Why the Expats Left Paris

[BTinSF]

Why the Expats Left Paris
The city once attracted American writers and artists looking for sanctuary. But the rest of the world turned into Paris, and Paris became more like everywhere else.
By DINAW MENGESTU
July 5, 2008; Page W1

In a picture taken in 1954 in front of the Café Tournon in Paris's chic sixth arrondissement, the writers and editors of the recently founded Paris Review are arranged in a human pyramid, with a row of casually dressed women sitting in chairs at the bottom and George Plimpton, the editor and co-founder, standing at the top with a slightly bemused, self-satisfied smile and a cigarette and what looks to be a glass of wine in his hand.


The writers and editors of the Paris Review, taken outside the Café de Tournon in late 1954 or early 1955. Front row, from left to right: Vilma Howard, poet; Jane Lougee, the publisher of Merlin; Muffy Wainhouse, the wife of Austryn Wainhouse; Jean Garrigue, poet.

Second row: Christopher Logue, poet and Merlin editor; Richard Seaver, editor of the Evergreen Review; Evan S. Connell, novelist; Niccolo Tucci, essayist and novelist; a lady known as "Gloria the Beautiful Cloak Model"; Michel van der Plats from the Dutch publication Het Vaderland; Peter Huyn, poet and editor; Alfred Chester, novelist and short story writer; Austryn Wainhouse, novelist and Merlin editor.

Top row: Paris Review editors Eugene Walter, George Plimpton and William Pène du Bois; James Broughton, film-maker; William Gardner Smith, novelist; Harold Witt, poet.

The photograph feels emblematic of what Parisian expatriate life must have been like in those heady postwar years: young, liberating and full of an intellectual vigor that was embodied in café life and the host of literary reviews that were springing up all across the Left Bank. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were holding their already famous philosophical debates at a table at the nearby Café de Flore. Richard Wright had arrived a few years earlier, as had Saul Bellow and a young, and relatively unknown and impoverished James Baldwin, who was living at the Hotel Verneuil, a cheap, slightly run-down hotel nearby.


Getty Images
The terrace of the Café de Flore, 1949.

For the past six months, I've been living roughly five minutes away from the Café Tournon, and the even more famous Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots -- the former epicenters of Parisian and American expatriate intellectual life. I went to the Tournon for lunch recently, with James Campbell's eloquent and aptly titled book "Exiled in Paris" tucked under my arm, curious to see if there was anything left of the café as it must have looked more than 50 years earlier when that picture was taken: when it was still possible to buy drugs in the little nook near the restrooms or have a chance encounter with one of the dozens of African-American writers and artists that had made Paris home following the end of World War II. It seems to almost go without saying now that I was the only American around.

Things have changed drastically in the last 55 years; the Café Tournon, along with the rest of St. Germain, has cleaned up its act, with a proper, well-appointed façade, an elegant but casual hardwood décor and a roundtable of leather chairs in the back. The former bohemian quarters of the Left Bank that were once home to even the poorest of writers have become the center of Paris's starry-eyed tourist trade, and the dollar has plummeted so far against the euro that what once seemed to be a semipermanent settlement of Americans, particularly writers and artists, has all but vanished. Recently while sitting outside of a café just off the Boulevard St. Germain I overheard an American woman remark to her two friends, "Eight dollars for a bottle of still water. Eight dollars," her voice not so much angry as baffled.


Writers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre in Saint Germain des Pres in Paris in the late 1950s. They held philosophical debates at a table at the Café de Flore.

It's hard if not inevitable now to think of that previous generation of writers and not romanticize them and their lives here a bit: to think of yourself sitting under a bright light at a table in the back of the elegant Café de Flore, in shouting distance of Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, or to have been on the terrace at the neighboring Les Deux Magots when James Baldwin and Richard Wright reportedly had a heated argument about an essay Baldwin had written excoriating Wright's "Native Son." Such events and conversations seem to belong exclusively to another era, one that was measured in francs instead of euros, when there wasn't an American Apparel store to be found just on the other side of the Boulevard St. Germain.


Author and playwright James Baldwin (center) stands between May Mercier (left) and pianist-singer Hazel Scott, while pianist-composer Memphis Slim stands behind them. The group was at a 1963 public demonstration in Paris supporting the civil rights movement's March on Washington.

What's really missing these days isn't just café literary life, but a palpable and vibrant American cultural life. As a friend who works for one of France's largest publishers pointed out to me, French writers, editors, publishers and journalists are still there at the major cafés and brasseries that have now become famous, and they're still talking about books and philosophy, perhaps with even the same degree of heady, intellectual rigor that Sartre would have done. And as if to prove the point even further, the major cafés of St. Germain -- Café de Flore, Les Deux Magots and Brasserie Lipp -- all have literary prizes, which come with money and their own individual perks ranging from complimentary Champagne to a large tab that can be used at the writer's discretion. In other words, books and literature in general are all still discussed and debated; there just happen to be no Americans around when they are.


A café in St Germain des Pres in 1951.

The absence of Americans is not a matter of sheer numbers. There are still almost as many Americans passing through Paris these days as in previous years. With the exception of a brief dip following the start of the war in Iraq and the branding of "freedom fries" in the nation's Capitol building, Americans have continued to arrive in droves. (The decline in fact was so notable that the French tourist industry launched a campaign targeted towards American tourists titled, "Let's Fall in Love Again.") You can still hear and see them standing outside of the famous cafés on the weekend, and for the average Parisian, the American tourist trade marches on unchecked. When I asked a group of friends over dinner whether they noticed that there were fewer Americans in Paris, the collective response from the table could be summed up as: Are you crazy? There are so many Americans here. And while they may have been right about the numbers, or the obvious presence which all tourists bring with them, it's hard not to believe that a certain type of long-standing love affair between Americans and the city hasn't in fact come to an end, that there's been a permanent departure that no advertisement campaign, however charming, can reverse.

Odile Hellier, the slightly petite, appropriately bespectacled, and at times effusively generous French owner of the English-language Village Voice bookstore in St. Germain des Prés remembers fondly her own version of the good old days in the early 1980s, when a strong American expatriate community created literary journals and reviews in Paris, the types of which hadn't really existed since the 1950s. In her cramped, white-walled and yet neatly ordered office at the back of the bookstore, whose selection can best be described as almost excessively literary in scope, she still keeps a bundle of notebooks with the names of writers and some of the journals they created in those days. The nostalgia in her voice, which is filled with a rarely heard type of passionate earnestness, almost goes without saying.

"So many," she says once, and then again two more times for emphasis, referring to both the Americans and the writers who once flocked here. "France still looked like a country where it was easy to live. The Village Voice took off because of that." The bookstore, like the Americans that initially helped sustain it, has been on the decline ever since, with a notable dip in sales that has continued unabated.

"For me, the community has exploded," and by exploded she means disintegrated.

Obviously a large part of that disintegration can be traced back to the dollar's rapid decline against the euro. If Baldwin and Wright were to sit down today to two cups of coffee on the terrace of Les Deux Magots to argue about an essay, their bill, without tip, would be almost $15. The decline in American life in Paris, however, can't be all about the dollar and its rise and fall. When Baldwin arrived in Paris in 1947, he arguably had less here in terms of financial and material support than he would have had he stayed in New York. He came regardless, following on the heels of Richard Wright. Both men, along with dozens of other African-American writers and artists, were fleeing America's divisive and often violent racism, and France, or Paris in particular, was in the midst of its long-running love affair with African-American culture, and jazz in particular, and seemed openly freer and more inviting than any place in America could ever be. A decade later, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William S. Burroughs would arrive in Paris seeking a similar relief, or freedom, from 1950s American society and culture.


Lonely Planet Images
The modern-day Café de Flore.

Since then America has grown up, both culturally and politically, expanding its civil-rights legislation to closer reflect its founding principles of equality, while at the same time shedding some of the cultural conservatism that in the late 1950s led to the prosecution of the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti for the publication of Ginsberg's drug- and sex-laden "Howl and Other Poems." As it's done so, inevitably the egalitarian appeal of Paris has declined with it. It's not just the Americans that the French miss, as much for economic as sentimental reasons to be sure, but the idea that France, and Paris in particular, was somehow markedly distinct and different from the United States and the rest of the world. If there's a nostalgia for the American presence that was once here, it's a nostalgia directly tied to the idea that Paris was once more open, more politically and culturally liberal and therefore easier to live and create in than most other cities. As Odile pointed out to me, following the birth of the euro and the subsequent rise in the cost of living, "France became more like the others," the others being the rest of the Western world, and America in particular, where commerce and not culture is the dominant social factor.

A recent walk along Boulevard St. Germain with a French book editor and friend quickly became an exercise in nostalgia as he tried to recall the names of some of the smaller family-owned stores that had dominated the street before the explosion of French and foreign chain stores took over; "None of this was here," being the phrase he used most often to describe what's happened since. Perhaps even more emblematic is the decidedly pro-American business model of the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy (aka "Sarko L'Americain" as he's sometimes mocked in the French media), whose attempts to adjust the retirement age of civil servants and squeeze more efficiency out of the government have been met with massive nationwide strikes that seem aimed more at holding on to the remnants of a vanishing culture than challenging the logic of the policy.

Today it's impossible for me to imagine the sense of refuge and sanctuary that other Americans once found here. Paris has its own complicated racial issues to settle; as the violent riots in the suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis recently demonstrated, there is little fraternité or égalité when it comes to France's large and growing African and North African immigrant communities. As a writer of African origin, I'm aware that it's precisely my American identity that protects me not only from the casual discrimination that other Africans experience here, but from the harassment of the police, who are prone to stopping Paris's African immigrants, particularly those living in the northern sections of the city. The food market near my former apartment in the 18th arrondissement, which in almost every detail, from the languages spoken to the fabrics of the women's dresses and the haggling at the vegetable stalls, was a perfect replica of some of the markets I've known in Africa, could sometimes feel like a market under siege with a constant and heavily armed large police presence marking the entrance off the Boulevard Barbès. The policeman's common cry for papiers, papiers -- documents proving legal residence -- is one that I know I can all but ignore thanks to my American accent first, and my passport second.

James Baldwin noted shortly after he first arrived in France, "I didn't go to Paris. I left New York." Inherent in that statement is the idea that it wasn't the destination but the departure that mattered most. I can't help but think that to some degree that sentiment still holds true, although for drastically different reasons than before. Paris has lost some of what once made it so special and unique, enough so that it's hard to imagine another outburst of American cultural creativity taking place in Paris again anytime soon. Why Paris when there's the rest of the world, much of which is cheaper and more unknown? It's a question I hear constantly, less so from Americans than Parisians who seem baffled by my decision to be here.

At the same time, perhaps that is the real, private joy and freedom of being in Paris these days -- the freedom not from politics or culture, but from an expatriate community in which to define yourself as part of or against. Shortly before I left America for Paris I had spoken with a friend about the possibility of moving to Buenos Aires. "Buenos Aires could become the Paris for our generation," she noted, and I could see why she said that. I had heard rumors of other people that we knew moving there, or if not there then to other cities around the world that were supposed to be indicative of a certain cultural vibrancy and easy, carefree life.

I can't say that there's much of either to be found in Paris these days, which is why I suppose there's a search for its newest incarnation, whether it's in Buenos Aires or Berlin or another destination that is supposedly rumored to be the next great spot, the place where we all really should be. The pressure of being fashionable has lifted from the city, and if possible by extension to the writers who live in it, leaving us free to wander and sit in complete anonymity with only our own thoughts for comfort in a way that would have been impossible 20 or 40 years earlier.

Unlike many of the writers and Americans who came here before, my reasons for being here are purely selfish and self-absorbed, with nothing and no one to run from. I used to say that I came to Paris because it was so quiet, in large part because at the time I could hardly speak the language. While today that may no longer be as completely true, the city still strikes me as quiet. There's no romantic ideal to be lived out here anymore -- no cafés, readings or events that can't be missed. What remain today are largely ghosts that are easy if not even comforting to live amongst. They had their Paris -- garrulous and crowded with the politics and culture of America -- and now finally, with no one else around, I can have mine.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article_print/...727827437.html

[Worley]

I think this analysis emphasizes too much the cultural reasons for the flourishing of the American literary expatriate community. As in many things, banal economic forces were central. As Mengestu says, "easy, carefree life" was a major factor. Personally, it reminds me of graduate school, except without classes. A major driver of that was that Europe had been economically ravaged by World War II and the cost of living (in currency terms) was far lower than it was in the United States, especially in New York City (which was booming). Europe didn't recover parity with the United States until the 1960s. During that time, lots of educated people left to earn more money in the United States in a "brain drain", but if you were an author, your royalties would go a lot farther in Paris.

In addition, Paris offered Maurice Girodias and his Olympia press. Olympia would publish avant-garde works that contained too much sex for US or UK publishers. But more important was that it published large amounts of English-language pornography for export (sometimes legal, sometimes not) to the US, UK, and the rest of the world. This gave English-language writers a relatively easy way to make money regardless of how well their literary works were selling. When de Gaulle took over in 1958, the French authorities became a lot stricter about foreign-language pornography.

(See "Venus Bound: The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press and Its Writers" by John De St. Jorre; some of this is described plainly and some only hinted at. I have a personal connection with this since Muffy Wainhouse was my aunt, but I never heard about it until after she died. It seems she didn't tell her relatives much about what she did in her Paris years.)

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by Worley

Personally, it reminds me of graduate school, except without classes.

Through the 1980s, a fine French restaurant was ranked among any American city's greatest attractions. French was still taught as a second language in nearly every high school, even though Spanish made a lot more practical sense.

I think that's all over. Nobody cares about French food anymore and fluency in French impresses nobody at parties.

Rock & Roll brought the working and middle classes of the U.S. and England together like never before. France and the rest of continental Europe proved incapable of rocking. A few English rock bands, but especially The Rolling Stones, not only imitated American styles, but sang about American subjects and specific American places. Americans learned about their own country from a foreign musical act. In the 80s, a lot of U.S. punk bands copped elements of the British working class, like mods and skinhead culture, plus the imitation of Jamaican music created by that nation's emigrants to England.

No similar dialog occurred between the youth of the United States and France. The relationship between the two cultures is locked in amber, a living museum to, at the very latest, 1970.

[Pedestrian]

Wow . . . talk about arising from the dead!

I still like French food and one of my favorite restaurants has superb onion soup. Unfortunately, our local copy of Cafe Flore, which used to be a city landmark, has crashed due to covid (and new ownership).

[mousquet]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Through the 1980s, a fine French restaurant was ranked among any American city's greatest attractions. French was still taught as a second language in nearly every high school, even though Spanish made a lot more practical sense.

I think that's all over. Nobody cares about French food anymore and fluency in French impresses nobody at parties.

Rock & Roll brought the working and middle classes of the U.S. and England together like never before. France and the rest of continental Europe proved incapable of rocking. A few English rock bands, but especially The Rolling Stones, not only imitated American styles, but sang about American subjects and specific American places. Americans learned about their own country from a foreign musical act. In the 80s, a lot of U.S. punk bands copped elements of the British working class, like mods and skinhead culture, plus the imitation of Jamaican music created by that nation's emigrants to England.

No similar dialog occurred between the youth of the United States and France. The relationship between the two cultures is locked in amber, a living museum to, at the very latest, 1970.

Yeah well, everybody's about electronic and rap music these days, then you show up with your daddies' and grandpas' Rock & Roll and Reggae.
The Rolling Stones? How old are they? I don't know, 80 years old or something? We're going to bury them tomorrow.

The youth doesn't care about that here. They bang to their rap and electro.
Idk what generation you belong to, but you got to deal with it.

[bilbao58]

Originally Posted by BTinSF

As a writer of African origin, I'm aware that it's precisely my American identity that protects me not only from the casual discrimination that other Africans experience here, but from the harassment of the police, who are prone to stopping Paris's African immigrants

Wow! Plus ça change... In the winter of 1984, when I spent over three months in Paris, my partner at the time was African-American. He and I were stopped constantly by les flics. One night, near Pernety I believe, un break policier filled with cops hit the brakes...screeched backwards... cops flying out of it like circus clowns from a tiny car. Just like EVERY OTHER TIME something like this happened, the cops barked "Vos papiers!" And also just like EVERY OTHER TIME, when we produced our blue American passports the cops, with looks of disappointment on their faces, turned around, loaded back into the car, and left. Our passports were like blue kryptonite to the cops.

ETA: I just noticed how old this thread is and that the OP has been banned. Oh well. My story remains.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by mousquet

Yeah well, everybody's about electronic and rap music these days

My point was that music linked the U.S. with England and Jamaica in a way that didn't happen with France (or anywhere else). Cuban music was fairly popular in the United States until the embargo, with Cuban bands playing Las Vegas, touring across the country, etc. The I Love Lucy show, which featured a Cuban costar, aired in the 1950s until just months before Castro took over. The musical history of the United States (and Cuba) might have been completely different if not for that event.

[ssiguy]

I was in Paris a couple of years ago. An incredibly beautiful and vibrant city but certainly not what I would refer to as "liberal". There was a lot of very clear race segregation and the city was not that busy after midnight.

I went in early April to avoid the tourist crowds and yet the tourist were everywhere and much to my surprise a huge number of Chinese. Yes I was in the city core but it very much seemed like a city that is being designed for tourists and not the inhabitants themselves.

Has always and will always be one of the world's truly great cities but you couldn't pay me enough to live there. I have no desire to live in a city where you feel like a foreigner because you actually live there.

[CivicBlues]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

I was in Paris a couple of years ago. An incredibly beautiful and vibrant city but certainly not what I would refer to as "liberal". There was a lot of very clear race segregation and the city was not that busy after midnight.

I went in early April to avoid the tourist crowds and yet the tourist were everywhere and much to my surprise a huge number of Chinese. Yes I was in the city core but it very much seemed like a city that is being designed for tourists and not the inhabitants themselves.

Has always and will always be one of the world's truly great cities but you couldn't pay me enough to live there. I have no desire to live in a city where you feel like a foreigner because you actually live there.

Yikes, you have the same complaints about Vancouver don't you? You do realize going as a tourist to complain about other tourists is the height of hypocrisy.

Also, you also realize Paris has a lot of Vietnamese-descendant as well as Chinese-descendant French citizens right? Or did you just see a lot of Asian faces and flashback to the horrors of that time you got lost in Richmond?

[liat91]

Originally Posted by CivicBlues

Yikes, you have the same complaints about Vancouver don't you? You do realize going as a tourist to complain about other tourists is the height of hypocrisy.

Also, you also realize Paris has a lot of Vietnamese-descendant as well as Chinese-descendant French citizens right? Or did you just see a lot of Asian faces and flashback to the horrors of that time you got lost in Richmond?

Your right, geographic boundary and ethnicity should never be intertwined. Let’s send a few hundred million Africans to East Asia just to prove this point. Yay!!

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

Has always and will always be one of the world's truly great cities but you couldn't pay me enough to live there. I have no desire to live in a city where you feel like a foreigner because you actually live there.

Get out of the core tourist neighborhoods. Pre-Covid we would stay in residential areas on the Left Bank with few tourists.

I only see the hordes of Chinese tour groups around the big department stores and the primary tourist attractions. Most are on short group visits so never hit anything besides the most iconic sites. So, yeah, you can't avoid them if visiting Au Printemps or the Louvre, but otherwise you barely see them.

[Yuri]

Paris strikes me as much more conservative (broader sense) than cities like London or specially Berlin. It's definitely not the place if you looking for a counterculture vibe.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by liat91

Your right, geographic boundary and ethnicity should never be intertwined. Let’s send a few hundred million Africans to East Asia just to prove this point. Yay!!

I don't get the point of this. On any given day you'll easily see more white people in Hong Kong than you'd see Chinese people in Paris.

[hauntedheadnc]

Originally Posted by bilbao58

ETA: I just noticed how old this thread is and that the OP has been banned. Oh well. My story remains.

No, he's still around. He just came back as Pedestrian.

[Minato Ku]

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

Paris strikes me as much more conservative (broader sense) than cities like London or specially Berlin. It's definitely not the place if you looking for a counterculture vibe.

It's mainly because tourists aren't interested by the counterculture vibe of Paris and then they mostly avoid these places.
Tourists often see just a small part of even the core of Paris.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by Minato Ku

It's mainly because tourists aren't interested by the counterculture vibe of Paris and then they mostly avoid these places.
Tourists often see just a small part of even the core of Paris.

Or maybe the city is different. For instance, Milan is not well-known for its counterculture either. It's almost like the 2000's nightlife, when you needed the right clothes, the right appearance, to get in.

Of course creative is there, but it's employed mostly by the haute couture, high end design, big money items.

Probably I'm biased, probably is not all Paris' fault, but that's the picture the city shows these days.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

Or maybe the city is different. For instance, Milan is not well-known for its counterculture either. It's almost like the 2000's nightlife, when you needed the right clothes, the right appearance, to get in.

Of course creative is there, but it's employed mostly by the haute couture, high end design, big money items.

Probably I'm biased, probably is not all Paris' fault, but that's the picture the city shows these days.

Maybe this is because Paris seems more rigid about its national identity than western primary cities tend to be? New York, London, Berlin, etc., seem to embrace multiculturalism more than Paris. I would say Paris is more like a Tokyo, where the city's image is very intertwined with the national identity.

[Nantais]

That statement seems very subjective. And London seems very British to me, and Berlin very German too, while also being undoubtedly multicultural.
I think people fail to see the multiculturalism when it doesn't look like what they expect the multiculturalism to look like (also true about "counterculture").

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Maybe this is because Paris seems more rigid about its national identity than western primary cities tend to be? New York, London, Berlin, etc., seem to embrace multiculturalism more than Paris. I would say Paris is more like a Tokyo, where the city's image is very intertwined with the national identity.

In of those census threads, one forumer while prasing the good urban credentials of Chicago, Boston and Washington, called them “conformist”. Maybe that’s also the case of Paris or Milan.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

In of those census threads, one forumer while prasing the good urban credentials of Chicago, Boston and Washington, called them “conformist”. Maybe that’s also the case of Paris or Milan.

Yes, that comment made a lot of sense when I saw it. I don't think I know that much about Paris to say it absolutely applies there, since the person who made the comment was drawing a direct comparison to NYC cultural norms compared to other American cities.

BUT, I do know that France more deliberately manages what it means to be French more than its neighbors seem to do with their own national identities. I don't really go to Berlin to do "German things", and I don't necessarily go to London to do "British things", but I'm absolutely expecting to do "French things" in Paris.