, as always, of cochairing this Seminar Series with the National History center. Eric will introduce our speakers and moderators to the discussion. Washington history seminar is a collaborative effort of two organizations, the national association, and the Wilson Centers heritage and Public Policy program. We have served as a Nonpartisan Forum to discuss New Historical findings, insights and publications central to the missions of our organization. Behind the scenes, two individuals helped produce this event, rachel weekly for the National History center and peter , from the Wilson Center. Our thanks to both of them. We would like to acknowledge our supporters and welcome your support. Details on how to support the seminar are in the chat right now, or simply go to our institutional websites. We welcome your support. Finally, please join us next week, may 16 for a conversation about kelly hernandezs new book , mad mexicans, race, empire, and resolution of the borderland. Thats at 4 00 p. M. Eastern daylight time. A quick couple of technical notes. Todays session will be recorded and soon appear on our respective organization websites. For the q a part of this seminar, you have two ways to participate. Our preferred way for you, the audience, to chime in is to use the right hand function in the zoom functionality. Once you press the button, you will be entered into a queue and with the moderator calls you, you will see a prompt to ask you to mute your screen. Press yes, or you will not be able to talk. You can start getting into the queue even before the discussion begins. You can do so as soon as right now. You can also use the q a function in the zoom menu please do not use the chat function. With that, i will turn it over to eric. The zoom room is all yours. Welcome, everyone. Welcome, everyone. It is my pleasure to introduce our speaker today, the James MadisonProfessor Emeritus at the university of virginia. He has been a recipient of fellowships and Research Grants from the ford foundation, the Japan Foundation center for global partnership, the guggenheim memorial foundation, the National Endowment for humanities and the National Science foundation, amongst others. He is the author of numerous books, the changing face of inequality, 1980 two, making america corporate, 1990, and philanthropy in america, a history published by Princeton University press in 2012. Today he will speak on his new book, the man who understood democracy, the life of alexis to toe detofil, published by Princeton University. Thank you so much, and thank you to agreeing to be a commentator. Thank you, christian, for your kind introduction. I am delighted to be here. I know we are going to get into the nittygritty of what is significant in the book. I would like to make a few professional remarks about this biography it is more personal than academic. I have had a long friendship with dash. I met him as a young man. I was fortunate when i was still a graduate student in french history, board shifting to u. S. History, to meet scholars of the french revolution we all know his work. He is the first one in 1968 that i remember, in the 1968, the colonial years here in paris, introduced me to the writings on the french revolution. That was my First Encounter with the work. The work and how he spent his life on the french revolution is really kind of a second masterpiece. By accidents, really, when i joined the university of virginia faculty as an assistant professor in 1978, i had a chance to help launch a review and to create a society with a sociologist by the name of cap low, who wanted to create a society for the comparative study of social change. I thought it was a very worthy enterprise and i also felt that this Small Society needed not only to study social change, but to get involved in dash. I brought it up to some others, and this small group grew and is now in its 44th year of publication, shared with one of the editors, actually. That has been a real success worry in a way. Then by accidents, some 20 years ago, i met an extraordinary translator, and has translated a lot of important work. It was now finished and comprised two volumes of matters , speeches, parliamentary speeches and documents. But he asked me to a prove his translations of democracy in america. I have to tell you, reading a book carefully, taking notes, thinking about the argument, reading the book and thinking about how to render it in a different language is a whole different ballgame. So all of a sudden, i found myself needing to think quite differently. Entering into almost daily conversation with the translator , think about ways in which to modify slightly, include slightly his translations. So at some point, all of this added up, and it became kind of obvious to me that if i were ever to write anyones biography, it would be his. I ended up knowing more about him than anybody else, and i spent 20 years of my life is a historian, writing about 19th and 20th century intellectual, social, and political history. I thought, there was my chance to write a book about somebody who played a significant role in my countries adoption with the United States and played a significant role in the country of my youth, friends france. As i had a chance to reconnect with people and put together in a formal way many of my ideas about the two countries and deepen them. Also, writing a biography is something i had never done before. It is a special genre of history and is difficult to do, so i enjoyed the challenge. I had very strong motivations and was especially fortunate, also, to make this decision at a time when finally, all of the work was coming out and being published. Most of the full transcriptions were already published. He had a very short life, born in 1905, died in 1953, and his life was cut short by tuberculosis, but he had a very full life as a writer. Democracy of america, his collections on the 1848 revolution, and his book on the french revolution was finished, but it was so important to be a politician then to be a writer. He worked very hard at being a politician. History fears that he was not successful, but he put a lot of work into it. There were many reports and major issues at the time, the abolition of slavery in the french colonies, he was a lifelong abolitionist. The conquest of algeria she was a colonialist. He spent a lot of time trying to reconcile church and state and french political life. He devoted much time writing speeches and his speeches are beautiful. He was not not a great public speech speaker, so his speeches are better written than listened to. Altogether, including the correspondence, his works comprise 32 volumes. I must be one of the few people in the world who have read them all. But my friend who was directing the publication of his complete works, they began publishing them in 1951. 73 years. They were in a hurry, obviously. But she was generous enough to share with me everything that was still in press. So i had the benefit of everything that i could read. I felt that was extremely good. I will say, i felt that we needed a new biography, rightly so. The classic biography is very good and covers his life very well. Does not attempt to make any significant connections between his work and political work, which i thought was a great gap in it. [inaudible] it does not do a deep analysis of democratic theory, but is great, so i think it needed to be redone. In the biography on the shelf, there are biographies, is a very good historian, published five years ago and it has very good moments and it. But it seems a contribution to democratic theory. [inaudible] so i felt that needed to be corrected. There is a biography that is incomplete, so i think we can deduce those are the three you find on the shelves. I felt we needed a new one. I thought i would give it a try. One of the best moments i had working on the book was in reading the letters. He was a wonderful letter writer and must have written letters almost every day of his life. He buried himself in letters. You take a sentence from one, you put it into another, and thats ok. But as i said, i had a friendship with him in writing these letters. I was even worried about how we would respond to this, that and the other. But now, ok, here is the work done and for you to talk about it. Thank you for agreeing to do so. Thank you very much. We have two commentators this afternoon, the first of whom is an associate professor of french and history, and an affiliate of african and africanamerican studies, women and gender studies, and the war in Society Programs at george mason university, where she also serves as a director for faculty diversity. She has held multiple fellowships at the stanford humanities center, university of cambridge, the university of st. Andrews center for french history and culture, west Point Military academy, and society in cincinnati. She is the author of the military enlightenment, war and culture in the fresh empire, french empire, published in 2017 and was the final for the oscar tanager book prize in 18thcentury studies. Christie, welcome. The screen is yours. Thank you so much for that kind introduction. It is such a pleasure to be here to discuss his biography. Here it is. I will be citing from it in a couple of minutes. I want to begin by saying, i absolutely devoured this book. Congratulations, olivier, on this outstanding, authoritative biography, and i want to say, i cant wait to teach it alongside his writings. I am sure many of our colleagues will soon be doing the same, so thank you, and congratulations for this work. In addition to being researched and detailed, it is beautifully written and structured. Its a real page turner, i think , and read to me in many ways as the kind of nonfictional tale of the comingofage of one of historys greatest political theorists of democracy. I found it particularly rewarding as a historian and educator to conceive of the making of the man, his education, his quandaries, his relationships of political and spiritual engagement, his greatest and persisting aspirations, his times fascinating he is fascinating and at times devastating blind spots, and this is one of the strong and important contributions that this biography is making, bringing us these sides together. For those of us who teach this to undergraduate and graduate students of history, or for people who are interested in the work of the historian in our methods and on trying your hand at them, i think this glimpse into the life and work, and i want to make a distinction between the hard labor that goes into the making of history, rather than work as the body of the final product. Looking at this side of the labor of token of him as a politician, and it is informative as a historians practice. It misses the sense of intimidating genius when they look at the finished product of these incredible works. That he produced. With this in mind, i wanted to say a few words about the complex vision that emerges, just a couple of questions for all of us to think about. First, for those of us who know his work and particular, democracy in america, i found it so interesting that you have a sense of building a type of friendship with him by engaging with the broader corpus of his work, including his correspondence. I think sometimes one can feel, even in democracy in america, a sense of the intimate, unintimate tone and narrative voice that is recognizable and can give the reader a sense of proximity to him, a sense of knowing or understanding the author in some way. But generally speaking, he often appears in curriculum and on people reading lists as a giant of political philosophy, a foundational historian, interpreter of american democracy and the origins of the french revolution in this way, he can feel very distant and indeed disembodied from this perspective. He can therefore fall into the category of what is called the unmarked scholar. I just want to Say Something about this notion of the unmarked scholar in the chapter d colonizing education, a pedagogic intervention, in the edited volume to colonizing the university, which came out in 2018, what dennis explains is i am quoting her here, the unmarked scholar requires no introduction. You do not need to explain his appearance in the text and he requires no further markers of allocation. What the unmarked scholar says is more important than who he is. He speaks from a place which is just there, the place which is no place. Reinterpreting the disembodied authoritarian voice of the unmarked scholar through reconstructing an embodiment in geopolitical context is a key to the colonizing practice. I want to note here that oliviers biography opened up this possibility in important ways, and in reading the book, one realizes how little one actually knows about him and his life, and how valuable and embodied an ethnographic approach to thinking about this writer can actually be. I wanted to make that point. But we cannot fall prey to his observations that historians often provide too many facts and too little insight. He brings his long experience as a scholar into this biography, and offers a key and insightful view to this man as one of conviction and contradiction. We see him at the opening of the psion of an older aristocratic family in france, emerging from the ashes of the french revolution with esteemed members of his elder generation, meeting their end under the blade of the guillotine. We see him as a naive traveler to america, who saw things before he knew anything, or seems to know things before he even had the historical background to interpret them. I shook my head, seeing that he had never read certain books, and he showed us the process of his education over time, these people are not born with a type of genius that allows them to know all things or to touch a book to their head and understand, we see him as working hard to obtain this knowledge, to take hundreds of hundreds of pages of notes and in struggle to organize. He writes chapters and throws them away. This is such a valuable vision as we approach him and look again at these key works. We see him as an eyewitness to americas greatest times, to the indian removal act, the trail of tears, to chattel slavery, upon which he comments and also strikes his traveling companion in very strong ways. We see how a specialist of prison reform, initially, though he has to become a specialist on the way, who ends up in prison himself. I am interested in oliviers observations, if any, on what he was thinking when he was behind bars. He was perhaps not experiencing the prison system as an elite visitor in the ways in which someone from a more common background would have experienced prison, but i thought that was an interesting thing to perhaps hear more about. We see him as a social network of tremendous privilege, but one that still needs to be navigated. I was struck in this work, as i have been in biographies of other great white male intellectuals, of the 18th and 19th centuries, of the role of women, the Critical Role of women both in intellectual engagement and also in making significant connections, hosting salons, connecting these intellectuals and politicians to others, both within the country in question and also abroad. That was a really important point you brought home at several points, and i appreciated your spotlighting the lives of these women, including his spouse, mary. We see him i think this is such a critical part of your work engaging in praxis, right, the transformation of theory into practice. The desire to practice what he preached and see the blind spots that come along with that, to see him trying to chart a path as an independent, which seems to be a very important message, and you underlined it also in your remarks. This is not a sort of legitimate, monarchist in disguise, nor is he a revolutionary of the sort. Neither is he an extreme republican in that sense. He tries to chart this middle path. What is so interesting, the way his friendship and family relationships evolve as he continues to try to chart that path and maintain his independence. I think that readers will find this very illuminating, about this effort toward practice and about founding a position that is unique and allows him to occupy political space with integrity. We see him as a zealous colonialist, that is something that he takes on very openly. This is a point for which he has received a lot of criticism, especially in this postcolonial era. Your examination of that in its own chapter, i think, was a very good gesture. We see him struggling with physical and mental health, and i feel also this is a very timely piece of your interpretation and part of his life that you put forward, to not only talk about his struggles with illness, tuberculosis, but also his struggles with depression and moments of being completely overwhelmed, moments of needing to retreat from his social life, and that he himself was vocal about these issues in his communications with close ones in his letters. This is a part of a scholarly habit at the time, or of peoples lives that is far too often sort of diminished in public discussion and i think is really wonderful, that you have put forward here. He is plagued by doubts, i the loss of his faith. At the same time, he works on helping to craft as historians going into these archives. He also see him arguing with people across continents, traveling, and in many ways at times, seeming like a bit of a nomad, searching for his health, searching for information, searching for ties as they ebb and flow along with his politics and his writing. My question for you, and i would like to move there now with this bit of backdrop that i helped illuminate some of the work and significance of this book, i would like to ask you a couple of questions. One about your work as a biographer, and another, returning to this question of blind spots. First of all, i am really interested in the challenge of becoming a biographer as you have done here. The type of research it demands, the type of analysis, the type of writing. Did you learn anything new or surprising about him, or about his work in writing this biography compared to how you looked at him in his work before . Are there new insights or new possible interpretations that you would bring back into a classroom if you were to teach it now in light of what you know . I am interested in those discoveries of yours and the challenges, and in that process of becoming a biogr