Thomas Jefferson's Enlightenment: Paris 1785

As portrayed in this colorful book, Thomas Jefferson is not quite the monument that readers learn about in school. In a new kind of nonfiction narrative, Jefferson's transformation from frontiersman and political loner into cosmopolitan political leader is taught by submerging the reader in the things that Jefferson did and saw on his travels to Paris in 1785. Featuring 168 museum-quality reproductions of period maps, Parisian scenes, and portraits of the lumieres who welcomed the untraveled American into the salons of prerevolutionary Paris, readers accompany Pierre Cabanis and his aspiring protégé to public gardens, the theatre, salons, the grain exchange, and along the bustling, stinking thoroughfares of the French capital. They accompany Jefferson as he settles into the most elegant and debauched society in the world. Because they are with Jefferson as Cabanis instructs him on the French concept of Progress, they understand how Jefferson became its agent and how his new vision of himself and his role in the world prepared the Father of the Enlightenment in America for the political contest he entered when he returned home.