Nineteenth-Century Americans in Paris

David McCullough's sweeping study of Americans in Paris plays out, not over the well-combed 1920s and 1930s of the Lost Generation fame, but over a less familiar stretch covering roughly three-quarters of the nineteenth century, beginning when Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, the new "Citizen King," was taking the reins of power from his Bourbon cousin Charles x. The significance of McCullough's principal title, The Greater Journey, begins to emerge as the reader learns of the physical hardships undertaken by James Fenimore Cooper and family—Cooper being the first protagonist of the book—in crossing the Atlantic on a merchant ship in 1826—"no better than it had been when Benjamin Franklin set off for France in 1776." And so it would be also for the increasing number of Americans who would follow Cooper to Paris in the 1830s: Samuel Morse, Wendell Holmes (father of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes), Emma Willard (founder of the Troy Female Seminary school, which had impressed the Marquis de Lafayette during his tour of the Hudson Valley), and Charles Sumner (a young attorney and future senator from Massachusetts)—to name but a few of the earlier pioneers. For, as McCullough summarily quips, "not all pioneers went west." The characters of his story were instead answering the sirens' call to the Old World, even if "to them it was all new." The author ends his introductory chapter with these prophetic words: "Great as their journey had been by sea, a greater journey had begun . . . and from it, they were to learn more, and bring back more, of infinite value to themselves and to their country than they yet knew."

While the first wave of knowledge-and culture-hungry Americans were realizing in Paris what Nathaniel Willis, a prototypical newspaper correspondent abroad, called "the dream of [a] lifetime," Alexis de Tocqueville was heading in the opposite direction to "inquire into everything [in America] to see what a great republic is like." As accomplished a painter as the future inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse, already was, having been commissioned to do a portrait of President James Madison and a painting of the House of Representatives in session, "he needed Paris": "My education as a painter is incomplete without it." His fellow artist George P. A. Healy of Boston, the future portraitist of Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and John Quincy Adams, later elaborated on the American artist's need to make a Parisian pilgrimage: "In those far-off days there were no art schools in America, no drawing classes, no collections of fine plaster casts and very few picture exhibitions." Wendell Holmes would make a similar claim about the uniqueness of the Parisian teaching hospitals: "all parts of the human body—nerves, muscles, organs, blood vessels, and bones— [could] be studied, and this, Holmes stressed, could hardly be done anywhere in the world but in Paris." As for Emma Willard, her sojourn of exploration—meant "to benefit not only herself and her students, but the women of her country"—got off to a propitious start, with a long and warm visit, within twenty-four hours of announcing her arrival in Paris, from Lafayette himself, in spite of the general's military busyness at that moment supporting Louis-Philippe's new regime. As for Charles Sumner, who quickly mastered enough French to begin following lectures at the Sorbonne (the Americans, in general, appear to have been well-motivated language learners, eager to break through to the business of content learning), he was surprised to see several black students in the audience who seemed to be "well received" by their peers, causing Sumner to reflect upon the situation of free blacks and slaves in his homeland: "It must be . . . that the distance between free blacks and whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things"—a point that Sumner would later defend vociferously throughout his political career.

Because such a longitudinal study, involving so many characters who had sojourned in Paris...