History Dept.

Sex and Monticello

Jefferson, France and the politics of secrets.

In the final years of Thomas’s Jefferson’s life, America’s best friend in Europe was also the last surviving commander of Continental Army forces. The Marquis de Lafayette was a fatherless French aristocrat, inspired by the Declaration of Independence, who outfitted a vessel and sailed the Atlantic to commit to the American cause. Widely identified as General Washington’s “adoptive son,” Lafayette survived not one, but two revolutions (our nation’s and his). After an absence of four decades, he returned to the United States in 1824, accompanied by his son, George Washington Lafayette.

Throughout the marquis’ triumphal tour, newspapers reported his every move, his every speech, as he symbolically set foot on the soil of each of the 24 states–nearly drowning when the boat his party was traveling on up the Ohio River went down in the middle of the night. All a person had to say was “the Nation’s Guest,” and everyone knew who was meant. Lafayette was so beloved that multiple cities and counties were named after him. For extended moments, France loved America, America loved France.

On Nov. 4, 1824, Lafayette’s coach arrived at Monticello, to the accompaniment of trumpets. Jefferson emerged from the house and the two men embraced. Eyewitnesses wept. Jefferson’s nephew arrived late: “I would have given my best coat to have witnessed the meeting,” he said.

No one will marvel at the sublime when Francois Hollande is received Monday at Jefferson’s villa, but the French president undoubtedly knows of the “special relationship” our two countries enjoyed at the time America’s moral identity was being forged. Hollande’s visit to the mountaintop with President Obama will conjure warm feelings and reveal familiar artifacts. Jefferson was a noted connoisseur of French wines, which he continued to import for decades after his tenure as U.S. minister to France ended in 1789. Monticello’s signature dome was copied from the Parisian architecture he had lovingly inspected. When Jefferson was in office, a French chef ran the kitchen at what was then called the President’s House.

As to that moral identity, which Jefferson helped to forge with his rich patriotic script and French Enlightenment influence, much can be said. Jefferson has always been freedom’s philosopher, but over the past half-century, his position along America’s political spectrum has shifted from one end to the other. From the New Deal through the 1960s, he was plainly a champion of liberal government. The patrician Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw Jefferson as he saw himself, “a great gentleman … a great commoner.” In combating the conservatives who regarded his programs as a government takeover, FDR insisted: “Jefferson realized that the government must intervene … not to destroy individualism, but to protect it.”

Yet no president loved Thomas Jefferson more than Ronald Reagan, who collected Jefferson quotes, peppered numerous speeches with them and was thoroughly convinced that the third president was, like himself, a champion of small government. At the Jefferson Memorial, on July 3, 1987, he said: “Jefferson so fervently believed that limited government was vital to the preservation of liberty that he used his influence to see to it that the Constitution included a Bill of Rights, 10 amendments that spelled out specific governmental limitations.”

One thing has never changed. Jefferson’s is the first name Americans associate with representative democracy. He is the founding father whose political sentiments reverberate loudest. Here and around the world, he is democracy’s muse. When former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited Monticello in 1993, he remarked that he had conceived Russian reform by referring back to what he’d read in college about Jefferson’s political thought.

Politicians gravitate to Jefferson for obvious reasons. His expressions of hope for the future of the republic—and republics abroad—remain integral to Americans’ collective sense of purpose. Over the years, he has provided an ennobling vocabulary that members of Congress draw upon when they seek support for anything from the latest farm bill to patent reform. He is an oracle of sorts, with near-biblical authority. In the mid-1990s, for example, Republican Bob Smith of New Hampshire rose in the Senate chamber, and proclaimed: “Lest there be any doubt where Thomas Jefferson would have stood on the balanced budget amendment, that doubt ought to be laid to rest by the following statement he made in 1798: ‘I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution … an additional article taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.’”

But back then, the Democratic Party had a spokesperson with a special claim to the third president. It was right there in his middle name: William Jefferson Clinton. Speaking at the Jefferson Memorial on the occasion of Jefferson’s 250th birthday, President Clinton called attention to one of the panels inside the national shrine that resonated with model liberalism: “Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind…. Manners and opinions change. With the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.” If Reagan’s Jefferson was a symbol of an admired past and a simpler, more manageable government system, Clinton’s Jefferson was sensitive, experimental and oriented toward the future. He was a protector of the environment, too.

Jefferson can sound thoroughly cautious and practical in his pronouncements, and usually does. But he also indulged in hyperbole. From France, some years before that nation plunged into the time of Terror, he wrote fatefully: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh wore a “blood of tyrants” T-shirt on the day he blew up the Murrah Federal Building.

As a unifier, Jefferson came into play after Sept. 11, 2001, when a number of congresspersons repeated the iconic phrase that encircles the inside of the Jefferson Memorial: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” We would persevere whenever tyrannical threats loomed. And then flowed stern recollections of President Jefferson’s response to state-sponsored terrorism: In 1801, despite his policy of holding down the defense budget, he opted to defend the national honor by dispatching marines to “the shores of Tripoli,” where Islamic pirates kidnapped and demanded ransoms. In 2004, with leadership responsibilities front and center in that fraught election year, Time devoted its Independence Day cover story to Jefferson, the “philosopher-president.” Would he have invaded Iraq?, the editors asked.

How odd that an 18th-century man should retain such a hold on our political culture. What would cause a people to turn to him as often as they do, and on so may levels? How can he be at once the founder of the modern Democratic Party and the Tea Party’s darling? Everyone wants to claim him. Except when it comes to private behavior, that is.

From Paris, in 1785, Jefferson wrote to a young Virginian to warn him of the temptations a male faced in France: “He is led by the strongest of all the human passions into a spirit for female intrigue destructive of his own and others happiness, or a passion for whores destructive of his health, and in both cases he learns to consider fidelity to the marriage bed as an ungentlemanly practice and inconsistent with happiness.” Given President Hollande’s ongoing tussle with the scandal sheets, Jefferson’s old advice is given new life. But, of course, Jefferson himself, who lacked the prescience to anticipate DNA, continues to endure a similar scrutiny over his sexual activity with Monticello house servant Sally Hemings.

As the French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” How romantically our two nations are intertwined! It was generally assumed, in 1824, that the 66-year-old French marquis was more than “just friends” with his traveling companion, the women’s rights activist and free love advocate Frances Wright. Jefferson’s prim and proper daughter Martha found Fanny Wright to be frightfully immoral.

When the “Nation’s Guest” was riding in the neighborhood of Monticello with the aged Jefferson, at the reins of their carriage sat Israel Jefferson, a slave, who was to be sold after Jefferson died in deep debt. Lafayette had been writing regularly to Jefferson over the years, decrying the persistence of American slavery, and Israel was eavesdropping on just such a conversation. The two leaders were so intimate that years later, during his final visit to the American patriarch’s home, Lafayette promised to send Jefferson a superior French “bougie,” or catheter, to assist the Virginian in treating an enlarged prostate.

Today, the eavesdropping on world leaders’ private conversations is quite another matter. Last summer, Hollande joined German Chancellor Angela Merkel in calling for the United States to stop eavesdropping on its allies. Presumably, Messieurs Obama and Hollande will guard their tongues and speak pleasantries at Monticello.

Presidents used to imagine they could keep their secrets–and build their legacies–without having to adjust for prying eyes. Freedom-loving Americans expressed shock at European liberties—those that were personal, yet exposed. And so Jefferson took his secrets to the grave. But we know the way these things go: Some years later, Israel Jefferson confirmed that his late master had been on “intimate terms” with his attractive biracial chambermaid. Sometimes the past reawakens. Reputations change.

As Hollande steps into Jefferson’s home, he will be mulling over a dismal 19 percent approval rating back in France. In that vein, it is curious that Jefferson the Francophile, though he adored Lafayette, also confided in James Madison that the pro-American marquis had one giant flaw. It wasn’t a taste for younger women, but a “canine appetite for popularity.” So it’s hard to know what Monsieur Hollande will obtain by channeling Jefferson. At least, he’ll get to see hanging in the parlor of Monticello the same portrait of Lafayette that the marquis himself saw when he last visited.

Andrew Burstein is Manship professor of history at Louisiana State University. He is author of Jefferson’s Secrets, coauthor of Madison and Jefferson and will publish Democracy’s Muse: Thomas Jefferson and His Modern Fate next year.

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