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Such a system, Jefferson wrote, was particularly appealing to him because it contrasted so sharply with the violent shearing of daily life then underway all around him in Europe. “France, with all its despotism, and two or three hundred thousand men always in arms, has had three insurrections in the three years | have been here,” he marvels. In fact, France’s revolutionary age was only just beginning. The fall of the Bastille was 18 months away; the flight and death of the King five years off. Paris would soon see a time when one riot a year felt like peace. You can’t miss in Jefferson’s letter, and in the others he exchanged with Madison that winter and the following spring, his instinct that the world was changing, that it was being riven by urgent new forces, and that America must be positioned for the fresh order both internally and in her foreign policy. Jefferson knows what this new age demands - liberty - and in that spirit he fires off suggestions for Madison. It is in this December, 1787 letter that he remarks that he “does not like” the absence of a “bill of rights”, a hint that led to an adjustment of historic import. It is possible to regard the transformations of politics, economics and military affairs over the past centuries, the sorts of bold remakings that tore apart places like the Bastille or built up instruments like the American Constitution, as emerging froma few crucial periods, the sorts of historic turns that mark moments when power makes an epochal shift. It is striking how, in passing through these periods of unthinkable change, America has benefited so much, so fully. The country was, to begin with, born out of the social and political revolutions of the 18" century. The national liberation that pulled Jefferson from his Virginia farm and into politics was the first of the great, revolutionary movements that convulsed and fractured a dozen European powers. France followed America, as did Germany and Italy and soon most of the continent. “The boisterious sea of liberty,” Jefferson called the new political order*. It required a strong stomach. Tempests of accumulated social pressures - the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution — had passed over one ancien regieme after another like powerful waves. America, begun on fresh land and with new ideas inked onto clean paper, had a natural advantage in the situation of her birth. “I think our government,” Jefferson concluded in his letter to Madison, “will remain virtuous for many centuries.” A second transformation of global order began in the middle of the 19 Century, as Jefferson and Madison's age ended. Their period had largely been one of internal revolutions, as the nations of Europe realigned their domestic orders. What came next were furious contests between these countries. We might think of this new period as starting with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and as running, with increasing violence, through to the summer of 1945 and the end of World War Two. In this era, Europe’s statesmen struggled from one tragically collapsed balance to another. The demands of industry and nationalism and ideology and economy could only be reconciled, it seemed, by war, as if it was absolutely necessary to devour the old buildings and the young men before a new order could settle in. The scale of this 45 “The bousterious sea of liberty”: Thomas Jefferson to Philip Mazzei, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 29: 1 March 1796 to 31 December 1797 (Princeton University Press, 2002), 81-3 40 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018272