David McCullough has ranged widely across American history, from early books about the Johnstown Flood, the Panama Canal and the Brooklyn Bridge to later, Pulitzer-winning biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams. He gets around. You can even find him narrating Ken Burns documentaries and the movie “Seabiscuit.” Having been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, McCullough could, at 78, rest on his laurels and hold forth in interviews. Instead he has been working for years on a big book about the allure of one of his favorite cities: Paris.
“Not all pioneers,” McCullough says early on, “went west.” Thus he establishes his theme, the intellectual frontier mentality that drove countless Americans to brave the rigors of a sea voyage and an alien culture to imbibe the Old World charm and history of Paris. There they could write, paint, sculpt, compose, study medicine or indulge the other creative yearnings that propelled the multitude crowding this panoramic book.
‘The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris’ by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster. 558 pp. $37.50)
McCullough begins his story in the 1830s, sketching the characters as they prepare to leave for their journeys — novelist James Fenimore Cooper, portrait painter Samuel F.B. Morse, poet and medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes, women’s education advocate Emma Willard and others. At the time, sea travel is fraught with risk. Only a determined band of adventurers (mostly young, mostly male) has the means and ambition to face it. Later, as the voyage becomes safer and less expensive, the cast enlarges. More women join the pilgrimage, including tireless medical student Elizabeth Blackwell, who later founded the New York Infirmary and College for Women, and art student Mary Cassatt.
A third of the way through the 19th century, Paris’s population of 800,000 was four times the size of New York City’s. A historic center of art, literature and medicine, it could lay claim to being the most influential city in Europe. McCullough provides glimpses of many lives, from Cooper, America’s first writer to achieve huge popular success, to future senator and abolitionist Charles Sumner. Crusading novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe liked Paris because it seemed less utilitarian and Protestant than her homeland. “With all New England’s earnestness and practical efficiency,” she complained, “there is a long withering of the soul’s more ethereal part — a crushing out of the beautiful — which is horrible.”
For each American visitor to Paris, the recurring theme upon arrival is surprise at how much better everyday life seems there. “A dinner here does not oppress one,” marveledCooper. “The wine neither intoxicates nor heats, and the frame of mind and body, in which one is left, is precisely that best suited to intellectual and social pleasures.”
One of the many interesting characters is abolitionist and fugitive slave William Wells Brown. He faced death if he denounced slavery in his native Kentucky, but in Paris he was among 800 delegates to an international peace conference with Victor Hugo as its figurehead. At Hugo’s request, Brown delivered a widely quoted speech about the need to “break . . . in pieces every yoke of bondage.” He was feted at a reception hosted by none other than Alexis de Tocqueville, the French foreign minister.
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