We’re pleased to send you our fourth issue of Reporting from Paris... this month focused on 250 years of Franco-American relations.

You’ll find articles and videos on:

• The role played by the Marquis de Lafayette as well as French commanders Rochambeau and de Grasse in defeating British General Cornwallis at Yorktown

• Benjamin Franklin as the quintessential diplomat... and fashionista!

• Language: French and English and “les faux amis”

• French cuisine on the high seas, with a recipe from Admiral de Grasse

• Jazz as the ultimate American export to France

• An introduction to other revolutionaries who have found refuge in Paris

We value your support and comments and would like to hear which subjects and topics interest you or that you would like us to cover in future editions. You can email us at contact@reportingfromparis.fr.

Enjoy this new issue of Reporting from Paris and stay in touch!

Best regards,

Shellie Karabell
Editor-in-Chief

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Reporting from Paris Editor-in-Chief Shellie Karabell talks with Edith de Belleville, author, lawyer, tour guide and professor.

Want to read through the whole Revolutionary Timeline in one go?

[All graphics by Edie Twells-Eastwood]

The Carnavalet Museum houses the history of Paris, showcasing artifacts dating from prehistoric times to the present. The French Revolution and the French-American relationship are well documented.

Reporting from Paris Editor-in-Chief Shellie Karabell and museum attaché for heritage and patrimony Lény Roinné visit a special exhibition dedicated to 250 years of that heritage. [videographer/editor: Celine Marchand]

Reporting from Paris Editor-in-Chief Shellie Karabell talks with Edith de Belleville, author, lawyer, tour guide and professor.

[videographer/editor: Celine Marchand]

Shellie Karabell has spent more than 40 years in broadcast journalism as a news executive, anchor, producer, and field reporter in her native USA, Europe, the USSR/Russia and the Middle East for ABC/WTN, PBS, Dow Jones Broadcast, CNBC, and Forbes.com. She has covered some of the major news events of the 20^th century: the release of the American hostages from Iran in 1981; the collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989); civil wars in Lebanon (1983) and Yugoslavia (1991-92), and USSR/Russia (1986- present). She is currently VP of the Anglo American Press Association of Paris (President 2022-2025).

More than any other peoples back in the 18^th century, the French of the Enlightenment and the independent-leaning American colonialists upended the idea that kings ruled by divine right, sharing the view that each man was endowed by his creator with inalienable rights, which could not be usurped by a monarch. And so, the long march towards participatory democracy began, much of it in the cafés of Paris.

On a down-to-earth level – the “how do we get this done?” level – there were practical aspects for the rebellious American colonialists to consider, not the least of which was funding and military support. This was not easy for a bunch of colonies still in obeisance to the British Crown, with limited ways of raising money and even fewer ways of raising an army. These needs coincided very nicely with the interests of a young French military officer looking for a just cause to support – an aristocrat who went on to become George Washington’s closest attaché and unofficially his adopted son.

The man is Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, born September 6, 1757, at the Château de Chavaniac in the Auvergne mountains in central France. He is referred to in France as the Marquis de Lafayette. In the US, he is simply “Lafayette.”

The Aristocratic Revolutionary

An unlikely revolutionary, this son of one of France’s oldest families – his forefathers fought in the Christian crusades and supported Joan of Arc – was orphaned and a millionaire by age 14, married to the love of his life at 16 (Marie Adrienne Françoise de Noailles, herself from a distinguished family), a major general in the United States Army at 19, and famous on both sides of the Atlantic by the age of 20.

His introduction to the American revolution came not from the French army (in which he was a member of the officer ranks) but at a dinner party in Metz, where he was cooling his heels when the 1775 military budget cuts in France jettisoned him from active service.

There, he met the younger brother of Britain’s King George III, the Duke of Gloucester, who regaled the 17-year-old French officer with derisive tales of the colonialists’ belief in their right to self-rule, their mounting of a Continental Army under George Washington, and mocked their revolutionary beliefs. “My heart was enlisted,” Lafayette wrote in his memoirs, adding his desire to “join my colors to those of the revolutionaries.”

Benjamin Franklin had already been in Paris drumming up support for American independence – so successfully that pundits at the time claimed there was more support for George Washington in France than in all of the Continental Army. The rights of man were on the minds of people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Off to America

In early 1777, aged 19, Lafayette set sail for America – hiring ships at his own expense and paying the way for his entire company. His family were opposed to the idea, calling Lafayette’s youthful display of impatience, desire for glory, and idealism “first-rate idiocy” – especially as the young captain was leaving behind his young, pregnant, and highly-born wife. The family turned to King Louis XVI to stop him, but Lafayette went anyway… and it is interesting to note that French society chose to applaud rather than castigate this derring-do of the young knight-errant.

Lafayette’s reception in Philadelphia, however, was not an immediate success: Congressman James Lovell of Massachusetts had by now grown sick of what had become a steady stream of gallant Frenchmen seeking a good fight and glory in the colonies, and at first refused to see Lafayette. That changed when Lovell was made aware of the French captain’s vast wealth and excellent connections, and Lafayette was finally introduced to General George Washington. The two men almost immediately struck up a close relationship – Lafayette seeing in Washington the father he had never known (his own was killed during France’s Seven Years’ War with England when Lafayette was 14) and Washington referring to Lafayette as “my son.”

He also became enchanted with the country itself. Writing to his wife on June 19, 1777, Lafayette described America as an idyllic land where “the simplicity of manners, the desire to oblige, the love of country and of liberty” were the dominant characteristics of the people, and where “sweet equality … reigns over all.” Lafayette’s first extended sojourn with an American community deepened these beliefs.

Fighting alongside Washington and the Continental Army against General William Howe in the Battle of Brandywine (Pennsylvania) in September of 1777, Lafayette was wounded in the leg. He was nursed back to health by the Moravian Brethren in Bethlehem (also in Pennsylvania) whom he described in a letter to his wife as “an innocent family” that managed to maintain its “community of goods, education and interests” despite the devastating war around them.

Lafayette then joined American General John Sullivan at Valley Forge that winter and developed close friendships with Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

Sending in the Troops

Lafayette’s flamboyant exercises and close relationships in America, coupled with Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic efforts in Paris and Washington’s victories in Sarasota, finally resulted in solid French support for the American cause. In February 1778, Louis XVI signed a treaty of alliance with the United Colonies of America, and the French court at Versailles recognized American independence on March 20, 1778. This was an important step and Lafayette knew it, rushing back to France in 1779 to convince Louis XVI and the court that now was the time for France to commit its military and money in support of America’s war of independence from their common enemy: Britain.

By now, Lafayette also had the support of French Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Charles Gravier de Vergennes, who viewed supporting American independence as an opportunity for revenge against Britain after the French defeat in the costly Seven Years’ War that had caused France to lose many of its land holdings in North America.

When Lafayette returned to America in May of 1780, it was as an official representative of France, bringing with him a French military expeditionary force of some 5,500 men under the command of Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau to operate in coordination with General Washington’s troops. Admiral Francois-Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse. arrived in May of 1781 with the French Navy (read Susan Herrmann Loomis on “what they ate” elsewhere in this edition of Reporting from Paris). Despite being better trained, better armed, and more experienced than the Americans, the French military and its aristocratic leaders agreed to serve under General Washington. Their target was another aristocrat: British Lieutenant General Lord Charles Cornwallis.

By Land and by Sea

Thereafter, victories were swift. In late September, Admiral de Grasse’s decisive naval victory routed the British fleet of Rear-Admiral Thomas Graves off the Virginia coast of Chesapeake Bay, leaving Cornwallis with his unprotected back to the sea. This gave the insurgents time to plot the strategy that would entrap the British at Yorktown, Virginia.

It was there, on October 19, 1781, hemmed in on land by some 16,000 Allied troops and cut off from escape via the water by de Grasse’s ships, that Cornwallis laid his sword at the feet of George Washington and surrendered with his 8,000 men. The Articles of Capitulation were signed at Moore House in Yorktown that day, abandoning any chance of British victory in the American War of Independence.

Three commanders who needed a translator to communicate with each other (Lafayette, as a major general of American forces, served as a liaison, of course) had defeated the world’s mightiest military. Lafayette was just 24 years old.

On September 3, 1783, the Treaty of Versailles officially brought the war to an end.

Washington and Lafayette – two men, from two different countries and of two different generations, sharing a common commitment to liberty and to the rights of man – had changed the world.

After the War

Lafayette’s ties with America did not end with the victory at Yorktown. While most of the French officers who fought in the War of Independence returned to France and the careers they had left behind, Lafayette made America his life’s work, promoting friendship and trade between France and America and serving as the new nation’s foremost advocate in France. His written complaints to officials in Paris about the French way of doing business – “the intricacies of our regulations are even more annoying than their cost” – are familiar words today!

Lafayette’s affinity for America and Americans went deep. He referred to himself as an American citizen (he wasn’t, during his lifetime). He named his son George Washington Lafayette, and one of his two daughters Virginia, after the state where the battle of Yorktown took place. (Ed’s note: Virginia’s full name was Marie-Antoinette Virginie Lafayette)

A Farewell to Comrades-in-Arms

Washington and Lafayette last saw each other in 1784, when Lafayette left America to return to France. His Paris townhouse in Rue de Bourbon became a gathering place for the Jeffersons, the Adamses, and the Franklins. A gold-engraved copy of the Declaration of Independence hung on the wall of his study.

Lafayette sent Washington the key to the Bastille when that symbol of royal tyranny was overthrown in the debut of France’s own revolution on July 14, 1789. With his military experience during the American Revolution, the now-32-year-old Lafayette quickly assumed a prominent role in the opening chapter of the French Revolution, serving in the National Assembly and commanding the Republican Guard (Garde Républicaine), formed to keep order throughout France. It is very likely that his time serving under Washington as a major general in the Continental Army provided much of the inspiration for France’s “Rights of Man,” which Lafayette wrote, and which survives today as a key doctrine of French democracy.

However, Lafayette did not believe France should follow the American model in pursuing its own revolution. Writing to Thomas Jefferson in 1789, he pointed out that Americans had “the advantage to work a new ground…” Europeans, in contrast, “had lived in a state of corruption for so many centuries that they could not easily be extracted from it.” It was his support for a constitutional monarchy rather than a republic that eventually saw him branded a “royalist” in France, forcing him to flee to Austria, where he was immediately incarcerated as a “dangerous radical.”

Though he lived through some of the most turbulent times in the history of the world, Lafayette was steadfast in his beliefs. He anticipated and supported causes for freedom, defending Native Americans and Black people in America, Protestants and Jews in France, human rights and universal suffrage, openness, and the quest by the Irish, Poles, and Italians to create their own nations.

Lafayette returned to the US for the last time in 1824 at the age of 67 (Washington had died in 1799), toured all of the then-24 states, and returned home to France, where he died in Paris on May 20, 1834. He is buried next to his wife Adrienne in Picpus Cemetery in the eastern part of Paris. He was made an honorary US citizen in 2002. A plaque at his grave indicates it is maintained by the Daughters of the American Revolution. An American flag flies overhead.

Postscript:

• General Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, supported the French Revolution but was arrested during the Reign of Terror (1793-94) and imprisoned in the Conciergerie. The fall of Robespierre several days before his scheduled execution spared Rochambeau from the guillotine. After his release from prison, he met with Napoléon, who presented him with a pension in 1801 and the French Legion d’Honneur in 1804. Rochambeau died on May 10, 1807, at Thoré-la-Rochette, Loir-et-Cher. He is buried in the cemetery there.

• Admiral François-Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse, Marquis de Grasse-Tilly, despite his distinguished 50-year naval career and his vital role in defeating the British at Yorktown, met defeat shortly after that battle at the hands of the British while sailing home to France through southern waters. His ships destroyed, de Grasse was captured, brought to London, and served time in jail before returning to France to face a court marshal. De Grasse blamed the defeat on his officers’ not following orders. He died in his Paris pied-à-terre in the Saint-Roch district of Paris before the start of the French Revolution on January 11, 1788. He is buried in the church of Saint-Roch.

• George Washington returned to manage his farm estate at Mount Vernon, Virginia, after serving two terms (1789-1797) as the first president of the newly United States. During his presidency, relations with France changed drastically: the French Revolution started; King Louis XVI, who had given his full support to securing American independence, was guillotined on January 21, 1793. In his second term, Washington signed the Jay Treaty with Great Britain, formalizing trade and diplomatic rapprochement. The new French government was not pleased, and it began capturing American ships, launching the so-called “Quasi-War.” Washington was named Commander of the Provisional American Army by his successor John Adams but refused to serve unless and until France invaded the US. The end to this “Quasi-War” was negotiated by Adams in 1800 after Washington had died at his home on December 14, 1799, of what has since been diagnosed as “acute bacterial epiglottis” resulting from a bad cold. He is buried on the family estate at Mount Vernon, Virginia.

• The key to the Bastille and one of Lafayette’s armchairs remain at Washington’s Mount Vernon home today.

• A statue of Washington and Lafayette stands in Lafayette Park directly across the street from the White House in Washington, DC.

• The Philadelphia Historical Society and the Alliance Francaise of Philadelphia are repositories of many Lafayette artifacts.

• Picpus Cemetery is located at 35 Rue de Picpus, 75012 Paris, and is open weekday afternoons. Tel: + 33 1 43 44 18 54.

References:

• Laura Auricchio, The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered, published 2014, Skylight Books. (The Vice President and Secretary of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, she previously served as Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center and Vice Provost for Curriculum and Learning at The New School, NYC.)

• Gonzague Saint Bris, La Fayette, published 2006, Telemaque.

Shellie Karabell has spent more than 40 years in broadcast journalism as a news executive, anchor, producer, and field reporter in her native USA, Europe, the USSR/Russia and the Middle East for ABC/WTN, PBS, Dow Jones Broadcast, CNBC, and Forbes.com. She has covered some of the major news events of the 20^th century: the release of the American hostages from Iran in 1981; the collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989); civil wars in Lebanon (1983) and Yugoslavia (1991-92), and USSR/Russia (1986- present). She is currently VP of the Anglo American Press Association of Paris (President 2022-2025).

Reporting from Paris Editor-in-Chief Shellie Karabell and museum attaché for heritage and patrimony Lény Roinné visit a special exhibition dedicated to 250 years of that heritage. [videographer/editor: Celine Marchand]

Franklin was no stranger to France or to the French court. His first mission, ten years previous, was very different. From his base in London, where his job was to represent colonial interests to the British government, Franklin crossed the Channel several times. In 1767, he spent some six weeks touring France, meeting the country’s scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals, and making contacts that would prove useful in 1776 when he would arrive asking for aid.

As a consequence, Franklin was enthusiastically welcomed at court and by the country’s influential figures in 1776, who knew him not as a rebel but as one of Europe’s most distinguished scientists and who had been admitted in 1772 to the prestigious French Academy of Sciences. Such was his fame that on his arrival in Nantes, he was fêted with a ball, and en route to Paris, he left ladies in his wake styling their wigs à la Franklin, inspired by his soft fur hat.

Fashion at Court was Formidable

La mode was serious business in 18^th-century France. Luxury artisans and merchants along the Rue Saint-Honoré furnished the court, while the nascent fashion press, largely concentrated in Paris, brought elite fashions down the social ladder and abroad, as Denis Bruna and Chloé Demey observe in their book Histoire des Modes et du Vêtement. Indeed, Lyonnais silk manufacturers – who pioneered the system of releasing new models each season that would come to define the fashion industry – were esteemed across Europe.

Fashion ruled life at Versailles, where entire offices were consecrated to the royal wardrobes and ensembles communicated not only the status of their wearers but reflected that of those around them. However, the Benjamin Franklin greeted by the French in 1776 was very different from the one they had met, dressed à la française, in 1767.

Whereas in 1767, Franklin presented the image of a courtier (which he was not), he now sought to portray himself as a Quaker (which he also was not). He had swapped complicated French etiquette for American simplicity, and he made it clear in what he wore: exchanging the powdered wigs and silk vests from his initial French visit for unadorned, soberly colored coats, and pants, and swapping a wig for a plain hat atop his own natural, thinning grey hair. “Think how this must appear among the Powder’d Heads of Paris!” proclaimed the Founding Father in a letter, reflecting upon his strikingly modest appearance. Through his simplicity of style, Franklin sought to personify the American spirit – exceptionalism, universalism, integrity, a certain purity – to help succeed in his mission to win French support.

In 1767, Franklin wanted to fit in; in 1776, he wanted to stand out.

Clothes Make the Man

It worked. Framing the revolutionary effort as ideological, with virtue as important as gunpowder, Franklin dressed the part of “noble frontier philosopher and simple backwoods sage.” Fashion already signaled influence and virtue in French society: he simply flipped the script.

Against the lace and frills, diamonds and pearls, silver and gold, and meter upon meter of many-hued velvet and silk adorning the elite members of court, the severely dressed American was downright exotic. Marie-Antoinette’s première femme de chambre, Madame Campan, recalled how Franklin’s “flat, unpowdered hair, his round hat, and his brown suit contrasted with the embroidered, sequined ensembles and powdered, perfumed hairstyles of the courtiers.”

The change was more than cosmetic, and it was not lost on the court or the wider French society. Franklin’s overall style appealed to followers of The Enlightenment as well as to those at the highest echelons who were beginning to talk openly about liberté, égalité, and fraternité.

Diplomacy in a Plain Suit

But while Franklin’s mode of dress sent a clear message of American idealism and ambition, it was not quite measuring up to the realism of going to war… until the British were soundly defeated by the American rebels in the Battles of Saratoga in September and October of 1777. The French began to believe the rebels had a real chance to defeat their age-old rival, the British. Two treaties were signed in February of the next year: one of friendship and commerce, and the other a treaty of alliance, in which France formally recognized the independence of the United States and agreed to join them in their war against Britain.

With that alliance secured, Franklin had a final fashion statement to make at the reception at Versailles in March 1778, officially celebrating the signing of the two treaties. While his co-commissioners wore official court dress and the swords typically required within the palace walls, fashion rules didn’t apply to Monsieur Franklin. Standing out against courtiers in ceremonial garb – outfits that could cost more than a laborer earned in 30 years – France’s favorite American opted for his standard brown suit. Instead of a sword, he simply accessorized with his spectacles.

He did, however, lose the fur cap in favor of a white hat. In France, white was the color of royalty. But Franklin made it a symbol of liberty. “Whether or not he meant it to be,” asserts biographer Walter Isaacson, “white hats for men were soon in vogue in Paris, as everything else Franklin wore was wont to become”.

Franklin had used fashion to support a new way of thinking and changing politics. In so doing, he turned the world on its head, securing the French military and financial support the colonies needed to defeat the British at Yorktown in 1781… and helping to set the stage for the revolution that was to take over France in 1789.

Works referenced:

• Denis Bruna and Chloé Demey, Histoire des Modes et du Vêtement (Paris: Éditions Textuel, 2018)

• Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan, Mémoires sur la Vie Privée de Marie-Antoinette, Reine de France et de Navarre, Suivis de Souvenirs et Anecdotes Historiques sur les Règnes de Louis XIV, de Louis XV et de Louis XVI (Paris: Baudouin Frères and Mongie l’Aîné, 1822)

• Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004)

Lacey Minot has a background in art history, museology, and fashion studies. She considers fashion’s place in museum collections and other disciplines and has written about the history of pajamas and the artist Foujita’s sense of style. Her work appears in a variety of publications including Fashion Theory, Modes Pratiques, and PAN & the Dream. She is a contributing writer at Air Mail and works in publishing in Paris.

They include 19^th-century Venezuelan liberation leader Simón Bolívar; Algerian independence fighter Ahmed Ben Bella; and Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who lived briefly in the village of Neauphle-le-Château, to the west of Paris, before returning to spearhead Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

But there was also the raft of early 20^th-century leftist activists who laid the foundations of Communist China and Russia. And the Black artists and intellectuals who spearheaded the Négritude movement, founded in Paris, ahead of a wave of colonial independence uprisings in Africa and other former colonies in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Lessons of the Paris Commune

Paris was a magnet for many other leftist thinkers and agitators. This was where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels met in 1844. Where Ho Chi Minh, the first president of North Vietnam, helped to found the French Communist Party in 1920. And where Cambodian revolutionary-turned-dictator Pol Pot studied in the early 1950s.

Many were influenced by the Paris Commune of 1871, a short-lived insurrection against the French government that was crushed in a bloody riposte.

“It was the first revolution of the proletariat, as Marx said,” says Paris tour guide and lecturer Thomas Stehlin. “It was a failure, but also a huge inspiration.”

The Commune also helped shape the thinking of Vladimir Lenin, who moved to Paris in December 1908, after exile in Siberia and stints in other European cities. He eventually settled in a small apartment in the 14th arrondissement with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his mother-in-law – reportedly moving his mistress, Inessa Armand, into an apartment next door.

Lenin kept a low profile in Paris, studying, writing, and playing chess. He met with Leon Trotsky and other exiled Russians at local cafés, weaving through city traffic on a bicycle – a practical way to also duck Russian secret police.

“Life for these exiles wasn’t easy,” Stehlin says, “as about 40 members of the Czarist police were based in Rue de Grenelle [in the 7^th arrondissement].”

Lenin moved out of Paris in 1912. Five years later, he returned to Russia to lead the October Bolshevik Revolution.

“All the Russian revolutionaries left Paris in 1917,” says Serge Wolikow, historian and professor emeritus at the University of Burgundy. “And Russians who were against the revolution began to arrive here.”

Work, Study, and Revolt

Down a nondescript street off Place d’Italie, in the 13^th arrondissement, is a small plaque dedicated to a big figure: Zhou Enlai, who served as foreign minister and first premier of Communist China until his death in 1976.

In 1920, Zhou joined a wave of young Chinese heading to France and elsewhere in Europe as part of the “Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement” that offered an escape from a poor and war-ravaged country.

“They came to continue their studies,” says Li Jianle, owner of the Neptune Hotel, where Zhou stayed for two years. “Zhou Enlai studied science and worked as a journalist.”

Zhou and his counterparts arrived in a country buffeted by civil unrest. “They observed the social fights, the strikes in France…” says Professor Wolikow at the University of Burgundy. “They discovered Marxist movements and leftist unions.”

Photos of Zhou line the wall outside Room 1 of Hotel Neptune, where the future Chinese leader lived and worked, reportedly surviving on bread and water. The small room was even smaller during Zhou’s time, reveals hotel owner Li, barely fitting a bed and chair.

“With his comrades, Zhou published two newspapers,” he adds. “The second, called Youth, he did here.”

Zhou wrote the editorials, Li says. Other colleagues pitched in – including future Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping, who commuted in from the French town of Montargis, more than 60 miles south of Paris, where he worked in a factory.

“Deng would stay Saturday evenings with Zhou Enlai [to work on the newspaper],” Li says. “He slept on the floor – there was no other bed.”

Zhou left the hotel in 1924 and headed home. He and Deng joined a revolution that would pave the way for the People’s Republic of China in 1949. “After he left France, he never returned,” Li says of Zhou.

A university professor, Li moved to Paris with his wife in the 1980s. They bought the hotel in 2001, after hearing about its history.

Today, it is a go-to attraction for many Chinese people. “At the beginning, it was Chinese people like me, from the old generation,” Li says. “But, increasingly, young Chinese are visiting. Which is a good thing. You can’t forget history.”

The Négritude Revolution

Paris attracted many other changemakers early last century, including the best and brightest youngsters from France’s colonies.

Among them were three African and Caribbean writers who met in Paris: Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal, Aimé Césaire from Martinique, and Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana. In the 1930s, they founded the groundbreaking Négritude movement, affirming Black identity and African culture, and rejecting European colonialism and racism.

“I think we can call it a revolution,” says Black activist Louis-Georges Tin, who co-founded the Representative Council of Black Associations (CRAN) in France. “It was about redefining North-South relations – and that rebalancing is beginning to happen, even if there are difficulties.”

In the 1940s and ‘50s, Left Bank cafés became hubs of debate on Négritude – influenced also by the earlier Harlem Renaissance across the Atlantic in New York, and gathering some of the Black American artists and thinkers who had flocked to Paris. Not all Black intellectuals supported the movement, however, and Black French and Americans did not always see Paris – or France – the same way.

“Many Americans felt they were well received in Paris – and if you compare Alabama to the Latin Quarter in the 1950s, we could say Paris was much more open,” Tin says. “But the majority of Black French weren’t in France in the 1950s, they were in the colonies. And that comparison did not favor France.”

In 1956, the Sorbonne University hosted one of the most important meetings of Black intellectuals of the time, the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists. It was organized by Présence Africaine, a cultural, literary, and political magazine that continues today, along with its Left Bank bookstore and publishing house.

The 1950s and ‘60s also saw a wave of independence movements in Africa and elsewhere. The three Négritude founders, later deputies in France’s National Assembly, earned success and acclaim.

Damas went on to become an academic and United Nations delegate. Senghor became independent Senegal’s first president, and the first African member of the Académie Française. Césaire, who became mayor of Martinique’s capital, Fort-de-France, turned to militancy in his writings.

Many believe Négritude has left an enduring footprint on culture, society, and politics, including the Black Lives Matter movement.

“For a Martiniquais like me, Négritude is everywhere,” Tin says of the French overseas department he hails from. “It was a cultural, family, and national immersion. It was a normal reference.”

These and other revolutionaries have left their mark on the French capital in myriad ways – captured in plaques, statues, bookstores, and cafés – and in politics and daily life thousands of miles away.

Even today, as Professor Wolikow observes, “Paris remains a place of encounter, of liberty, of debate – and of exile.”

Elizabeth Bryant (“Lisa”) is a Paris-based journalist with 30 years of experience across radio, print, and television. She was a long-time correspondent for Voice of America, has freelanced for outlets including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Houston Chronicle, and Religion News Service (RNS), and currently contributes to Deutsche Welle’s English-service radio. Previously based in Cairo and the US, Elizabeth has worked for AFP and UPI and was a staff reporter for US national and local news outlets. She is a member of the Anglo-American Press Association of Paris.

_{[video: ECPAD.fr and imagesdefense.gouv.fr]}

We can point to the end of the First World War as the period when American jazz entered France. Visualize a cold winter morning in 1918, when the 369^th Infantry Regiment, an all-Black regiment, landed in Brest Harbor in Bretagne on the Atlantic Coast of France, later christened the Harlem Hellfighters for their combat bravery (earning them France’s Croix de Guerre). The regiment included a marching band led by a native of Mobile, Alabama, aptly named (for someone who would be a hit as part of a ragtime orchestra on the continent) Lt. James Reese Europe.

The Love Story begins with Hellfighters

This all-Black ragtime orchestra was already a legend in New York, having performed at Carnegie Hall in 1912. As soldiers, they gave their first concert on French soil in Brest only a few hours after arriving. Later, having served on the front for over six months within a Division of the 4th French Army, they played in Paris again in the summer, notably at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and in the Tuileries Garden. The Paris audience was enthusiastic – and far less shocked than the crowd that caused a near-riot when Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps debuted in the same theater five years earlier!

The term métissage – a cross-mix of ethnic groups – best defines the evolution and the history of jazz in France, reflecting the changes and events occurring when music, fashion, and art forms collide, mix, and mingle. Take the Roaring Twenties, when Cubism, Surrealism, Dada, and La Revue Nègre with Josephine Baker exerted a major cultural influence. This sometimes atonal and spontaneous musical backdrop can also be heard in the 20^th century’s modern composers, such as Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Maurice Ravel, or Darius Milhaud.

Paris’s creative effervescence welcomed jazz into its cultural melting pot and became itself a jazz capital with Montmartre initially at its epicenter. Here, famous Lost Generation expatriates Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and composer Cole Porter, frequently met with Afro-American musicians, who, fleeing the racial segregation of America’s southern states, found in Paris a place where color wasn’t much of a problem. Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Max Jacob could be seen mixing with the ever-so-slightly-racy demi-monde as well as high society; or crowding Pigalle’s cabarets and clubs: Chez Florence, Mitchell’s, La Plantation, or singer Ada Smith’s Bricktop. (Woody Allen’s unabashedly romanticized Midnight in Paris comes to mind…)

Cross-pollination… and Resistance

In the 1930s, with the early developments in the recording industry and radio broadcasts, jazz in France became even more popular. Following in the steps of the swing era, American big bands headed by Duke Ellington, Count Basie (who returned well into the 1950s to perform at the Olympia), Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, etc. – and a handful of gifted French jazzmen including saxophonists André Ekyan and Alix Combelle – put together large orchestras and small groups. Hot jazz and swing took over in dance halls and clubs in and around the capital, often sharing the bill and jamming with visiting American soloists, thus spearheading the advent of French jazz through intercultural exchange and cross pollination.

At the same time, a Belgian-born gypsy guitarist – and admirer of Louis Armstrong – was creating a buzz with his unusual technique and would rapidly become the first guitar personage in jazz history. His name: Django Reinhardt. Together with violinist Stéphane Grappelli, Joseph Reinhardt (Django’s kid brother) and Roger Chaput on rhythm guitars, and Louis Vola on bass, Django founded an all-string jazz ensemble: the Quintette du Hot Club de France – not surprisingly, an instant success. The jazz manouche was born!

World War II pulled the plug on a lot of this music. During four years of occupation, when the Nazi regime outlawed jazz as degenerate music (Entartete Musik), enforced racial laws targeting Black people as well as Jews and other races, and banned American jazz records, jazz somehow survived. Nevertheless, a colorful tribe of young Parisians calling themselves the Zazous sported eccentric fashion and promoted a jazzy, defiant attitude as an act of resistance.

Jazz, Existentialism, and the Search for Meaning

With the Liberation in 1944, jazz was pulled toward the magnet of French intellectual life: to the Left Bank and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, side-by-side in the heart of the sixth arrondissement, along Boulevard Saint-Germain, became the meeting place of the capital’s deep-thinkers, not least of whom was Jean-Paul Sartre. At night, self-proclaimed fellow existentialists – a mixed crowd of writers, poets, and musicians, under the tutelage of multi-talented inventor, writer, amateur musician, and premier social influencer, Boris Vian, gathered in caves (cellars), such as Le Tabou and Le Club Saint-Germain, dancing all night to live jazz intoxicated by post-war boundless freedom. Influenced by jazz and contemporary American literature, the Bobby Soxers succeeded the Zazous.

Those needing a guidebook to this new life could read Boris Vian’s 1950 Manuel de Saint-Germain-des-Prés – 300 pages of street guide-cum-user’s manual – a pataphysician’s catalog containing sardonic solutions to imaginary problems encountered in places and involving famous people, jazz discography, and whimsical anecdotes that were part of the living legend of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It also featured real-world articles on cultural celebrities such as Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and celebrity personalities like singer Juliette Gréco, whose liaison with Miles Davis made newspaper headlines in 1949.

In The Heat of Paris Nights

By the 1950s, the door to the Paris music scene was open, and in 1956, drummer Kenny Clarke, one of the bebop founders, entered, followed by trumpeter-arranger Quincy Jones and pianist Bud Powell. Musicians visiting Europe began making prolonged stopovers in Paris to enjoy the lifestyle and benefit from the city’s growing club attendance: saxophonists Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, and Lee Konitz, and trumpeters Donald Byrd and Chet Baker. As the recording industry expanded, French jazz musicians, thanks to bebop, quickly assimilated new directions in modern jazz. This saw musicians such as pianists Martial Solal and René Urtreger, saxophonist Barney Wilen, drummer Daniel Humair, and bassist Pierre Michelot making a name for themselves among their US colleagues. European jazz was coming into its own.

The Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) in the mid-1950s and 60s paired jazz and cinema and opened a new chapter in France’s love story with jazz. Film directors Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, Roger Vadim, and Pierre Granier-Deferre – all jazz lovers themselves – commissioned established jazz musicians to write and/or perform in their film soundtracks. Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud (Louis Malle/Miles Davis), À Bout de Souffle (Jean-Luc Godard/Martial Solal), Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 (Roger Vadim/Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers), Sait-on Jamais… (Roger Vadim/The Modern Jazz Quartet), and La Métamorphose des Cloportes (Pierre Granier-Deferre/Jimmy Smith) are still praised today by film buffs and jazz fans and are being discovered by a new generation.

The Golden Age

Jazz underscored the themes of emancipation, equality, and breaking the rules in the 1960s and 70s. Jazz giants such as Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Ray Charles, and Chick Corea would regularly visit the French capital, giving historic one-night concerts or participating in the many jazz festivals blossoming all over France. These standard-bearers now belong to the history of music: their compositions and technique are studied in music schools and conservatories, their lives have become biographies in several languages, and their re-issued recordings on vinyl and CDs can still be heard on the radio and on the internet, inspiring the next generation of jazz musicians.

France, America’s ally across the Atlantic, has joined in the celebration, even creating some striking graphics of its own, including the one below, to fête this once-in-a-lifetime event.

A Tale of Two Countries

It’s often said that America and Britain are divided by a common language. But the US and France are even further apart. It’s not just that each country has a distinct national language but that they treat theirs in such disparate ways. France is enormously protective of its mother tongue, while the US – a country of immigrants, where hundreds of languages are spoken – has never officially put English in that category.

For the French, however, preserving their national language is paramount. In the latest annual report from the Ministry of Culture on the French language, Catherine Pégard, the Minister of Culture, noted that French – now spoken by 365 million people, including citizens of the French overseas territories, according to the report – is the fourth most spoken language in the world. “French is a living language and one that evolves,” she added. “It must remain as a bridge between cultures and generations. It’s up to us to make sure that it thrives.”

To ensure that that happens, various organizations are devoted to the task, including the august Académie Française. One of the five constituent academies of the Institut de France, it is responsible for promulgating the French language – and famously creating its dictionaries at the pace of an escargot. In the meantime, the Académie keeps pace in other ways, offering tips on correct usage on its website.

One thing is certain, the French language – taught rigorously, beginning in the country’s 42,000 primary schools – is a matter of enormous national pride. As some of us know firsthand, it takes work to learn to speak it correctly. Many of its verb tenses – hello, imperfect subjunctive! – are notoriously difficult, at least for foreign adopters. Not to mention such grammatical booby traps as the ne explétif, a two-letter word some erudite francophones use as a kind of fillip to improve the rhythm of a sentence.

And then there are those nasty interlopers – the faux amis! Fake friends that leap from one language into another, diabolically changing their meaning as they go. These treacherous, so-called allies confuse foreigners learning French.

Preserving the Mother Tongue

As for the French themselves, they have other things to worry about – notably incursions into their sacred mother tongue. Back in 1994, the country passed the Toubon law – named for Jacques Toubon, then the country’s Minister of Culture – who was adamant in his campaign to de-English his native language.

His law required that French be used in teaching, at work, and in the country’s official government publications, as well as in some advertising. It also, rather grandly, promised to safeguard “the right to the French Language” for that country’s citizens. Some time-honored Englishisms, such as “le week-end,” got a pass as, eventually, did such Silicon Valleyisms as “dot-com” and “start-up.”

America, in its own way, also takes a pedagogic approach to its own language. The United States Department of State, for example, offers an excellent website that focuses on “teaching and learning about American English and American culture.” Even so, the US – notably multicultural – takes a more nuanced approach than the top-down one favored by the French.

Back when the US Constitution was ratified in 1790, America’s population spoke many languages beyond English, including Spanish, Dutch, German, and multiple indigenous ones spoken by native tribes. Many others have been added in the centuries since. While English is the most dominant of these, it wasn’t until Presidential Executive Order 14224, signed March 1, 2025, that it was declared the official language of the country’s federal agencies.

“Wait, what?” you may ask. You’re not alone. Many Americans hardly registered this development, which seemed to reflect the Trump administration’s wary approach towards immigrants.

Some organizations, such as the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) disapproved, noting that 67 million Americans speak a language other than English in the home. “While there is little doubt that English proficiency is valuable for communication and economic opportunity,” an ACTFL statement read, “policies that formally elevate one language at the expense of others fail to recognize the rich linguistic diversity that has long been a strength of our nation.”

Trump’s Executive Order is not law, has only limited power, and can be repealed by subsequent administrations. So, is English actually the official language of the United States? The correct answer just may be... maybe. It is at least the *lingua franca.

Word on the Street

Meanwhile, dismaying verbal tics keep hitchhiking their way into American English. Words like “you know” and such hateful locutions as the word “like” dropped into the beginning of sentences. “Like, you know,” etc., etc. Not to mention obscenities, which you rarely, if ever, hear in normal conversation in France. In the US, and even in its media, the “F word” and its unpleasant relatives seem to float in the air, carrying a distinct feeling of ambient hostility along with them.

So, there are far worse linguistic crimes than the dreaded faux amis. In fact, these seem tame in comparison. No one, after all, has been injured by incorrectly using the French verb “injurer” – which to anglophone ears sounds like causing physical harm, while to native speakers it just means insulting them with words.

Proper English itself, on the other hand, looks increasingly vulnerable to both insult and to injury. It definitely seems in need of some TLC. Perhaps it’s time to take a few lessons from the French?

*Lingua franca: A language that is adopted as a common language among speakers whose native languages are different.

Penelope Rowlands is a journalist and the author of six books. She learned persnickety French – up to and including the dreaded ne explétif – at the Paris flagship of the Alliance Française. For more about her work, follow her on LinkedIn or visit her website here. Penelope is a member of the Anglo-American Press Association of Paris.

When François-Joseph-Paul, Comte de Grasse, Marquis de Grasse-Tilly, an admiral in the French Navy, set sail with his fleet on March 22, 1781, they had a long journey ahead of them. Bound for American waters, to join General George Washington and French General Rochambeau, who were conspiring to beat the English, they would eventually anchor in May in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) – more than 4,000 miles away.

During this epic voyage, in his case on board a multi-storied ship called La Ville de Paris, he and his crews needed to eat. And, as his reputation for bravery and professional skill would suggest, he viewed proper nutrition as an important element in his new expedition, upon which rested the fate of the struggling American colonies.

Admiral de Grasse was an aristocrat, as were many French ship captains at the time. The position was one of the various rewards the king could dole out in exchange for what the nobles could give. History tells us that, for the most part, these noblemen were not qualified to plan, steer, fight, lead, or do much more than demand and argue, but Admiral de Grasse was an exception.

An excellent mariner and tactician with much experience, he also took care of his crews. They were Frenchmen, after all, and even on the open seas, the admiral was honor-bound to respect French law. And that included adhering to the legal requirement of ensuring that each crew member had three meals a day, the equivalent of around 3,000-3,500 calories, considered the minimum to keep up their strength.

Live Cows and Ducks, Beans, Cheese…

The journey from France to the Americas could last anything from a matter of weeks to several months, depending on the weather. So, the food had to last.

His ships leaving the continent were laden with nourishment, from thousands of pounds of “hardtack” (unsalted, teeth-breaking biscuits that turned tender when vermin nibbled them into crumbs, which, if the crumb measured the equivalent of an inch, was still considered food) to rounds of Dutch cheeses and Gruyère, flat planks of salt cod and Irish salted beef, salt pork, air-cured hams and sausages, and vats of fermented cabbage.

Sacks of pulses – from peas to beans – were stashed near buckwheat groats and lentils. There were barrels of fresh water mixed with vinegar to keep it palatable, and others of cider, ale, and wine.

When he set sail from Saint-Domingue for the Chesapeake, food supplies were augmented with, it can be imagined, live goats and chickens, probably coffee, and definitely barrels of rum. Provender for this journey would also have included – along with the ubiquitous hardtack – molasses and rice, sugar cane and chocolate, and pineapples, bananas, guavas, and soursops.

“À Table!” (or “Dinner’s Ready!”)

However, the meals would have been French cuisine through and through – ragouts and soups, pea and bean purées, fish stews, lightened up, one can conjecture, with the bright flavors of the Caribbean such as peppers and ginger.

And while research and hearsay lead one to believe the food was infecté (terrible) aboard ship, perhaps for a few weeks or short months, at least, it would have reflected some well-established French regional dishes.

Imagine giant bowls of Brandade de Morue, a garlic-laden purée of salt cod and olive oil; choucroute (pickled cabbage, which was loaded with vitamin C) topped with salted and cured meats; Boeuf Bourguignon and Pot-au-Feu from the center of France; soups of split peas and beans seasoned with smoked pork; perhaps even a version of Cassoulet. It is said mariners had time to fish, and so there might have been huge pots of fish stew seasoned with bay leaves, brought along to keep the flies away, and grilled sardines or mackerel.

You Are What You Eat

Whatever the French mariners ate before and during that decisive Battle of the Chesapeake on September 5, 1781, de Grasse and his men routed the British fleet from the Bay, setting the stage for the American victory at Yorktown six weeks later. Here is a recipe that might have been part of the key to success:

BRANDADE DE MORUE

6 to 8 servings

INGREDIENTS:

For the toasts (optional):

• 4 thin slices of good-quality white bread, crusts removed, each cut into 4 pieces on the diagonal

• ¾ cup (7g) flat-leaf parsley leaves

For the brandade:

• 1 pound (500g) skinless and boneless salt cod

• 1 cup (250ml) milk

• 1 cup (250ml) extra-virgin olive oil

• 4 large cloves garlic

• ½ teaspoon grated nutmeg

• 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

• Freshly ground black pepper

• 4 slices bread, toasted, and rubbed with 1 clove garlic

• ¼ cup oil-cured black olives

METHOD:

1. This step is for an optional garnish of toasts. Line a plate with a double layer of paper towels. Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat. When the oil shimmers, add the toasts and fry until they are golden, which will take a minute or two, then flip until golden on the other side. Mince the parsley and put it in a shallow bowl. When the toasts are golden, using tongs, remove them from the oil, letting any excess oil drip into the pan. Dip one edge of each toast into the parsley, then set the toasts on the prepared plate, and reserve.

2. Soak the cod in plenty of cold water, changing the water several times, for one to two days.

3. Drain the cod. Place it in a saucepan and add cold water to cover. Bring the water to a boil over high heat, reduce the heat to medium and cook, simmering, until the cod is translucent through, about 10 minutes. Drain the cod. When it is cool enough to handle, break it into flakes, discarding any skin or bones.

4. Scald the milk in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. At the same time, heat the olive oil in a small saucepan over medium heat, until hot but not smoking.

5. Place the cod and the garlic in the bowl of a food processor. With the machine running, add the hot oil in a thin stream. Pulse on and off, so the cod isn’t over-beaten. When the oil is incorporated and the mixture is quite smooth, slowly add the milk in a thin stream, pulsing on and off to avoid over mixing the brandade. It should be light, white, and fluffy – like pudding.

6. Add the nutmeg and the lemon juice to the brandade; pulse one to two times. Season with pepper. Scrape the brandade into a shallow serving bowl, mounding it in the center.

7. Cut the toast into triangles. To serve, arrange the toast triangles with a point up, around the base of the brandade. Garnish with the olives and serve immediately.

On a recent Thursday evening, the crowds outside the wine bar Cave Canaille, in the 11^th arrondissement of Paris, spilled out into the street. Buses and vespas honked their way past vast swaths of mostly young customers who ignored the sweltering heat to enjoy macerated Alsatian Riesling and chilled Loire Gamay.

Anyone who thinks that French wine culture is dying should try to get a table at a decent, wine-forward restaurant in eastern Paris – say, Le Baratin or Lissit – on a Thursday night. While many legacy wineries across the country are undeniably struggling with severe crises, the most ambitious wine bars and restaurants have become international destinations, and buyers from Japan and the United States are willing to pay record-high sums for artisan natural wines.

Perfect Storm, New Trends

Nationwide, a perfect storm has hit French wine. Demand has been shrinking, tariffs and shifting geopolitics are wreaking havoc on global exports, and climate change is destroying harvests.

Despite this, artisanal wine makers, from the hills of Languedoc to the mountains of Ardèche, are producing radical wines with integrity and personality, attracting wine lovers from all over the world who increasingly plan entire vacations around France based on the regions they want to explore. Along Canal Saint-Martin, arguably the social heart of contemporary Paris, summer evenings unfurl with hundreds of people sharing bottles of wine on the stone quays, legs dangling just above the murky water.

The crowds flocking to new wine bars and niche wine shops do not just reflect superficial trends, but rather a new golden era of eccentric French wine-making that coexists with the wider decline in the commercial wine industry, according to the author and wine critic Alicia Dorey.

“I think there has never been a better time to drink wine in France,” Dorey says when we meet at Willi’s Wine Bar in central Paris to make sense of these contradictions.

Dorey does not deny that the challenges facing the current wine industry are real. Overall, domestic wine consumption in France has nearly halved, from more than 40 million hectolitres in the 1970s to about 24 million now, according to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine. To address shrinking demand and overproduction, the French government has begun to permanently uproot more than 80,000 acres nationwide, with Bordeaux wineries representing almost half. Growers receive a grant per hectare with no replanting allowed for at least six years.

The Champagne region is in its third straight year of decline, and in Bordeaux, global exports have plummeted. More than 100,000 jobs could be at risk, according to FranceAgriMer. Why has overall demand fallen?

Consumer Tastes are Changing

Dorey mentions a generational change in which young people today are more concerned with the health effects of drinking alcohol. The heavy reds of Bordeaux have been hit particularly hard by this consumer shift. But there are also global factors involved. Internationally, wine consumption fell to a 60-year low in 2024.

For many decades, China was a major buyer of expensive Bordeaux and Burgundy. But since the country launched a big nationwide anti-corruption campaign, many local officials, once the biggest spenders on French legacy estates, tend now to be in jail or relieved of their expense accounts. According to Wine Spectator, Bordeaux exports to China have fallen from 72 million cases to under 22 million in just a few years.

The globalization of the premium wine market has also exposed French legacy producers to more international competition, where great wines can often be found for lower prices. But much of the decline in French domestic drinking is also due to the fact that wine is no longer drunk like water at the French dining table.

People are more likely to make informed decisions on what to drink now, and this hurts the mass producers of cheap box wines in Bordeaux or Provence, while it actually helps many of the artisan wine makers who work with integrity and passion to create unique wines with strong personalities. In a way, Dorey suggests, we are seeing a shift from quantity to quality.

This can result in a number of increasingly absurd contradictions in French wine culture. While legacy wineries in Bordeaux and Champagne suffer through existential crises, cult winemakers and distributors in Bourgogne and Loire can “drive around in Lamborghinis,” says Dorey. Their sales have grown in tandem with increased demand from wine nerds in Tokyo, Copenhagen, and California, who crave sought-after natural wines from makers like Overnoy and Ganevat over legacy brands.

The shift is also visible in domestic wine auctions. Whereas organic and biodynamic wines make up only two percent of French wine production, they now account for almost a third of sales at French auctions, according to iDealwine’s Auction Barometer. This shift in demand has not just changed the progressive wine bars of eastern Paris but also many legacy institutions around the country.

Funky vs Conventional

“At one point, you had this huge split between very extreme, funky, natural wine and the very conventional ones with a lot of chemicals and chaptalization [added sugar to increase the alcohol content],” Dorey continues. “But now, there is a kind of convergence between the two worlds. The funky wines understand that they might need to make more straight, clean wines, as people become more knowledgeable about wine. But the most conservative, conventional wine makers also understand that chemicals and pesticides are not the future.”

This is noticeable in many of the more renowned restaurants and wine cellars in Paris, where sommeliers have embraced more radical, organic wines.

“There is a new generation of sommelier now,” Dorey explains. “For instance, the sommelier of Le Bristol – they have a huge wine list – and when he arrived, he said, ‘Oh, in 10 years, half of the cellar will be natural wines.’ But he knows that it’s not like funky people at Le Bristol, so he has very straightforward, very delicate, nice natural wines.”

Americans also play a surprisingly benevolent role in this shift, Dorey says. While you can still find the stereotypical, culturally ignorant American tourist in certain parts of Paris, the city also attracts an increasing amount of well-informed American consumers who deliberately seek out progressive, ambitious wine bars, far from the obvious tourist traps.

The owner of a popular wine-focused restaurant in Belleville tells me that whenever someone calls to make a reservation several weeks in advance, she assumes they are Americans. Parisians tend to be more spontaneous with their dining choices, whereas an increasing number of American visitors plan their entire trips around wine cellars, choosing hotels based on the neighborhood dining and drinking scene.

These customers don’t just bring much-needed revenue to more adventurous wine makers in France, they increasingly shape the currents of the whole wine market. Knowledgeable and passionate American wine nerds have already reshaped the wine culture in New York and California to a point where they also shape the trends for the French wine scene.

“I visit New York at least twice a year, and the wine culture there is just amazing now,” adds Dorey. “They increasingly set the trends that arrive in France one or two years later.”

Thomas Jefferson and French Wine

Of course, the American love affair with French wine goes back to the dawn of the founding of their republics.

The famously francophile Thomas Jefferson sustained an extensive correspondence with French wineries, including the esteemed Beaune wine merchant Étienne Parent, who guided him through Burgundy and became his personal wine buyer. After serving as the minister to France in 1785-1789, Jefferson became particularly fond of Meursault and Montrachet, Chambertin, and Volnay. He personally visited many of the venerable Bordeaux wineries and often kept cases of Château d’Yquem in his cellar at Monticello, non-controversially calling it “the best white wine of France.” At one point, Jefferson ordered 250 bottles of the allegedly great 1784 vintage.

The convivial Benjamin Franklin fittingly preferred champagne and sparkling Mousseux, and once wrote, possibly after a couple of glasses, that every rainfall over the vineyards of France was “a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”

Martin Gelin worked as a US correspondent for European media for two decades and moved to Paris in 2024. He writes regularly for Dagens Nyheter and The Guardian, and lectures globally on soft power and geopolitics. His new book, Rules of Attraction: Why Soft Power Matters in Hard Times, will be published in more than 20 countries in 2027. He is President of the Anglo-American Press Association of Paris.

What is a flâneuse?

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a flâneuse (or flâneur if a man) is someone who “walks around not doing anything in particular but watching people and society.”

Everyone loves Paris, right? Tourists, especially, are justifiably enchanted by boats on the Seine, lovers kissing on its bridges, cafés where people seem to pass a great deal of time hanging out, and in general the French lifestyle.

I’m on board with that!

However, my perspective is a teeny bit different now that I have lived here for (gasp) half a century. Paris is the backdrop of my daily life, which is not about visiting monuments and museums but about… grocery shopping, making doctors’ appointments, dealing with the kids’ schools (no small task in France), and doing all those things we do in our “real life.” In other words, Paris stopped being a tourist destination for me long ago, as I carved out the life I most probably would have had in the States (marriage, children, work, social life).

All this is to explain (and please forgive me) why I am sometimes irritated by all those starry-eyed visitors. I know this sounds positively obnoxious, so I will take it to its obvious conclusion: I am jealous! I am jealous of these people who have nothing but the pleasure of being here and don’t have to worry about fitting in or even understanding everything.

Lost in Translation

It is wonderful not to understand what is going on around you. Unless their French is perfect, that is the case of visitors and even new residents who are seeing the pageant of French life unfold like a movie without the sound. I am not saying that is bad. After all, we can’t learn every language in the world; however, if you plan to settle permanently, it’s best to hone your language skills.

Like so many, I thought the French were so perfect and romantic – until I had finally mastered the language enough to understand a real conversation. I remember the moment. We were in a hidden-away mountain village in Corsica when I heard two women calling out to each other from their windows. I perked up my ears and proudly caught the gist of the conversation, which was definitely not philosophical. No, they were talking about… social security benefits.

That was a breakthrough. The spell was broken.

At the same time, I was empowered. Now, Harriet the Spy could actually spy! Other than my American accent, nothing (okay, maybe my nice smiling American face) gives away the fact that I can understand everything around me.

To put jealousy aside, let’s be kinder and just say that I am no longer a tourist. Paris is not a once-in-a-lifetime trip or even a frequent trip. It is my home.

Doing it by the Book

I shouldn’t gripe about people being smitten with and fascinated by Paris. In all modesty, I am partly responsible for the multitude of books about fitting into France, falling in love with a Frenchman, buying a country home, etc. Peter Mayle, an Englishman married to an Englishwoman, was one of the first with his bestselling blockbuster, A Year in Provence. They loved France and had a home here.

I don’t know how “integrated” they were, but I do know that when I read the book that amused the entire world, I also laughed. At the same time, I remember thinking that he was treating his French neighbors and workers as little stick people. I wondered if his French adventures would have been so funny had he understood “who people are” and “what they are saying.”

Why? In France, you always need to be aware of whom you are talking to (the pecking order). You need to listen to the way they speak to determine whether they are uneducated, highly educated, or somewhere in between, on the Left or on the Right. It’s all very complicated – so much so that for a long time when Philippe and I attended parties, I would ask him afterwards about the social class of the people we had met. In a country where revolutionaries cut off the head of the king and social class counts, this is important.

Lessons in Love

All the things that gradually revealed French people to me in their complexity and variety came about because of living with a Frenchman and speaking the language. I am definitely not seeing the movie without the sound.

That is the reason I wrote French Toast, a compendium of all my new-found knowledge. It was fresh and sassy, and as I wrote, I realized I had a lot to learn.

To reassure my readers: I am not a perpetual curmudgeon. I may gripe a lot, but that’s because I’ve become like the French, for whom disagreeing and criticizing is seen as positive. Nonetheless, I am enchanted almost daily.

So, I will share with you below a little list of my Likes and Dislikes.

I LIKE:

• Walking out the door and heading to my favorite café, whether in my neighborhood or another.

• Spending time in that café, writing or phoning or dreaming. It’s hard to do that in the States.

• Living in beauty. I do not live in the most beautiful arrondissement but we are privileged to have our own private yard complete with grass, trees, and plants. In any case, beauty is everywhere in this city, including in my neighborhood. Just down the street from us is Saint-Germain de Charonne, a church that dates from the 12^th century and is the parish church of many of our neighbors. I am fascinated by the idea of attending religious services as a matter of course in an 800-year-old monument.

I DISLIKE:

• Cyclists – I do not mind, and even applaud, the city’s move to get rid of cars in the center (although they clog up and pollute the streets elsewhere). I do mind the total lack of impunity of cyclists as they careen down the street and through red lights. They are a danger for old people, parents with babies, and small children.

• Horrid urban furnishing – huge plastic flowerpots, unaesthetic benches, and untended street gardens. Hope is on the horizon: things got so bad under the outgoing Mayor that the new one has appointed an “aesthetics czar” to do away with the worst abuses. City Hall claims the job is done. Proof that it is not is in the picture below.

• Dirty streets – let’s face it. Other than the tourist areas, which are basically impeccable, the rest has gone to pot. Even in beautiful Paris, there are areas where empty bottles and trash litter the sidewalks. Parisians often complain about that, as they should.

You may have guessed by now that I do love Paris. I love Paris in the springtime, I love Paris in the fall, I do not love Paris in winter, and, very rarely, I do not love Paris at all!

Harriet Welty Rochefort grew up in the American Midwest, came to France via freighter after college, and stayed. A freelance journalist, professor of journalism and author of several books about Franco-American cultural differences, she lives in Paris with her French husband, Philippe. She is a member of the Anglo-American Press Association of Paris. You can find her writing on Substack at harrietinparis.substack.com

When I began doing my research for this article on Bastille Day, the first thing I did was to Google it, as you do, to make sure I had all my French history in order. In doing so, one of the top questions in the “People also ask” section brought a wry smile to my face: “Is Bastille Day a big deal in France?”

For the avoidance of any doubt, I can confirm that, yes, July 14^th is indeed a big deal. Officially called “La Fête Nationale” (France’s national day of celebration), Bastille Day is one of the biggest deals.

Turning the Tides of History

The origins of Bastille Day date back to July 14^th, 1789, and the “storming of the Bastille.” Originally a medieval fortress built between 1370 and 1380 under the rule of Charles V, the building later became a royal prison, often used to house political dissidents. By the late 18^th century, with the Age of Enlightenment, the Bastille had grown to represent what the people hated about the court and its aristocratic consorts, who were also blamed for the food shortages and high taxes at the time.

So, when an angry mob descended on the prison in search of gunpowder – and freed the prisoners inside in the process – this act of defiance came to symbolize the start of the French Revolution. In actual fact, there were only seven inmates left by that stage, as the prison had fallen largely out of use. Nonetheless, the attack on this emblem of power would mark the beginning of the end for the ancien régime.

To give an idea of the depth of feeling among the people, the man who negotiated the surrender of the prison, its governor, Bernard-René Jordan de Launay, was attacked by the crowd and beheaded. For good measure, his head was then put on a pike and paraded through the city. A number of guards and many of the attackers also lost their lives that day.

One year later, to mark the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, a “Fête de la Fédération” was held on the Champ-de-Mars. This time, however, the day was all about celebrating national unity. The political force behind the event was none other than Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, recently returned from America, where his involvement was instrumental in helping George Washington win independence for the colonies from Britain.

By 1880, lawmakers declared that the events of this auspicious date – in both 1789 and 1790 – should not be forgotten. Ever since, July 14^th has been a day devoted to celebrating the nation.

Fabulous fireworks displays

Today, of course, Bastille Day is commemorated far and wide with festivities the length and breadth of the country. Notably, this is the time when the skies all over France are lit up by spectacular fireworks displays.

Here in Paris, there is a major military parade along the Champs-Élysées, a symphony concert, and the country’s most famous fireworks display of all. Even for those who are not into patriotic rah-rah, watching showers of colored sparks rain down around the Eiffel Tower is quite something.

This year’s event also marks another, more somber, anniversary. It’s 10 years since the Bastille Day terrorist attack in Nice, which left 86 victims dead and hundreds wounded. In a gesture of respect for all those affected, July 14^th itself will be devoted entirely to remembrance, and the capital’s famed fireworks display will take place the evening before.

Adding Some Sizzle to the Celebrations

A lesser-known but exceedingly and increasingly popular side of the celebrations is the “Bals des Pompiers” (Firefighters’ Balls). Legend has it that the dancing dates back to 1937, when a bunch of firemen in Montmartre decided to continue the Bastille Day festivities at their base.

Since then, these balls have become a firm fixture at many fire stations, making it the one time of the year when everyone gets to party together (though, naturally, there is always a crew on standby for any emergencies). In the lead-up, firefighters can often be spotted selling tickets in the street outside, usually for a nominal fee, and some of the events are free – though donations are often welcome.

For anyone not in Paris for Bastille Day, the event is marked not only across the country but in many other locations around the world. For example, one of the biggest celebrations in North America happens, of all places, in downtown Milwaukee. This four-day festival even features a 43-foot-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower. So, it’s not necessary to be in France (or to behead someone) to join the party on Bastille Day.

_{The “Bals des Pompiers” (Firefighters’ Balls) are an opportunity for everyone to party together
[video © Elaine Cobbe]}

Caroline Harrap is a freelance journalist, editor, and trainer based in Paris. Her writing has been featured in France Today, The Guardian, and BBC Travel, among others, and she is a copy editor for the Louis Vuitton City Guide collection. Beyond her editorial work, Caroline is a co-director of the Society of Freelance Journalists, a committee member at the Paris branch of the National Union of Journalists, and a mentor for the journalism undergraduate program at Birmingham City University. She is also a member of the Anglo-American Press Association of Paris.

It would be easy to blame the 18^th-century queen of France, Marie-Antoinette, and her penchant for outrageously tall and often-feathered headgear, for the surge in demand for bird feathers. As the era’s chief fashion influencer, the queen set the trends for her court and aristocratic hangers-on. But it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution created a growing middle class, with disposable income and social ambitions, that wearing feathers became a popular status symbol. That spike in demand increased the number of Parisian plumassiers – artisans who fashioned feathers for haute-couture masterpieces for wealthy clients – from around 25 in the late 18^th century to hundreds just a century later.

This fashion frenzy for feathers wreaked havoc on birds. Many Great and Snowy Egrets, with their delicate spray of breeding feathers, were killed for the stunning plumage they naturally grew to attract mates during breeding season. Colonies of thousands of adult birds were killed on site, leaving four to six abandoned chicks per nest, endangering future generations, and paving the way to extinction.

To give just one example, according to the scientific journal The Auk, rookeries in Florida were empty and silent by 1887 – a drastic and ominous change from the raucous cacophony of bird calls from thousands of nests (such as in the video below of the rookery at Little St. Simons Island, Georgia, USA). Birds were disappearing globally at an alarming rate.

^{[video: Scott Coleman]}

An Unlimited Market

Still the trade grew. Feathers and bird skins from common and exotic species were imported in wholesale quantities from around the world to feed fashion’s demands. London was the epicenter of this trade that decimated dozens of species including grebes, terns, parrots, manakins, albatross, and even condors. Iridescent hummingbirds, taken from South America by the tens of thousands, were taxidermized and fastened whole onto women’s hats.

While feathers may have been lightweight, the market for them was anything but. Historian Malcolm Smith notes that at the end of the 19^th century, the London feather trade was worth £20 million a year (approximately £2.5 billion/$3.35 billion today) representing at least 200 million birds killed annually worldwide. Economic ornithologist Herbert K. Job wrote that in 1902 a single London auction house sold 48,240 ounces of feathers, equal to 192,960 egrets killed at their nests plus two to three times that number of eggs or chicks. Worth twice their weight in gold by 1903, feathers became the trophy of a deadly global trade.

Evolving in isolation, the refined, specialized feathers of Birds-of-paradise exclusive to Papua New Guinea were the rarest and most coveted. Between 1905 and 1920, 30,000 to 80,000 of these skins were exported annually to Europe, bringing the birds to the brink of extinction. Zoologist William T. Hornaday mentioned this silence, writing in 1913 of a colleague’s comment: “One can now walk miles … through the former haunts of these birds [of paradise] without seeing or hearing even the commonest species.”

The Tide Turns

The 19^th century also saw a growing appreciation of nature, Victorian concern for animal welfare, and women’s reform movements combined with the realization that nature wasn’t unlimited. As news spread about the scope and cruelty of the feather trade in the 1890’s, women such as Emily Williamson in Britain and Harriet Hemenway in the US mobilized against the slaughter.

By the 1920’s, laws in Europe and North America restricted feather importation. The French fashion industry resisted restricting its luxury fashion tradition until 1978 when it ratified the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) framework.

Though the feather trade helped push Carolina Parakeets and Great Auks to extinction, generations of protection show results: some species, including Great Egrets and Raggiana Birds-of-paradise, are no longer endangered.

While fashion still has advocates for real feathers and animal products, increasing concern for nature and animal welfare is driving demand for sustainable alternatives. Today, innovative designs using faux fur, plant-based leather, synthetic faux feathers, and laser-cut textiles that mimic the beauty, vibrant colors, and movement of natural plumage are readily available. This has helped to create a new world of style for modern fashionistas valuing ethical alternatives that respect and are inspired by nature.

For more information:

• In England, in 1889, Emily Williamson founded what became the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

• In the US in 1896, Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall formed the Massachusetts Audubon Society; in 1905, the National Audubon Society was established.

• In France, in 1912, a conservation organization that was formed after Atlantic Puffins were decimated in the Sept-Îles archipelago by feather traders and puffin-hunting tours became the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux (LPO).

• In 1922, these organizations coordinated international action addressing various issues, including the feather trade, and founded the International Committee for Bird Protection (ICBP) – now Birdlife International.

Deborah Rivel is an award-winning wildlife filmmaker; co-author of bird-finding book Birdwatching in New York City and on Long Island and owner of streaming nature sounds WildTones.com. She serves on the Audubon CT/NY and Friends of BirdLife International boards, and on the BirdLife Advisory Group, and founded a volunteer group which monitors beach-nesting birds. Deb travels extensively photographing birds and wildlife, and works to engage and inspire people to experience and protect nature.

Where can one find a plaque indicating the location of the Salle du Manège, where the Constituent Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, and the National Convention successively sat?

QUESTION 2

Where did Vladimir Lenin live during his stay in Paris from 1908 to 1910?
[hint: find part of the answer in this article]

QUESTION 3

What pleasant dental memory is associated with the Place des États-Unis?

From Connaissez-vous Paris? (Do You know Paris?) by Raymond Queneau, present edition published by Editions Gallimard, 2011.

The main thrust of the city’s crackdown on the sudden housing shortage has been to reduce the number of holiday lets and make the business less attractive to property owners.

Local taxes and social charges have also increased, in a bid to encourage more owners to return the properties to long-term rentals.

Property manager Gail Boisclair, who runs Perfectly Paris has seen the rental market change but is not convinced that current measures can really solve the housing crisis nor reduce overtourism.

For Paris residents, the average monthly rental for an unfurnished apartment is €40 per m² but that can vary between €35 and €52 per m² depending on the arrondissement. Depending on what kind of lease a vacation rental owner uses, they can ask considerably more for short-stay lets.

When he was running for office, the new mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire promised to go after owners of buildings deliberately left empty for part or all of the year. These include secondary residences, apartments used for vacation lets, but also entire buildings owned by large companies who deliberately leave them empty, secure in the knowledge that the value of the building will increase, even without any rental income.

Boisclair believes going after those companies would do more to increase the long-term housing offer than driving out people who have a secondary home in Paris that they let occasionally to tourists.

One of Grégoire’s promises that both Boisclair and Béatrice Dunner of the Association for the Defense of Montmartre believe is imperative, is a move to protect smaller shops and businesses from the open rental market, where big chains or luxury brands can afford to pay more and thus push up prices, driving out local grocery shops, hardware stores or bookshops.

Reporting from Paris reached out to City Hall for comment but had received no reply at time of publication.

Krishnan Narayanan, Chairman and Partner in SkiesFifty, an investment firm dedicated to sustainability in the aviation industry, spoke with Reporting from Paris Editor in Chief Shellie Karabell about developments in sustainable aviation.

Shellie Karabell has spent more than 40 years in broadcast journalism as a news executive, anchor, producer, and field reporter in her native USA, Europe, the USSR/Russia and the Middle East for ABC/WTN, PBS, Dow Jones Broadcast, CNBC, and Forbes.com. She has covered some of the major news events of the 20^th century: the release of the American hostages from Iran in 1981; the collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989); civil wars in Lebanon (1983) and Yugoslavia (1991-92), and USSR/Russia (1986- present). She is currently VP of the Anglo American Press Association of Paris (President 2022-2025).

The main thrust of the city’s crackdown on the sudden housing shortage has been to reduce the number of holiday rentals, thus making the business less attractive to property owners. Anyone wanting to stay in the tourism rental field in Paris has to either set up a rental business (which comes with the traditional weight of French bureaucracy) or maintain a non-professional landlord/lady status (which limits the number of days per annum that the property can rent, and limits how much can be earned).

Local taxes and social charges have also increased, in a bid to encourage more owners to return the properties to long-term rentals.

Property manager Gail Boisclair of PerfectlyParis.com has seen the rental market change but is not convinced that current measures can really solve the housing crisis nor reduce overtourism.

For Paris residents, the average monthly rental for an unfurnished apartment is €40/m² but that can vary between €35 and €52 per m2 depending on the arrondissement. Depending on what kind of lease vacation rental owners use, they can ask considerably more for short-stay lets.

_{What do tourists think of the crowds? Edie Twells-Eastwood went and asked.}

When he was running for office, the new mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, promised to go after absentee owners of buildings deliberately left empty for part or all of the year. These include secondary residences, apartments used for vacation rentals, but also entire buildings owned by large companies who deliberately leave them empty, secure in the knowledge that the value of the building will increase, even without any rental income.

Boisclair believes going after those companies would do more to increase the long-term housing offer than driving out people who have a secondary home in Paris that they occasionally let to tourists.

One of Grégoire’s promises, which both Boisclair and Beatrice Dunner of the Association for the Defense of Montmartre believe is imperative, is a move to protect smaller shops and businesses from the open rental market, where big chains or luxury brands can afford to pay more and thus push up prices, driving out local grocery shops, hardware stores or bookshops.

Elaine Cobbe is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist based in Paris. A former foreign correspondent with CBS News, she has covered many of the major international stories of the past three decades, including the conflicts in Iraq, Kosovo, and Rwanda, and terror attacks in Paris, Brussels, and Barcelona. A regular commentator on French and international politics for news outlets in France and her native Ireland, she is also a researcher and trainer in journalism and trauma. Elaine is a committee member of the Anglo-American Press Association of Paris.

[videographer/editor: Celine Marchand]

International travelers continue to flock to Europe, attracted by the history, the architecture, the culture, the scenery and, in many countries, the cuisine. Europeans themselves are also more likely to choose another European destination for their vacations or weekends away. All that adds up to a booming business – and some serious inconveniences for the locals.

According to the final report from EU Tourism Day, (held January 26, 2026, in Brussels) the 27 EU countries welcomed approximately 625 million international tourists from January–September 2025, an increase of some 4 percent from in the same period in 2024. But as welcome as tourism income may be, rising visitor levels also bring additional costs to host countries for services such as cleanup, law enforcement, and crowd control, not to mention repairs to property damage in over-charged locations.

The Tourist Menace

It’s called overtourism, and it is public enemy number one in areas where tourists flood a city, outnumber locals, and sometimes leave their manners and good judgment at home.

Overtourism crowds the streets, the restaurants, the shops. City officials complain that rental platforms such as Airbnb remove private accommodation from the housing market, constraining availability and pushing up prices for both renters and buyers. Tourists partying into the wee hours in the apartment they’ve rented in an “authentic” residential area are doing no favors to the working guy downstairs who has to be at his desk by 9am. When the local household goods store turns into yet another perfume boutique, where does one go to buy an iron?

For the EU, the tourism challenge is no longer attracting visitors but managing tourism and its growth in a way that works for destinations, visitors, and inhabitants alike. Discouraging travel isn’t the answer.

For one thing, short of an emergency – such as Covid and its lockdown periods – telling tourists to stay away hasn’t worked, as the tourist numbers in this article will attest! Instead, Tourism Day officials emphasized the importance – with the help of technology – of redirecting and managing demand so that tourists are encouraged to consider other seasons, regions, sights, and experiences.

The Tourist Day report suggests that metrics -- relevance, resilience, environmental stewardship, and cultural vitality -- are more important than raw numbers (such as counting arrivals) in ranking success or failure and recommends shifting the emphasis to evaluating the impact tourists have on places they visit.

The “right visitors,” opine the writers of the Tourist Day report, is not a matter of money or whether tourists arrive in a bus or a chartered plane. Instead, the “right visitors” are those who value the cultural richness, environmental sensitivity, and social context of the places they explore. (The full Tourist Day event recording is available here.)

In our special coverage, Reporting from Paris visits Montmartre, one of the most popular areas in the city, talks with tourists all over the city and looks at how four European cities are trying to cope.