THIS is a spirited attack upon Thomas Jefferson. The third president of the United States (and purveyor of the middle name of the current incumbent of the presidency), Jefferson stands in the American pantheon second only to George Washington. The book is still more an attack on his cult, and on the "pious Jeffersonians" who sustain it.
It is concerned with Jefferson's infatuation with French revolution, and his complacent condonations of its excesses, embodied in his pronouncement: "What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
For an Irishman of O'Brien's fastidiousness, such an image provokes a shudder of distaste, recalling Yeats deployment of a related image, as Pearse says to Connolly:
There's nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right rose tree
Cruise O'Brien charts Jefferson's unfolding response to events in France, his movement from "an extremely homesick American" as Minister Plenipotentiary in Paris 1785-9, to "America's most ardent Francophile". When Jefferson finally brought himself in 1793 to recognise "the atrocities of Robespierre", it was in terms of posing "a tremendous obstacle to future attempts at liberty". His quasi-religious fervour for the revolution remained firmly subordinated to his own political purpose.
Jefferson deployed the French Revolution as an American issue, to assail Hamilton and the Federalists, and more insidiously to counter the ascendancy of Washington, of whose administration he was a member. O'Brien bridles at the premise of the scholars of the Jefferson canon that their subject, in his sainted capacity as the Cincinnatus of Monticello was incapable of duplicity ("There can be very few successful politicians who have suffered from such an incapacity, and I do not find that Thomas Jefferson was disadvantaged in this particular way"). He was, as O'Brien amply demonstrates, "a devoted and skilful organiser of controversy, and a ruthless, elusive, and devious participant in the political melee".
O'Brien's secondary theme, which at first seems unrelated to his main concern, relates to Jefferson as a Virginian slave-owner. He concludes that Jefferson was "demonstrably a racist, and a particularly aggressive and vindictive one at that". In the coup de grace of the book's closing movement, O'Brien fuses his two themes: "Washed in the blood of the French Revolution, and other revolutions inspired by it, humanity is born again. Above all, America, and even higher and above it, Virginia, is born again, washed clean at last from that deep blurred single stain, born of blackness and guilt. The French Revolution gives back to America its lost innocence.
What drives O'Brien's anger is less revolutions in the modern world than the self-indulgence with which those safely removed from the fray approbate violence in the pursuit of ends they theoretically espouse. Neither Jefferson nor Madison "ever thought about the French Revolution in itself. They thought about it as an issue in American politics. And they fantasised its relation to the abstract idea of Liberty." Towards such lapses on the part of public men of Jefferson's intelligence, O'Brien is unforgiving.
This is a quietly devastating foray into the scripture of the American revolution. Just as the author's patriotism is wilfully misconstrued in some quarters in Ireland, so the outraged Jeffersonians who read this book may wish to ignore the deep attachment to the United States out of which it is written. It is, in other words, vintage Cruise O'Brien.