About france . We love france. I will start and you will finish. France is really important. Did people hear her . We are talking about france. The pivot of our book we would agree. What we needed to do was get jefferson out of virginia. He was having a rough time there as you know, and give him a chance to be a visionary, to get some perspective on the American Revolution and the state of virginia. Being in france enabled him to do that. To suddenly see that a space that he wanted, had great doubts about his fellow virginians and they are all over his book about the state of virginia. In france those doubts diminished because he saw something much worse. He saw the old regime and he said what we have in america, we have wholesome families, farming their farms, this is the foundation of a healthy, Natural Society and also, this is the crucial argument we make and it is one of annettes great contributions of course it is all her book, to our understanding of jefferson, that is how jeffe
And no political power. There is in france no legislature, theres no way for the people to be able to actually speak and to change things. And so he sees a decadent political system that he locates as decadent because of the family. The family life in france is decadent to him. Women, women out in the street scary. Was scary. He liked them, you know, obviously. [laughter] women out in the street, all these things. Sigmund was not around then, zig money freud was not around then Sigmund Freud was not around then, but women out in the streets looking for pleasure, they should be back in their nurseries, theyre not attending to whats at home. Is so he has this idealized version of family. We talk about the importance of home, of family, hes not at home until he gets to retirement. Hes there 17 years. Family, heath idealizing the women. His wife is dead and hes there by himself. He begins to look at the world, at virginia, in a very, very through a sentimental haze. And he begins to look a
The John Birch Society pushed a darker, more conspiratorial politics in the ’50s and ’60s and looms large over today’s GOP, argues historian Matthew Dallek.