Tale of a Cockade – Thomas Jefferson's Daughter in Revolutionary Paris

While living at Monticello during her father’s retirement, Martha Jefferson Randolph played many roles: daughter, wife, mother, and a hostess who welcomed her father’s frequent guests while directing the work of his enslaved domestic servants. But there was period in her of her life when she was away from most of that, away from the social confines and expectations for women of her status in Virginia. As a teenager living in Paris with her father, who was then serving as the U.S. Minister to France, she attended school at a nearby convent and socialized in the highest circles of European society. Known even then for her brilliance, Martha found many admirers and friends, among them the Marquis de Lafayette, whose grand gesture toward her during a parade not long after the storming of the Bastille became the stuff of family legend.

On this episode of Mountaintop History, Monticello guide Alison Kiernan looks at how a seemingly innocuous object—a small, decorative cockade given to a young Martha at party in Paris—reveals a story that spans two continents and three and a half decades, from revolutionary France to a joyful reunion at Monticello.

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Alison Kiernan: On the second floor of Monticello, in a sunny southeast corner, is the bedroom slept in by Martha Jefferson Randolph, oldest daughter of Thomas Jefferson. The space is dominated by a freestanding four poster bed adorned with red toile fabric. An 18th century highboy, marble topped dresser, and alcove bed space cleverly converted into a closet also attract visitors’ attention.

On “Behind the Scenes” tours at Monticello, guides will use this space often to discuss Martha Randolph's complex role as a Monticello hostess, daughter, wife, and mother. The space illuminates a brilliant woman living within the social confines of the Early National period, while also living a lifestyle dependent on the system of slavery.

Today however, on Mountaintop History, we're going to highlight a part of her story that people often miss. Sitting atop a marble topped dresser, peeping out of a small box sits a small fabric cockade in concentric circles of red, white, and blue.

A cockade is a small, usually circular piece of pleated fabric or ribbon, and was a fashion item typically worn by men in the 17th and 18th centuries to decorate hats. Cockades were also, however, a way to make political statements, display military rank, or show allegiance. This was a practice particularly popular in Europe, where Martha Randolph lived with her father in France from 1784 to 1789.

Thomas Jefferson himself, then serving as U. S. minister to France, recorded purchasing an orange cockade, for example, as a sign of respect to the House of Orange on a trip to The Hague in 1788. While wearing an orange cockade for Jefferson was simply a matter of diplomacy, in France these little pleats of fabric were becoming instilled with drama and could possibly be a daring or even dangerous thing to wear.

As tensions slowly mounted to overthrow the monarchy, cockades became a way to identify people who were supporters or non-supporters of the French Revolution, with the revolutionaries donning the tricolor red, white, and blue, and royalists sporting the ivory. While it is unknown if Thomas Jefferson ever wore a tricolor cockade in symbolic solidarity with his friends like Lafayette, his 17-year-old daughter is another story.

According to a book written by Martha Randolph's great granddaughter, Sarah Randolph, a faded cockade was discovered, along with other mementos of Randolph's teenage years, by Martha Randolph's daughters towards the end of her life. Surprised to find such a stirring symbol of the French Revolution, they asked their mother to explain, who in turn, “related its history,” which simultaneously revealed her own history. The cockade opened the door to the life of a teenage girl whose social network touched some of the great figures of late 18th century France.

In 1789, Martha Jefferson was just 17 years old and affectionately called "Jeffy" by her friends. Surviving locks of her hair show she had rich brunette hair. Later paintings reveal hazel eyes and a pretty smile. She was young, likable, and according to descriptions, “passionately fond of dancing.” Thomas Jefferson even had a rule that she must only attend three balls a week, and “it mattered not how tempting the fourth might be.”

Sarah Randolph describes her great grandmother as a full participant in what she called the, “whirl of fascinating society”; brushing shoulders with women like Madame de Stael, the celebrated lady of letters, and Georgiana Cavendish, the famous beauty and ancestor of Princess Diana. Apparently, on seeing Martha Jefferson, the Duchess said that it pleased her to see another woman, “as tall as myself” - perhaps an inherited Jefferson trait.

Despite having spent the last four years of her life at a convent school in Paris, Martha Jefferson had not lost her zest for fun. She had made friends with the nieces of the Duke of Dorset, the Ladies Caroline and Elizabeth Tufton, after whom Tufton Farm at Monticello would later be named. These social connections, along with her father's position as minister to France, had launched her into elite social circles and high society life. Letters exchanged between these girls describe walks in the Champs Élysées, dinners, parties, and candlelit balls. Lady Elizabeth wrote to Martha, “in the course of years, our letters will make quite an history. I think we had better not publish them separately.”

Being in these circles on the eve of a revolution, however, placed the daughter of the US Minister in a delicate situation. According to Sarah Randolph, Martha Jefferson, on one occasion, was invited to dine with Queen Marie Antoinette herself at the home of the Duke of Dorset, who also had an eye for Martha.10 The Queen was set to appear, “incognita” at the dinner, yet Martha Jefferson ultimately had to refuse the invitation under the excuse of illness.

Whether or not Martha Jefferson was actually ill, or if Jefferson thought the daughter of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence probably shouldn't be dining with a Queen without whom Jefferson claimed, “there would have been no revolution” is unknown. But it does show that as the daughter of the minister from the United States, her social outings, how she presented herself, the company she kept could be diplomatically significant.

Declining this invitation may have also been a way to protect his daughter from any further advances by the Duke of Dorset, a known womanizer, not to mention a member of the English aristocracy, something the United States had just thrown off. Perhaps turning down this invitation was for the best. The timing may have also been significant.

According to Sarah Randolph, it was around this same time, when Martha, was “at a a party in the country near Paris, just after the French officers had assumed the tricolor cockade. There were a number present, and they proposed to transfer the cockades to the ladies, who accepted them at once and pinned them on their dresses.” While this story is perhaps charming, actually by choosing to wear the cockade, this was a way for a woman to express a political opinion, saying they were a supporter of the French Revolution.

It was an act that, while subtle, also made a powerful statement, and gave Martha Randolph an opportunity of expressing a political opinion in more of an open way than she would likely have experienced at any other point in her life. Despite just being a teenager, Martha Jefferson was at the center of a world of politics, gossip, and Revolution.

While the cockade would certainly have been something dangerous to have worn to the Duke’s dinner party had she gone, it is unknown if Martha continued wearing the cockade on any other occasions following the country party in the summer of 1789. But Revolution and drama were never far from Martha Randolph. It was also around this time that Martha Jefferson witnessed the procession of Louis XVI's carriage through the streets of Paris following the storming of the Bastille.

According to Sarah Randolph, Martha Jefferson was standing in a window with her friends to watch the spectacle, yet shortly after the king's carriage had passed, “there rose a noise which they could not account for. At last it reached the ears of the part of the crowd nearest them and was taken up by those who heard it.‘Lafayette! Lafayette! ’was the cry."

As Lafayette rode down the street, he noticed young Martha Jefferson standing high up in the window and was the only person in the crowd that he acknowledged. According to the story, Lafayette apparently got off his horse and gave the daughter of Thomas Jefferson a gallant bow. Her great granddaughter wrote, “Never before, nor afterwards, did she receive a bow of which she was so proud,” and , “Her young friends declared they were filled with envy.”

As tensions continued to grow in France, Jefferson was becoming especially eager to bring his daughters back to America. The Jeffersons left Paris just days before the famous Women's March of October 5, 1789, without having a chance, as Jefferson's letters reveal, to say goodbye to some of their closest friends.

Recognizing that in a four mile an hour world and an ocean that could take a month to cross between them, they would probably never see their friends in France again.

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Almost forty years later, Martha Jefferson, now Martha Jefferson Randolph, was in her fifties and the mother of eleven children. She had devoted the majority of her adult life to supporting her father and educating her children at Monticello. Having lived nearly four decades now in rural Virginia, she must have felt that her days in Paris had been like a dream. Reality, however, came rushing back in 1824, when an aged Lafayette made his famous return tour of the United States and stopped at Monticello.

Members of Thomas Jefferson's family, neighbors, guests, and members of the enslaved community assembled on the lawn to greet him. An 81-year-old Jefferson and Lafayette, famously ran into each other's arms and wept.

Ascending the steps of the portico, Lafayette then saw Martha Randolph, possibly for the first time since that day on the street in Paris. According to a neighbor, Lafayette, “kissed her hands repeatedly and spoke many kind words as she received him with a grace peculiarly her own.”

Following her daughter's discovery of the cockade likely in the 1830s, it was probably tucked away in a box and has not resurfaced since. Unfortunately, the cockade that peeks out of the box in Martha Randolph's bedroom today is not the original that she pinned to her dress in the summer of 1789. But the story of her entanglement with the French Revolution, queens, soldiers, dukes, and all, lives on.

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Wish you could have been a fly on the wall? Surprise! On November 17th 2024, Monticello will re-enact Lafayette's return to mark the 200th anniversary of this moment. You can buy your tickets now at Monticello.org.

This has been another edition of Mountaintop History, a podcast produced by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.