Volume 44, Number 3 · February 20, 1997
Liberty's Wild Man
By Gordon S. Wood
The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800
by Conor Cruise O'Brien
University of Chicago Press, 367 pp., $29.95
In today's cultural climate it is perhaps necessary at the outset to point out that 'the long affair' referred to in the title of Conor Cruise O'Brien's strange and remarkable book on Thomas Jefferson has no sexual connotation. Jefferson, says O'Brien, had a long affair, but it was not with a woman; it was with the French Revolution. Not that O'Brien is uninterested in Jefferson's sexual exploits. Quite the contrary. He devotes a chapter or so to Jefferson's putative sexual and emotional relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. But O'Brien's main desire—and this accounts for the extraordinary passion of his book—is to use what he repeatedly refers to as Jefferson's 'almost manic enthusiasm for the French Revolution' to show multicultural Americans that this historical figure has nothing whatsoever to say to them.
Review, 4655 words
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