Parricide of Memory: Thomas Jefferson's Memoir and the French Revolution

Thomas Jefferson’s role in the French Revolution has seized both the scholarly and public imagination in recent years. Two books treating the subject have been published since 1996: Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution 1785–1800 and William Howard Adams’s The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson; a Merchant and Ivory film, Jefferson in Paris, also focuses on this period of his life.¹ This new scholarship emphasizes the extent to which Jefferson supported the Revolution, condoned the violence of the Terror, and was unable to confront the excesses of Robespierre. Even Merchant and Ivory follow O’Brien in attacking the hagiographic bent of much Jefferson scholarship and insisting that we recognize the hypocritical nature of Jefferson’s support of the revolutionaries, given that he himself was a slaveholder. Despite this attention, Jefferson’s most complete and conservative account of the French Revolution, which appears in his 1821 Memoir, has remained largely unexamined. Adams quotes from it a few times, while O’Brien doesn’t even include it in the index of his book. The obscurity of the Memoir is certainly partially to blame; although it generated considerable excitement and interest when it was posthumously published in 1829, the Memoir has been almost entirely neglected by contemporary Jefferson scholars.² But Jefferson’s account in the Memoir is also inconvenient for O’Brien and Adams because it does not display the zealous support of the Revolution that these two scholars reveal in Jefferson’s earlier writings.³ Perhaps for this reason, Adams chooses not to include Jefferson’s retrospective views on his years in Paris, and O’Brien ends his study with the year 1800. In fact, however, Jefferson’s “affair” with the French Revolution went on considerably longer than the fifteen years covered by O’Brien in The Long Affair.

Jefferson scholarship has suffered as a result of this oversight, for the Memoir offers Jefferson’s longest and most literary account of the French Revolution. To point this out is not to defend Jefferson’s early myopia with respect to the violence of the Directory but to attempt to reconstruct his efforts to protect his legacy from the charge of fanaticism. The Memoir represents Jefferson’s (largely successful) attempt to rewrite his own history with France. But Jefferson’s text has been betrayed by history much as he feared he had betrayed history by supporting the French Revolution. The Memoir is often referred to for the draft of the Declaration of Independence included by Jefferson as proof he had not plagiarized that famous document, but the work as a whole has been ignored as a literary text and denied a close reading.⁴ James Cox’s 1978 call for a general reexamination of the Memoir in his “Jefferson’s Autobiography: Recovering Literature’s Lost Ground” is still the only full-length essay on the autobiography, and his plea has gone unanswered.⁵

There is, however, a certain ironic justice in this neglect, for the theme of Jefferson’s narrative, both conscious and unconscious, is the violence of misremembering, mistranslation, and misprision. Both in content and form, the Memoir is marked by a guilty preoccupation with the mechanics of memory and the moral implications of the act of recollection. Jefferson begins by meditating on the problem of the translation of his ideas into action in the French Revolution and their transmission to future generations in his Memoir; he then seeks to absolve himself of responsibility for errors of interpretation in both cases. As the text unfolds, he moves from a philosophical contemplation of historical error, to an attempt to explicate the “translation” errors of the French revolutionaries, to a dramatic questioning of the written historical record in his account of a manuscript entrusted to him by Benjamin Franklin.

In the Memoir Jefferson remembers both too much and too little of the French Revolution. He devotes...