The Americans in Paris

T here’s nothing like a cross-country road trip to help you reach your reading goals. My recent jaunt through large portions of the American West gave me ample time to both observe our country’s natural beauties and to read more deeply about the people who inhabit her — even if my reading was mostly centered on the East Coast and Europe. My historian of choice? David McCullough — whose biography of the Wright Brothers is one of the most marvelous and inspiring books I’ve ever read. Another of his histories, The Greater Journey, sat on my shelf — after I’d found it at a secondhand store — for at least four years. I saw it daily and was truly determined to read it, but despite my approbation for his Wright Brothers book, The Greater Journey, at 400-odd pages, intimidated me. When, however, you’re confined to the back right seat of a Nissan Murano for nearly 50 hours, you can accomplish an impressive amount of reading.

Though it may initially strike some readers as unpatriotic, The Greater Journey, which details the scores of Americans who moved to Paris between 1830 and 1900, is a remarkable and deeply pro-America book. In fact, McCullough repeatedly stresses how much the individuals he was writing about loved their country and were proud of their roots. So why go to Paris at all? What could these determined men and women not find in the land of opportunity that they needed to make such a dangerous and grueling passage?

McCullough argues that for doctors, authors, inventors, and artists, there was quite a lot, actually. Americans ranging from Samuel Morse to Mary Cassatt all spent time in the City of Lights, and it wasn’t just to go shopping. Paris was not only a vibrant cultural hub; it was also on the cutting edge of medical knowledge. Doctors at the famed École de Médecine were renowned around the city and often the world for their lectures and their techniques. American medical schools were few and far between in the early 1800s, and their training was often quite primitive. Serious medical students whose parents could afford it would head to Paris for both the training and the information they would write back in letters to their families. This exodus to Paris was also a boon for female medical aspirants, who struggled to gain admittance to American medical institutions but found welcome in France.

McCullough deftly weaves together his American characters with fascinating French historical tidbits. Apparently, Galignani’s Messenger was the most popular travel guide for those arriving in the city and was packed with useful information. Something it did not tell its tender readers, however, was that one of the popular city attractions was, in fact, the local morgue, which supplied the hospital with cadavers for medical students’ research. A net, McCullough writes, had been strung downstream on the Seine to catch bodies of suicides and murders, which were then put in the morgue. Passersby could wander through and look for those they might know.

History books are often cast as dull or dry, and it is certainly the case that they can quickly become tedious and overly myopic. McCullough defies this stereptype, however, with The Greater Journey. He takes what seems to be a niche topic from an odd stretch of time and shows the enduring positive impact it had on America and the world. I simply could not put this book down, engaged as I was by McCullough’s writing style and fascinated as I was by the people he chose to highlight. McCullough gracefully balances major events with individual personalities. He never drops the thread of the narrative, giving readers a fascinating perspective of a time and place, and does so in a way that keeps sight of the human aspect of the time period. Interesting anecdotes abound, but you are rarely bogged down in minutiae.

Aspiring doctors weren’t the only professionals to take on Paris. The Louvre and its unbelievably rich trove of art beckoned scribblers, daubers, and dabblers hoping to hone their craft. McCullough carefully chooses his characters, both men and women, and details what they came to Paris to learn and how they accomplished it. These artists — among them John Singer Sargent, the aforementioned Mary Cassatt, and George P. A. Healy — came to Paris in search of fame, inspiration, and, most often, unparalleled training. More often than not, they received that and more.

One artist, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was a completely new name to me. During my time in New York City, I had often walked by Saint-Gaudens’s works without any knowledge of him or his the significance of his art. Reading McCullough’s book gave me a small window into the life and projects of this man, and it has transformed the way I now view statues and monuments. Saint-Gaudens started out in New York City as a cameo engraver but eventually moving to Paris to pursue his passion for sculpture. His Sherman Monument is at 59th and Fifth Avenue in New York City, and his Farragut Monument stands directly south of that, in Madison Square Park. McCullough details the time, care, and effort that Saint-Gaudens poured into his work, and he impressed upon me the immense process it was to bring even one element of a sculpture to fruition.

Fascinated as I was with the artists McCullough brought to life, it was actually an ambassador, Elihu Washburne, who most captured my attention as the book progressed. Washburne was an impressive individual from a family of impressive individuals, and despite what some naysayers in Washington believed, he was an excellent choice for ambassador to France. Washburne was present in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and the German siege of the city. He personally aided hundreds of beleaguered Americans, French, and Germans during the fighting and kept detailed, moving accounts of the city’s suffering during the lengthy siege.

Washburne’s Paris diary entries, I discovered while reading McCullough’s source notes, were only recently discovered outside of the Washburne family archives, and as McCullough says, “It is only in the nearly 200 diary entries . . . that the full drama and detail of what Washburne experienced on the scene are to be found.”

McCullough also used these source notes to make another observation that impressed me:

The wealth of material in the letters of the American medical students in Paris is extraordinary, and again one is struck by how extremely well written they are, even though the young men writing them . . . did not aspire to be writers or to write “writing.” . . . But then it was a day and age when young people were expected to write letters to their families and to use the English language properly.

If only such could be said about my journals, letters, and text messages.

This book is a love letter — one from McCullough to both the French and American people. He praised the Old World for what it brought to the new and applauded those brave souls who were determined to pursue excellence in their field and use it for the betterment of their homeland. As America celebrates her 250th birthday, let us rejoice in the worthy men and women who loved her enough to leave her so that they might return, filled with the wisdom to make her better and stronger.