Jefferson in Paris -- February 17, 2025

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Happy Presidents' Day everyone.

I have mixed feelings about Thomas Jefferson. He wrote the Declaration of Independence. He owned slaves. He made the Louisiana Purchase. He was a proponent of limited government powers. I used to think his virtues outweighed his faults, but now I am not so sure. I first became interested in him when I found an old issue of National Geographic which had an article about Monticello. I liked his automatic doors and his clock.

I remember when Fawn Brodie's biography of Jefferson said that he had fathered children with his slave, Sally Hemmings, who was the half-sister of his late wife. DNA tests later proved that people descended from her youngest son are in the male line of the Jefferson family. Some people still insist that Jefferson's brother or some other member of the family was the father. I think it is most likely that Jefferson was the one. 

In 1995, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote a script about Jefferson's time in Paris as Ambassador to France. Her regular collaborators Ismail Merchant and James Ivory produced and directed Jefferson in Paris. Nick Nolte played Jefferson. I would not have thought about casting Nolte in that part. Thandiwe Newton played Sally Hemmings. I thought the movie was slow.