Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars (review)

Brooke Blower's innovative study peels away the layers of romanticized nostalgia that have accreted on the image of interwar Paris as an artistic haven for Americans seeking relief from provincialism, racial tensions, and sexual restrictions: 'Paris was not simply the carefree playground Americans made it out to be. [. . .] it offered a terrain for some of the central struggles that animated urban cultural politics on both sides of the Atlantic between the wars' (p. 170). While the last chapter is devoted to the writers and other artists who did gravitate to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, Blower's broader sociological study, based in part on the Archives of the Préfecture de Police, concentrates on the much larger contingent of 'ordinary' American expatriates and tourists, who 'came to the capital in droves' (p. 5), in no small part drawn by the favourable exchange rate. Most importantly, the author examines the interplay of reactions and representations between American visitors and their French hosts, in a city that reflected and concentrated not just post-First World War transatlantic relations, but also the ongoing social and political upheavals of Europe (fascism, communism) as well as of its colonial empires. Blower thus devotes chapters to the demonstrations and riots that followed the highly politicized trial and execution of the Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, to the campaign subsequently conducted by the ultra-conservative Prefect of Paris, Jean Chiappe, to purge the capital of (mostly) left-wing and foreign elements, and to the lesser-known parade through the main avenues of Paris of twenty thousand members of the American Legion, ten years after the arrival in France of the first American troops during the Great War. The year 1927, which also includes Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight and triumphant landing at Le Bourget airport, thus stands out in this book. Throughout her study, Blower depicts Paris as a mirror — often blurry or inverted, rarely accurate — used by Americans for purposes of self-definition: 'they often discovered overseas just how they wanted to become American' (p. 38). The highly visible presence within the capital of large numbers of Americans, many of whom were relatively prosperous, in turn led to a wide variety of reactions — from envy and admiration to outright rejection and hostility — within France, so that l'Amérique became more intertwined with the ways in which certain notions of French identity were rapidly evolving: 'Making Frenchness and making Americanness were to be in the early twentieth century by-products of each other' (p. 88). Becoming Americans in Paris is a fascinating and original examination of a pivotal moment in the long history of French-American relations, which seem to alternate between periods of enthusiastic embrace and virulent animosity. Meticulously researched and tightly argued, Blower's book can be challenging. The author expects her readers to be familiar with, for instance, Palmerism (p. 104) and the Kronstadt massacre (p. 106), to which she makes passing references. However, anyone who is interested in the sociocultural history of Paris — and in its enduring place in the American psyche — should read this book.