Jefferson in France - the Ultimate Travel Blogger!

Thomas Jefferson – Traveling in France

1787 was a great year to be traveling in Europe.
While Catherine the Great was making her epic journey from St. Petersburg to the Crimea by sled/mobile home and boat (starting on New Year’s Day), Thomas Jefferson left Paris in February in the sleet. He was headed for the sunnier skies of Provence. His journey would not be that of a traveling dignitary but as a private citizen brimming with the enthusiasm of the ‘Age of Enlightenment’.

He writes to Lafayette: “I am constantly roving about, to see what I have never seen before and shall never see again. In the great cities, I go to see what travelers think alone worthy to be seen, but I make a job of it, and generally gulp it all down in a day. On the other hand I am never satiated with rambling through the fields and farms, examining the culture and cultivators, with a degree of curiosity which makes some take me to be a fool and others to be much wiser than I am.”

He goes on to urge Lafayette to do the same stipulating that he should do so incognito: “this is perhaps the only moment of your life in which you can acquire that knowledge. You must ferret the people out of their hovels as I have done, look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll in their beds under pretence of resting yourself but in fact to find if they are soft. You will feel a sublime pleasure in the course of this investigation, and a sublimer one hereafter when you shall be able to apply your knowledge to the softening of their beds, or the throwing of a morsel of meat into the kettle of vegetables.”

In the intro to Roy and Alma Moore’s book Thomas Jefferson’s Journey to the South of France, Shannon Sr. Research Historian at Monticello, Lucia C. Stanton describes this private citizen and ‘travel blogger’ of his day and how he prepared for his four month trip:

“In the best Enlightenment spirit, Jefferson had fully equipped himself for productive travel. His baggage contained his portable copying machine made to his own design in London which pressed out the only surviving copies of some of his most delightful letters.”

Far from considering his 4-month sojourn as a frivolous jaunt, an excuse for wine drinking (which he did greatly appreciate!)Jefferson was always gathering information to take back home to the US. In Sardinia, he slipped unhulled rice in his pocket which was a crime punishable by death – comparable to taking silk worms out of China. He rarely traveled in comfort. He retraced part of Hannibal’s route either by foot or on the back of a donkey. He gathered details incessantly with the persistence of an inventory control clerk. He marveled at the remains of Roman classic architecture, writing to one friend that he had ‘fallen in love with a building’. That would be the Maison Carre in Nime. He used the Maison Carre as the inspiration for his Virginia State Capitol building in Richmond:

“Here I am, Madam, gazing whole hours at the Maison quarree, like a lover at his mistress. The stocking-weavers and silk spinners around it consider me as an hypochondriac Englishman, about to write with a pistol the last chapter of his history. This is the second time I have been in love since I left Paris. The first was with a Diana at the Chateau de Laye Epinaye in the Beaujolais, a delicious morsel of sculpture, by Michael Angelo Slodtz.”

Rather than give away any details of his travels, I would recommend that Paris Logue readers interested in Jefferson’s travels through the southern France should pick up a copy of Roy & Alma Moore’s book (with exquisite photos!) Thomas Jefferson’s Journey to the South of France (Stewart, Tabori, & Chang, NY 1999).