Stacy Schiff: France & America ... A Troubled Relationship from the Start
Stacy Schiff, in the NYT (5-29-05):
[Stacy Schiff is the author, most recently, of "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America."]
... Long before Gene Kelly danced in Paris, John Adams tore his hair out there. In the 1770's and 1780's the greatest collection of brainpower this country had to offer found itself installed in the French capital. They were miserable. Almost to a man, the founding fathers looked upon Paris as a hardship posting. To their minds a farm in America would have been preferable. So would the job as doorman in Congress.
"We all pant for America, as will every American who comes to Europe," wailed Thomas Jefferson, in 1785. Part of the problem was that Paris was unforgivably foreign. There was neither a bowl of Indian pudding nor an uncoiffed head nor a bashful female in sight. (Nor was there a Protestant chapel, aside from the one in the Dutch Embassy.) As Mark Twain gasped later: "In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language."
Loyalty played a role too, along with its brawler of a cousin, chauvinism. "This is a very fine country," allowed John Jay, "almost as much so as our own, but not quite." He was among the first to grasp that the French capital did nothing for an American's self-esteem. One unilingual American could not bring himself to contemplate a Parisian appearance; he shuddered to imagine how "extremely awkward, insipid and uncouth" he would seem, especially to French ladies. That craven soul was George Washington.
And too the American relationship with France got off on the wrong foot. That country was inexcusably good to us. Washington won his first victory in 1776; the war continued until 1783. Over the course of those years the American Revolution was to a great extent a French venture; the original cast of Americans went to Paris to borrow, not to spend. For its own reasons (and against all logic) Versailles was fantastically generous. Yorktown constituted as much a French victory as an American one; Washington's men were clothed, armed and paid by France, joined by an equal number of French troops, and protected by a French fleet.
Critical as it was, that assistance only pointed up our helplessness, to be followed by a long line of condescending, menu-translating maîtres d'hôtel. It may be as difficult for us to forgive the French for having underwritten our independence as it is for the French to forgive us for having liberated them in 1945.
As in so many other arenas, Jefferson proved accommodating in his relationship with France. He confined his displeasure to the French weather (insufferable), the French government (abominable), French morals (pestilent), and French poverty (unspeakable), before falling, as soon as the sun came out, head over heels in love with Paris.
He was not the only convert. The city of light struck Abigail Adams as a den of iniquity, the world's filthiest city in every sense of the word. At the theater she cringed before the flying petticoats, the visible garters, wholesale affronts to her sensibilities. (She would have been more scandalized yet had she known that those undergarments were a rarity. The women in the audience next to her were unlikely to be wearing any.) Eight months later Mrs. Adams was instead appalled by her own behavior: "I have found my taste reconciling itself to habits, customs and fashions which at first disgusted me." The distaste melted to pleasure; she became a balletomane. The conversion from Paris is "the very dirtiest place I ever saw" to "nobody ever leaves Paris but with a degree of tristeness" took less than a year.