Tim Reuter

Tim Reuter, Contributor


1/24/2014 @ 8:00AM |3,758 views

How American Expatriates In Paris Built The United States

Ever since Frederick Jackson Turner announced the closing of the frontier in 1893, Americans have revered the pioneers. Countless pieces of literature and art immortalize the frontiersmen as the vanguard of civilization that helped spread democracy and capitalism across North America. The 1872 painting American Progress is probably the most famous depiction of the archetypal American, a rugged-individualist who despises big government and answers only to God.

This is an incomplete picture at best. The settlement of western lands did drive democratic expansion and economic development. However, the west was not the sole frontier. As David McCullough states in his excellent work, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, “not all pioneers went west.” Some voyaged to Europe in search of, and returned home with, intellectual capital.

McCullough’s chronicle of some of the thousands of Americans, mostly men, who visited Paris in the Nineteenth Century, is a good read. He sketches portraits of famous Americans, such as Samuel Morse (the inventor of the electric telegraph) and Charles Sumner (a leading abolitionist), when they were young and hungry. They arrived in France “ambitious to excel in work that mattered greatly to them, and they saw time in Paris… as essential to achieving that dream.”

The first Americans to land in France in the 1830s were an eclectic group; medical students, artists, and writers. They were also very talented. Samuel Morse, Charles Sumner, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and James Fennimore Cooper counted among the first wave. But at that time, almost all of them were unknown. They went to Paris to “study hard” as the painter George Healy stated. Even Cooper, already famous for his novel The Last of the Mohicans, shared his cohorts’ emphasis on work. He wrote eight novels during his seven years abroad.

The U.S. was better for their efforts. It was alongside black students at the Sorbonne that Sumner first discerned the lies undergirding America’s racial system. As he recorded in his journal in January 1838, “the distance between free blacks and whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things.”

Across the Seine, Morse chased his dream of becoming a painter. He worked tirelessly in the Louvre and his close-friend James Cooper provided moral support. But while a career in art did not materialize, Morse got an idea for an electric telegraph after he observed some primitive French models. According to Cooper, the idea became an obsession. It would also lead to “the annihilation of space” and change communications forever.

The chapter on “the medicals” exemplifies the intellectual capital brought home by expatriates. “Between 1830 and 1860 nearly seven hundred Americans came to Paris to study medicine,” and McCullough follows four of them; James Jackson Jr., Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Mason Warren, and Henry Bowditch. It is through their eyes as students at l’École de Médecine that the disparities between early American and European medicine are manifest.

As McCullough notes, “most aspiring physicians in America never attended medical school.” Only twenty-one schools existed in the U.S. in the 1830s, and they were poorly staffed with no more than five or six instructors. Most students learned by apprenticing under poorly trained practitioners. Moreover, arcane state laws restricted commerce in corpses, raised the cost of cadavers, and occasionally turned medical students into grave robbers.

By contrast, Paris was paradise. The library at the École contained 30,000 volumes where as New York’s College of Physicians and Surgeons had 1,200. Paris hospitals served tens of thousands every year whereas Massachusetts General Hospital treated less than a thousand annually. The École’s faculty lectured on various subjects and even allowed non-medical students to observe their rounds in the hospital.

The pace was frenetic. Holmes wrote to his father that he “never was so busy in my life.” Jackson absorbed everything he could: “not a day passes that I do not gain something new in itself or something old with renewed force.” Such enthusiasm for work made some French doctors “partial to American students.” The feelings were mutual. Jackson came to see Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis, the foremost expert on diseases of the chest, as a second father. And amid the cholera epidemic of 1832, Jackson became “the master’s favorite” apprentice.

This is not to say that medical education in France was perfect. Medicine was still in its infancy in the 1830s, and it showed. The absence of anesthesia made surgery an agonizing and dangerous proposition. By Jackson’s estimates, two-thirds of surgical patients later died from infection because sterilization did not exist. But ultimately, what mattered is what the students learned. They had long careers in America because of their knowledge gained abroad as much as natural skill.

After chronicling the first Americans in Paris, McCullough’s narrative roams through the Nineteenth Century. The reader encounters successive waves of expatriates who resided in a city undergoing radical changes. Some witnessed Paris’ modernization under Emperor Louis Napoleon and Georges Haussmann. Haussmann was a self-styled “demolition artist,” and he razed buildings and slums with impunity. In their places, he constructed wide boulevards to improve traffic flows (71 miles of road in total), created green spaces, and built new government buildings such as the Palace of Justice. Upon returning to Paris in the 1850s, Charles Sumner called the renovations “prodigious.”

The modernization of Paris is juxtaposed with the dark chapter of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) and the Paris Commune of 1871. In a notable find, McCullough uses the diary of Ambassador Elihu Washburne. The American diplomat stuck it out during the German siege, and his descriptions of the travails of war are horrifying: citizens eating cats, famous buildings on fire (the Palace of the Tuileries), and the army drowning the revolutionary commune in blood.

However, the chapters on high politics are an interlude. McCullough quickly switches back to the cultural arrivals after the war. The Americans who came in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century were, in a way, similar to the avant-garde of the 1920s. Augustus Saint-Gardens embarked for Paris as a penniless nineteen year-old and became a wealthy sculptor. The statue of Admiral David Farragut that stands in Madison Park in New York is among his best works. The painters Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent found validation abroad. Their Impressionist works won critical acclaim in 1879 as the movement was beginning to transform the art world.

The Greater Journey is more of a collection of chronicles than a cohesive story. McCullough did not necessarily set out to disprove the frontier myth that captivates the American consciousness. Instead, he pulls back the curtain on a forgotten truth. The United States grew rich because its people did not just cultivate land, but their individual talents.

In a subtle and unintentional way, McCullough made a powerful case for free trade. The exchange of ideas involved in trade is wrongly neglected. It matters as much as swaps of goods and services because knowledge is dispersed. No man can master everything about his own profession, let alone achieve omnipotence. But he can learn from others, and apply such knowledge in pursuits that may benefit humanity by removing unease from life.

When American expatriates returned home, they brought back knowledge that was unavailable in North America. But like the pioneers in the west, their experiences in Europe were formative for the United States. Many went on to distinguished careers in the arts, literature, medicine, and politics, and we still live on their intellectual capital today. Americans owe them, and the French, a great deal of gratitude.

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