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Capital of the world
THE GREATER JOURNEY:
Americans in Paris
By David McCullough
456 pp. Simon and Shuster
Reviewed by Jack Shakely
Long before Americans decided to hate France (remember “freedom fries?”), we loved her, adored her. And she responded in generous, enthusiastic, lettered and sensuous kind. The love affair was so complete in the nineteenth century that Oliver Wendell Holmes once declared, “When good Americans die, they go to Paris.”
Paris in the nineteenth century was not only the capital of France; it was also the capital of Europe, and therefore the world. It was the literary capital of the world, the fashion capital of the world; it had the best hospitals, best art museums, best opera houses, and most important to Parisians perhaps, the best restaurants and wine.
And Americans, keenly aware that had it not been for France, there might never have been a United States, came to Paris in droves. Such luminaries as James Fenimore Cooper, Samuel F.B. Morse, Oliver Wendell Holmes (senior, the doctor, not junior, the Supreme Court justice), through Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent all found their way to Paris. They came to Paris to polish their rough-edged rustic American ways. They came to learn their profession and learn how to live. They were youthful and romantic adventurers, and they fell in love with Paris, hard, many within days. Some like Samuel F.B. Morse and Charles Sumner would return again and again, and some like Mary Cassatt would never leave.
There was much to love. In David McCullough's adoring, and often surprising, valentine to the City of Lights, he paints a Paris where Americans were not only tolerated, but embraced. They could attend the Sorbonne for free, for example. While Parisians themselves could go to the Louvre free on Sundays, Americans, in fact all foreigners, could go free every day simply by showing their passports.
It wasn't only the well-to-do Americans who came to Paris. The great, now mostly forgotten sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens came over in steerage, and Morse, who was broke at Yale and broke in London, could live cheaply, eat well and paint in Paris. A bottle of wine cost a penny and so did a loaf of bread, and the Louvre was free.
McCullough points out that it was far more than just art and culture the Americans learned in Paris. Charles Sumner, who would later become a United States senator, was attending a lecture at the Sorbonne when he noticed two or three black men in the audience with him. McCullough quotes Sumner's diary: “They were standing in the midst of a knot of young men, and their color seemed to be no objection to them. I was glad to see this, though with American impressions, it seemed very strange.”
“It was for Sumner a stunning revelation,” McCullough writes. Writing about blacks years earlier, Sumner “had made clear in his journal he felt only disdain for them. He would feel that way no longer.” Sumner became one of the staunchest abolitionists in the Senate.
As the above paragraph demonstrates, McCullough's writing voice is identical to his now-familiar and pleasing speaking voice with its distinctive cadence and timbre. This was a bit disconcerting to me at first, because I found myself reading word by word, with the feeling that McCullough was reading his book aloud inside my head. It was a fleeting and frankly pleasant distraction, however.
McCullough reminds us that for all their education and sophistication, the one thing the French could never get right was governing. Revolutions were common-place and kings and presidents were deposed with regularity. In one tumultuous six-month period in 1848, King Louis-Philippe was overthrown by a hot-headed group very good at revolutions and very bad at governing. They in turn were sent packing by the despotic Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in a revolution that lasted all of four days.
Then in 1870 came the crushing defeat of France by Prussia and the horrible Siege of Paris where thousands of Parisians starved to death. Those who lived ate dogs, cats, rats, even the animals in the zoo. But the worst was yet to come in the form of the Commune, which filled the vacuum left by the withdrawing Germans and unleashed a murderous vengeance on its own people. In a remarkable repayment of kindness, it was the American ambassador to France Elihu Washburne who became the steady hand, brokering a peace between the warring factions of the Commune and the Versailles troops. Without Washburne's diplomacy the slaughter of Parisians, which already numbered as many as 25,000, would have been much worse. As thanks, the people of France sent the United States one of our most magnificent gifts, the Statue of Liberty.
If you are interested in the naughty bits of Paris, you won't find them in Greater Journey. McCullough's rather high-minded and romantic notion of Americans in Paris doesn't have room for demimondaines, absinthe or Lapin Agile. The whole subject of sex arises only a couple of times in the book, and it is downplayed in both instances. In one, the father of John Singer Sargent writes, “Behind the gaiety, vice and debauchery which floats on the surface… there is a solid substratum of honesty and probity and economy and virtue, and of indefatigable search for truth in morals and happiness and domestic virtues.” On another occasion, writing about a young American medical student named Philip Gooch, McCullough tells us, “He wrote of visiting brothels and of vicious hangovers, but also of working diligently at the hospitals and his studies all the while.”
What McCullough does with consummate skill is demonstrate the indelible link between our two countries. Americans in the early years of the nineteenth century sat at France's knee, eager pupils of joie de vivre. Later in the century, the pupil became the teacher in medicine, machines and government. But throughout the book, McCullough lets us know that he is in theological agreement with Oliver Wendell Holmes. Paris may not be heaven, but it'll do until the real thing comes along.
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