VIDEO: JEFFERSON IN PARIS (II)

AM | @agumack

The scene is taken from James Ivory's movie Jefferson in Paris (1995), starring Nick Nolte, Gwyneth Paltrow and Thandie Newton. Only a few seconds will concern us here: from 01:40 to 2:20. In a Parisian salon, Thomas Jefferson introduces the "seven-foot tall" moose, collected in Vermont and shipped to Paris (at great expense to himself), where it arrived in October 1787 (*). It is a fictitious rendering, since Buffon was ill and away from Paris [see]. (In early 1786, the two men had dined together with Chastellux at the Jardin du Roi; Jefferson and Raynal never met).

The overall context, needless to say, is the so-called "degeneracy" of living species in the New World. In chapter 9 of El 'best-seller que cambió el mundo ("Degeneración, regeneración"), I venture to suggest that Diderot —who must have felt deeply at odds with the idea of dégénération— actually provided a dialectical counterpoint to Raynal with his radical views on régénération:

Une nation ne se régénère que dans un bain de sang (HDI.80, XI.4)

The notion of régénération, inspired from Ovid and from Dr. Trembley's work on polypes d'eau douce, would prove to be one of the most explosive legacies of Histoire des deux Indes.

(*) See Jonathan Camio: "L'abbé Raynal et la dispute du Nouveau Monde. Le cas de l'Histoire des deux Indes en 1770", in Gilles Bancarel (ed.) Raynal et ses réseaux. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011, pp. 307-319 [see].
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