A Tale of Two Revolutions: Jefferson, Lafayette, and the Empire of Liberty

When Thomas Jefferson arrived in Paris in 1784, he carried with him the ideals of the American Revolution. Buoyed by the success of a revolution against the British empire, the soon-to-be appointed Minister to France found himself attempting to reconcile Republican principles with the complex political realities of Paris. It marked an intriguing reversal for two of the most prominent figures of the transatlantic age. The Marquis de Lafayette embarked to America in 1777 as a teenage aristocrat, finding in the young republic fertile ground for revolutionary aspirations. A decade later, Lafayette confronted a far more difficult challenge: managing revolutionary sentiment within an empire burdened by centuries of monarchy and privilege. Where America had offered a canvas upon which Enlightenment ideals could be tested, France proved a far more resistant landscape.

Over the next several years, Jefferson and Lafayette moved within the same aristocratic and reform-minded circles in Paris, reflecting on the challenge of adapting the lessons of the American Revolution to French conditions. While Lafayette attempted to reform one of Europe’s oldest empires from within, Jefferson represented a republic that had recently broken free from imperial rule and was beginning to imagine a future of its own.

Their correspondence unfolded during a remarkable transfer of historical momentum: as the French imperial order entered its final crisis, the young American republic began a transformation into what Jefferson called an “Empire of Liberty.”^[1]

The exchange was itself part of a larger transatlantic cycle of influence. The intellectual currents that flowed from France (Montesquieu, Voltaire) helped inspire the American Revolution, but it was the men forged by that revolution who shaped Lafayette’s worldview. Lafayette arrived in America in 1777 as a young idealist seeking military glory and an opportunity to strike a blow against Britain, the nation responsible for his father’s death during the Seven Years’ War.^[2] Instead, he found something far more consequential: a friend, mentor, and father figure in George Washington.

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Washington’s “trust in me is deeper than I dare say,” Lafayette wrote to his wife from Valley Forge on January 6, 1778.”^[3] He continued,

In the place he occupies, he is surrounded by flatterers and secret enemies. He finds in me a trustworthy friend in whom he can confide and who will always tell him the truth. Not a day goes by without his talking to me at length or writing long letters to me. And he is willing to consult me on most interesting points.

In Washington, Lafayette encountered a leader who wielded immense power yet repeatedly surrendered it, placing republican principles above personal ambition. The lesson would leave a lasting impression upon the young Frenchman.

When Lafayette returned to France, he was one of the most visible symbols of the American Revolution and one of the few Europeans who had witnessed the practical application of republican government firsthand. As political tensions mounted in France during the 1780s, many reformers looked to America for inspiration.^[4] Lafayette was not merely sympathetic to America; he was a product of the American Revolution.

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Jefferson arrived in Paris under circumstances very different from those that had brought Lafayette to America, although both shared a similar idealism towards their respective host countries. Whereas Lafayette had crossed the Atlantic as an eager volunteer, living among Continental soldiers and learning beside George Washington, Jefferson arrived as the representative of a newly-christened republic entering one of Europe’s most sophisticated capitals. The contrast between the two men was not merely one of personality, but of perspective.

Jefferson embraced Paris with enthusiasm. His ambassadorial residence, the Hôtel Langeac on the Champs-Élysées, reflected both his refined tastes and his fascination with French culture. As one historian describes it:

Jefferson’s ambassadorial residence was one of the new mansions on the Champs-Elysées, the Hôtel Langeac, designed by Jean François Chalgrin. Although this was a luxury dwelling built by a fashionable architect, Jefferson had to put his own stamp on the premises. He created a new room and took great care with the furnishings and cooking arrangements. . . . But we also read of formal dinner parties where the American diplomats Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Gouverneur Morris mixed with Parisian aristocrats, intellectual ladies, and men of science.[5]

Jefferson experienced France largely through the salons and drawing rooms of reform-minded aristocrats such as François Alexandre Frédéric, duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, where constitutional theory was debated among diplomats, philosophers, and members of the nobility. There, amid discussions of architecture, philosophy, science, and constitutional reform, he observed a society wrestling with Enlightenment ideals while still firmly rooted in aristocratic tradition.^[6] It was an environment well suited to debates over declarations of rights, representative institutions, and constitutional monarchy.

Lafayette’s France, however, extended well beyond the salons of Paris. Appointed by Louis XVI to the Assembly of Notables in 1787, later elected as a deputy to the Estates-General and serving in the National Assembly before becoming commander of the National Guard, Lafayette confronted mounting political pressures that intellectual conversation alone could not resolve. Fiscal collapse, food shortages, popular unrest, and deep divisions within French society transformed abstract constitutional questions into matters of immediate political survival.^[7]

It was against this backdrop that Jefferson and Lafayette exchanged ideas about liberty, constitutional government, and the future of France. In the spring of 1789, Lafayette requested Jefferson’s assistance in drafting “a charter of rights” for proclamation by Louis XVI, believing that a voluntary declaration of rights might reconcile the monarchy with the reform movement. Jefferson shared that hope, seeing the measure as a peaceful path toward constitutional monarchy. The king never embraced it. Jefferson later concluded that Louis XVI’s failure to issue such a declaration helped foreclose the possibility of a peaceful constitutional settlement, arguing in his Autobiography that France might otherwise have avoided “those enormities” that “destroyed, and is yet to destroy millions and millions of its inhabitants.”^[8]

As the National Assembly debated the principles that would guide a new France, Lafayette instead drafted what became the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Before presenting his proposal to the National Assembly in July 1789, Lafayette asked Jefferson to review the draft. Jefferson annotated the manuscript, offering comments on both language and constitutional structure while leaving Lafayette’s central vision intact. Their collaboration reflected a shared commitment to natural rights and constitutional government, even as each recognized that France’s experiment would necessarily differ from America’s.

Lafayette’s declaration echoed many of the principles articulated in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence—natural rights, popular sovereignty, and the legitimacy of government through the consent of the governed—while adapting those concepts to the political realities of a constitutional monarchy. For a brief moment, it appeared possible that France might achieve what America had: a peaceful transition from arbitrary authority to constitutional government grounded in universal rights.

Yet even as the Declaration was taking shape, events were beginning to outrun constitutional design. During the summer of 1789, as France descended into revolution, Lafayette’s appeal to Jefferson revealed how quickly constitutional theory had become crisis management. “I Beg for liberty’s sake You will Breack Every Engagement to Give us a dinner to Morrow Wenesday,” Lafayette wrote, asking Jefferson to convene “some Members of the National Assembly” whom he hoped to “Coalize” as “the only Means to prevent a total dissolution and a civil war.”^[9]

The language is urgent and revealing. Lafayette was not asking Jefferson for abstract advice on republican government. He was asking for a room, a table, and a chance to hold together a political center that was already beginning to fracture.

Jefferson approached the unfolding Revolution from a different vantage point. Two years earlier, reflecting on Shays’ Rebellion in America, he had famously written that, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”^[10] Yet when confronted with the realities of the French Revolution, Jefferson recalled that Lafayette “earnestly wished I would habitually assist at such conferences, being sure I should be useful in moderating the warmer spirits, and promoting a wholesome and practicable reformation only.”^[11] The contrast is striking. Jefferson could still glorify revolution, while Lafayette, responsible for preserving public order, was desperately attempting to prevent the violence Jefferson had once accepted as an occasional price of liberty.

The effort ultimately failed. Events moved faster than the moderates could organize. On October 5, 1789, thousands of Parisian women marched to Versailles, driven by bread shortages, rising prices, and growing distrust of the monarchy. Lafayette, now commander of the National Guard, reluctantly led his troops to Versailles in an effort to restore order. By the following day, after members of the royal bodyguard had been killed and the palace overrun, Lafayette escorted Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette back to Paris under the watch of the crowd. The king no longer ruled from Versailles. He had become, in effect, a prisoner of the Revolution.

The march marked a turning point. Constitutional reform yielded to the mob, and Lafayette found himself attempting to mediate between forces that no longer shared a common vision of France’s future. His commitment to both liberty and constitutional monarchy increasingly satisfied neither the royalists, who viewed him as a traitor, nor the radicals, who believed he had not gone far enough. As French historian Albert Soboul later observed, “The search for a political compromise between the aristocracy and the upper nobility was chimerical, inasmuch as it had not immediately destroyed the last vestiges of feudalism.”^[12] The constitutional middle ground Lafayette had spent years attempting to build was collapsing beneath him.

The failure of Lafayette’s constitutional project marked more than the collapse of one statesman’s ambitions. It revealed the limits of transferring the American revolutionary experience to a society burdened by centuries of absolutism and social hierarchy. As mob rule descended upon the mansions of the Champs-Elysées he had once romanticized, Jefferson turned his attention toward the future of his young American republic. The contrast between the two revolutions became increasingly apparent. Rather than reforming an old empire, America could build what Jefferson famously envisioned as an “Empire of Liberty”—an expanding union of self-governing republics whose independence rested upon the widespread ownership of land.

Jefferson had begun articulating this vision long before he entered the presidency. Writing to George Rogers Clark in December 1780, while the Revolutionary War was still underway, he argued that western expansion would “add to the Empire of liberty an extensive and fertile Country,”[13] strengthening the American Union while preventing the further extension of British influence from Canada. For Jefferson, an empire need not resemble the imperial systems of Britain or France. Rather, it would consist of an expanding federation of self-governing republics, populated by independent citizens whose ownership of land would preserve the civic virtue upon which republican government depended.

Modern historians have noted that Jefferson’s vision of western expansion was inseparable from his core republican philosophy. J. G. A. Pocock, for example, argues that Jefferson viewed the continual availability of western land as a means of renewing America’s virtue.[14] An expanding republic of independent farmers would resist the political dependence and concentrations of wealth that Jefferson believed had corrupted Europe’s ancien régime, the very system Lafayette had struggled unsuccessfully to reform during the French Revolution. The “Empire of Liberty” therefore represented not a contradiction of republican principles, but, in Jefferson’s mind, their fulfillment.

History has a sense of irony: The nation that had helped finance American independence eventually found itself so financially strained by revolution and war that Jefferson was able to purchase the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803. In a further ironic twist, Jefferson’s greatest contribution to the “Empire of Liberty” required him to stretch the constitutional principles he had spent a lifetime conceptualizing and articulating. Although he privately questioned whether the Constitution explicitly authorized the federal government to acquire new territory by treaty, he concluded that the opportunity was too significant to lose. The purchase nearly doubled the size of the United States, secured American control of the Mississippi River, and opened the vast interior of North America to future settlement.

“In the meantime we must ratify and pay our money, as we have treated, for a thing beyond the Constitution, and rely on the nation to sanction an act done for its great good, without its previous authority,” Jefferson wrote to John Dickinson in 1803.[15]

Years later, reflecting on executive authority, Jefferson acknowledged the tension between constitutional fidelity and political necessity. “A strict observance of the written laws,” he wrote, “is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest.”[16] When the survival and security of the republic were at stake, he believed that necessity could justify extraordinary action. The same statesman who had championed limited government accepted that preserving the republic occasionally required departing from a strict reading of the Constitution.

Jefferson and Lafayette never ceased to believe that liberty rested upon natural rights, representative government, and the sovereignty of the people. Yet the revolutions they championed ultimately followed very different trajectories. France, whose military and financial support had helped secure American independence, attempted to transplant many of the same principles onto an ancien régime burdened by centuries of monarchy, privilege, and fiscal crisis. The result was not constitutional stability but revolution, terror, and eventually a new imperial order under Napoleon. Rather than rebuilding an ancient state, the United States expanded across a continent, gradually transforming Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” from political philosophy into the foundation of an emerging continental republic.

The friendship between Jefferson and Lafayette symbolizes the reciprocal exchange of revolutionary ideas across the Atlantic, illustrating how identical Enlightenment principles could produce profoundly different historical outcomes. The French Revolution revealed the limits of constitutional reform within an entrenched ancien régime, while the American republic demonstrated the extraordinary opportunities afforded by political stability, abundant land, and expanding self-government. By the nineteenth century, France had experienced revolution, terror, empire, and restoration; the United States had become an expanding continental power whose economic and political influence would eventually extend around the globe.

Jefferson and Lafayette began as partners in a common Atlantic experiment. One watched an old empire collapse in pursuit of liberty; the other spent his career building a new republic upon its ruins. Their friendship reminds us that revolutions may share ideals, but history rarely grants them the same ending.

Bibliography

Thomas Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, December 25, 1780, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 4, 1 October 1780–24 February 1781, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-04-02-0295.

Matthew R. Costello, “George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon Digital Encyclopedia, Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, accessed June 24, 2026, https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/george-washington-and-the-marquis-de-lafayette.

Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, “George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon Digital Encyclopedia, accessed June 25, 2026, https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/george-washington-and-the-marquis-de-lafayette.

Thomas Jefferson Foundation, “Marquis de Lafayette,” Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, accessed June 25, 2026, https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/marquis-de-lafayette.

“Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment: Paris, 1785,” Virginia Museum of History & Culture, accessed June 25, 2026, https://virginiahistory.org/learn/thomas-jeffersons-enlightenment-paris-1785-0.

Jennifer Rosenberg, “Women’s March on Versailles,” ThoughtCo., last modified July 3, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/womens-march-on-versailles-3529107.

Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, January 6–July 29, 1821, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 121–22.

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette to Thomas Jefferson, August 25, 1789, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1: General Correspondence, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, https://www.loc.gov/item/mtjbib004478/; The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 15, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 354–55.

Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 12, 7 August 1787–31 March 1788, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 356–57; Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-12-02-0348.

Thomas Jefferson Foundation, “French Revolution,” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, Monticello, accessed June 25, 2026, https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/french-revolution/.

Albert Soboul, Histoire de la Révolution française, vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1962), 187.

Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to John Dickinson. August 9, 1803. In The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Vol. 41, 1 July–13 November 1803. Edited by Barbara B. Oberg. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-41-02-0133

Kurland, Philip B., and Ralph Lerner, eds. The Founders’ Constitution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987. Chapter 2, Document 3, “The Virginia Declaration of Rights, 12 June 1776.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a2_3s8.html

Notes

^[1] Thomas Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, December 25, 1780, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-04-02-0295.

^[2] Matthew R. Costello, “George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon Digital Encyclopedia, Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/george-washington-and-the-marquis-de-lafayette.

^[3] Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, “George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon Digital Encyclopedia, www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/george-washington-and-the-marquis-de-lafayette.

^[4] “Marquis de Lafayette,” Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/marquis-de-lafayette.

[5] Diana Ketcham, “Jefferson’s Paris,” American Heritage 46, no. 2 (April 1995), www.americanheritage.com/jeffersons-paris.

^[6] “Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment: Paris, 1785,” Virginia Museum of History & Culture, virginiahistory.org/learn/thomas-jeffersons-enlightenment-paris-1785-0.

^[7] Jennifer Rosenberg, “Women’s March on Versailles,” ThoughtCo., www.thoughtco.com/womens-march-on-versailles-3529107.

^[8] Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, January 6–July 29, 1821, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 121–22.

^[9] Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette to Thomas Jefferson, August 25, 1789, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1: General Correspondence, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., www.loc.gov/item/mtjbib004478/; The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 15, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 354–55.

^[10] Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-12-02-0348.

^[11] Thomas Jefferson Foundation, “French Revolution,” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, Monticello, www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/french-revolution/.

^[12] Albert Soboul, Histoire de la Révolution française, vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1962), 187.

[13] Jefferson to Clark, December 25, 1780, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-04-02-0295.

[14] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).

[15] Jefferson to John Dickinson, August 9, 1803, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-41-02-0133.

[16] The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), chap. 2, doc. 3, “The Virginia Declaration of Rights, 12 June 1776,” press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a2_3s8.html.