By Paul Carrier
Have you had your fill of books about American expats settling in Paris to soak up French culture and get their creative juices flowing? If you’re talking about members of the so-called Lost Generation who made the move in the 1920s, including Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, the answer may well be yes.
But famed historian David McCullough’s latest book focuses on an earlier migration - the 70 years from 1830 to 1900 when many Americans were transformed by their time in Paris. Some went to make a buck. But many hoped to hone their skills as writers, artists, sculptors or doctors. And at least one, U.S. Ambassador Elihu Washburne, made history simply by being in the right place at the wrong time.
All were forever changed by their experiences in the City of Light, altering the history of America itself. As McCullough notes in The Greater Journey: “Not all pioneers went west.”
The Paris of that era was a cornucopia of cultural and educational opportunities. The performing arts flourished. The Louvre gave aspiring artists a chance to study the masters firsthand. And 19th-century Paris was perhaps the greatest medical center on earth, home to world-renowned doctors and surgeons, a prestigious medical school and 12 hospitals, including the world’s first hospitals dedicated to children and to diseases of the skin.
There were moral lessons to be learned there as well. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who would later become such a vigorous champion of abolition in the U.S. Senate that it nearly cost him his life, concluded that racism is learned, not part of “the nature of things,” when he saw how well black students were treated at the Sorbonne.
No wonder the likes of James Fenimore Cooper, Samuel F. B. Morse (who got the idea for an electric telegraph while in France), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Cassatt and Augustus Saint-Gaudens spent time in the city. So too did lesser-known Americans, such as Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female doctor; artist George P. A. Healy; and many more.
Some of these visitors had never left the United States before sailing to France. Many spoke little or no French, at least initially, and they found themselves smitten by the size and diversity of Paris. Yet they deeply resented being mistaken for Englishmen (and women), and in some cases took great pride in flaunting their American citizenship.
The Greater Journey is a bit disjointed at times, which is not surprising because it covers the comings and goings of so many Americans, including some with walk-on parts. McCullough explores all of their accomplishments against a backdrop of momentous changes in French life over the course of those 70 years. Governments rise and fall. Revolts blossom and die. Cholera decimates Paris. And the city is physically reinvented during a massive, nearly 20-year rebuilding campaign.
McCullough is the master of the telling anecdote, and The Greater Journey is ablaze with them.
Stowe, longing to escape the celebrity surrounding the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, tours Paris in relative obscurity and realizes while doing so that she suffered “a crushing out of the beautiful” as a child growing up in staid New England.
Sumner, badly disabled after he is brutally attacked by a South Carolina congressman on the Senate floor, returns to Paris and undergoes a near-miraculous recovery.
Saint-Gaudens, learning that he needs surgery to remove an intestinal tumor, runs to the Seine to drown himself, but the sight of the Louvre in the bright sunlight triggers a sudden change of heart and the sculptor abandons his plan.
Washburne, a member of a prominent Maine family who remains in Paris while it is under siege during the Franco-Prussian War, chronicles the suffering of a city that has run out of food, firewood and other necessities and oversees the safe departure of 30,000 Germans who have been ordered to leave the country.
The Greater Journey is the remarkable tale of intriguing, often brilliant Americans who spent some of the best years of their lives in what they described as one of the most inspiring places on earth, and eventually shared what they had learned with their countrymen.
