Jefferson et les idéologues d'après sa correspondance inédite avec Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, J.-B. Say et Auguste Comte

Chinard reveals evidence that Thomas Jefferson translated the first 20 chapters of Volney's controversial book Ruins of Empires. Joel Barlow translated the last four chapters. The first Jefferson-Barlow translation was published in Paris in 1802. The first US edition of the Jefferson-Barlow translation was published by Dixon and Sickles of NY in 1828. The Jefferson-Barlow translation then became the standard in the US and was reprinted multiple times throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It is well known that both Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman read this book, quite probably the Jefferson-Barlow translation.

Ruins of Empires is a lost classic in Western Literature. Thomas Jefferson liked the book because he saw it as an affirmation of the American experiment. What Volney wrote in theory, the United States was doing in reality—keeping government small, decentralized and restricted, thus allowing its citizens to realize their dreams without interference from a super-sized nanny state (in France they call it: "l’état providence").

This is the message Jefferson wanted to transmit to future generations of Americans and that’s why he translated the book—he saw it as kind of a primer on the Enlightenment principles upon which the United States was founded.

In the last third of the book, Volney recounts a “General Assembly of Nations”—a kind of fictional first meeting of the United Nations. This is the religion section translated by Joel Barlow.