the abandon of a spoilt aristocrat.
His is a long life and a remarkable story, which makes William Howard Adams's achievement all the more impressive. This is a thorough, balanced study of Jefferson's time in Paris during which an American provincial idealist became a cosmopolitan with a formidable range of political, scientific and cultural understanding. Working within this five-year period, which followed the death of Jefferson's wife in 1782 and his subsequent move to Paris, Adams places his subject firmly in context.
Jefferson's father, an estate owner, saw to it that his son got the best education available in the colony. Considering his later love of all things French, it is interesting to note the anti-French mood prevailing in his youth: "In 1760, when Jefferson entered college, anti-French sentiments were widespread among ordinary Americans. All French men were either victims of a benighted Jesuit education and schooled in treachery or immoral followers of Voltaire, free-thinkers, frivolous and undependable." Jefferson, it appears, never had any difficulty with France. Discovering Racine at an early age, he copied four extracts from the great dramatist's tragedies into his Literary Commonplace Book, the only entries he wrote in French.
From his earliest student days, Jefferson's sources and inspirations were unconditionally international, in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Before ever leaving the US, he had campaigned for the transfer of the Virginia state capital from Williamsburg to the village of Richmond, a proposal passed in 1779, after he had been elected governor. Richmond's six large public squares would later be filled by buildings inspired by models Jefferson saw in Europe. Adams stresses the role France played in freeing Jefferson from the melancholy he suffered after his wife's death. According to Adams, Jefferson "fell under the spell of Paris" the moment he set foot there.
His arrival coincided with a time of extensive public building. "The Paris real estate boom of the 1780s was almost entirely in the hands of private investors and entrepreneurs. Contrary to conventional belief that the nobility stayed clear of business and commercialism, many of the titled grandees were deep into enterprise generated by the wealth of private tax collectors." Aristocratic ladies mixed with the wives of financiers, and this breaking of class barriers was viewed as "one more sign that the ancient social and political structure was collapsing as fast as the old buildings being razed all over the city in the name of progress and gain". Not surprisingly, Jefferson, having signed a nine-year lease on a fine residence and obviously sensitive to the French emphasis on appearances, soon found himself in debt.
In this book, Jefferson in Paris is portrayed as a quiet character, informal yet always correct. Adams is certainly an admirer, but he has kept his enthusiasm in check and tends not to try to read his subject's mind. The writing is atmospheric and vaguely witty; Paris is presented as a city in turmoil through which Jefferson goes about his daily business, even managing to sleep through the fall of the Bastille. Admittedly, Jefferson is frequently and ultimately irritatingly referred to throughout as "The Virginian". The book reads as exciting, atmospheric history; Jefferson is central without being oppressively heroic - Adams is very conscious of the presence of Benjamin Franklin's "antique simplicity". Nor does the author neglect the contradiction in Jefferson's image of the American woman as wife and motherfigure while he enjoyed the company of several highly cultivated, sophisticated, liberated and married "new" French women. The issue which dominates this calm, elegant book is Jefferson's acceptance of the excesses of the Revolution. As great as he is, Jefferson appears as a figure caught between his contrasting mythic cultural visions of Europe and of America. Subtle and understated, William Howard Adams's graceful study has a shaper edge than one might have expected.
Eileen Battersby is a critic, and an Irish Times staff journalist