The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

An ambitious, wide-ranging study of how being in Paris helped spark generations of American genius.

Not content to focus on a few of the 19th-century American artists, doctors and statesmen who benefited enormously from their Parisian education, award-winninghistorian McCullough (1776, 2005, etc.) embraces a cluster of aspiring young people such as portraitist George Healy and lawyer Charles Sumner, eager to expand their horizons in the 1830s by enduring the long sea passage, then spirals out to include numerous other visitors over an entire eventful century. In the early period of trans-Atlantic travel, American tourists were truly risking their lives over the weeks of rough sailing, but novelist James Fenimore Cooper, widowed schoolteacher Emma Hart Willard and young medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. all knew their education was not complete without a stint in the medieval capital. For many of these American rubes, exposure to the fine arts, old-world architecture, fashion, fine dining, museums and teaching hospitals proved transformative, and the knowledge they gained would define their professional lives back in America. The year in Paris artist Samuel Morse painted his extraordinaryThe Gallery of the Louvrewould provide the climax of one careerand segue into another—as inventor of the electric telegraph. The revolutionary upheaval of 1848, the advent of the Second Empire and the massive redesign wrought by "demolition artist" Georges-Eugène Haussmann changed Paris profoundly, some said for the better, while the Americans continued to arrive: sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Congressman Elihu B. Washburne and painter Mary Cassatt, among many others. For some, like John Singer Sargent, who had been brought up traversing European capitals, their time spent in Paris would reveal what made them quintessentially American.

A gorgeously rich, sparkling patchwork, eliciting stories from diaries and memoirs to create the human drama McCullough depicts so well.

Michael Sims

Stacy Schiff

From the Publisher

—Stacy Schiff, The New York Times Book Review

“An ambitious, wide-ranging study of how being in Paris helped spark generations of American genius. . . . A gorgeously rich, sparkling patchwork, eliciting stories from diaries and memoirs to create the human drama McCullough depicts so well.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A lively and entertaining panorama. . . . By the time he shows us the triumphant Exposition Universelle in 1889, witnessed through the eyes of such characters as painters John Singer Sargent and Robert Henri, we share McCullough's enthusiasm for the city and his affection for the many Americans who improved their lives, their talent and their nation by drinking at the fountain that was Paris.”

—Michael Sims, The Washington Post

"From a dazzling beginning that captures the thrill of arriving in Paris in 1830 to the dawn of the 20th century, McCullough chronicles the generations that came, saw and were conquered by Paris. . . . The Greater Journey will satisfy McCullough's legion of loyal fans . . . it will entice a whole new generation of Francophiles, armchair travelers and those Americans lucky enough to go to Paris before they die."

—Bruce Watson, The San Francisco Chronicle

"McCullough's skill as a storyteller is on full display. . . . The idea of telling the story of the French cultural contribution to America through the eyes of a generation of aspiring artists, writers and doctors is inspired. . . a compelling and largely untold story in American history."

—Kevin J. Hamilton, The Seattle Times

"There is not an uninteresting page here as one fascinating character after another is explored at a crucial stage of his development. . . . Wonderful, engaging writing full of delighting detail."

—John Barron, Chicago Sun-Times

“McCullough’s research is staggering to perceive, and the interpretation he lends to his material is impressive to behold. . . . Expect his latest book to ascend the best-seller lists and be given a place on the year-end best lists.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“A highly readable and entertaining travelogue of a special sort, an interdisciplinary treat from a tremendously popular Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. . . . Highly recommended.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

“For more than 40 years, David McCullough has brought the past to life in books distinguished by vigorous storytelling and vivid characterizations. . . . . McCullough again finds a slighted subject in The Greater Journey, which chronicles the adventures of Americans in Paris. . . . Wonderfully atmospheric.”

—Wendy Smith, Los Angeles Times

“McCullough has hit the historical jackpot. . . . A colorful parade of educated, Victorian-era American travelers and their life-changing experiences in Paris.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The Barnes & Noble Review

"Not all pioneers went west" -- with these charming, if misleading words, David McCullough launches his long, fascinating account of American residents in Paris in the nineteenth century.

They were not pioneers, of course, in the usual sense. There were no covered wagons, no endless plains and empty prairies, no hostile natives (except for the occasional glowering concierge). Instead, McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Truman and John Adams, has given a new twist to the idea of blazing a trail and has taken for his subject a version of that oldest and richest of literary dramas, as ancient at least as Homer and Odysseus: Someone Goes on a Great Journey. And he has given it a distinctively American form -- The New World Meets the Old.

His cast of characters is refreshingly original. He skips right past those first celebrated American expatriates in the City of Light, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and begins his story in the 1830s, with a wave of young New Englanders who, over the course of the decade, cast off from Boston in two-masted sailing ships and made the dangerous, arduous month-long voyage to Le Havre. From there they rumbled off in enormous fifteen-passenger stagecoaches called diligences for the twenty-four hour bone-cracking trip to Paris, usually stopping at Rouen to stretch their legs and view for the first time the astonishing beauty of a medieval Catholic cathedral.

Some fifty years earlier Abigail Adams had written a friend from Paris, with an audible snort of Puritan disapproval: "If you ask me what is the business of life here? I answer, pleasure." It was -- and still is, mercifully -- an accurate description of Parisian life, but McCullough's travelers, though not immune to pleasure, all came with deeply serious purposes. Roughly speaking, they were divided between artists and medical students, both groups drawn by the fact that what Paris offered in the way of resources and schooling could be duplicated nowhere else in the world, certainly not in the turbulent, rollicking cultural adolescence of Jacksonian America.

This first wave of Americans in Paris includes some familiar names -- Samuel F. B. Morse, who began his life as a painter before becoming "The Lightning Man," inventor of the telegraph; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who would become dean of the Harvard Medical School and a founder of The Atlantic Monthly; Charles Sumner, later senator from Massachusetts and leading abolitionist. But there are less familiar pilgrims as well -- Holmes's friend Thomas Appleton, for example, author of the much-repeated quip, "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris." Or Emma Willard, founder of the Troy (New York) Female Seminary, who frowned at the French tolerance for nude statues, but became a great opera-goer and student of ladies' fashions.

McCullough loads these pages with marvelous anecdotes and word pictures. We have Morse swaying at the top of a rickety scaffold as he copies paintings in the Louvre, observed and encouraged by none other than James Fenimore Cooper, a long-time Parisian. We follow his young Bostonians into a restaurant at the Palais Royal, where they goggle at the immense number of mirrors and at menus the size of newspapers. We watch over Sumner's shoulder as he recognizes, in a life-altering flash of insight, that the black students in his classroom at the Sorbonne are as able as the whites. McCullough has a keen eye for the memorable quotation -- Nathaniel Willis writes of the ballerina Marie Taglioni, "She swims in your eye like a curl of smoke." His long chapter on American medical students is particularly absorbing, as he traces their daily routines in the Latin Quarter's renowned École de Médecine. Though if we needed reminding of the primitive nature of nineteenth-century medicine, we have only to turn to his horrifying account of surgery in the school's amphitheatre, when as many as 600 students could practice operations at the same time. (The discarded limbs and body parts were fed to dogs kept in cages outside.)

But as the century wears on, as sailing ships and diligences are replaced by steamships and trains, McCullough's narrative grows more diffuse and less focused. There were perhaps fewer than a thousand Americans resident in Paris when his first wave arrives from New England in the 1830s. After the Civil War, travel is far easier and cheaper and their numbers swell. By 1867 the number of American residents in Paris quadruples. His small band of "pioneers" becomes a parade of tourists and famous names -- Hawthorne, Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, P. T. Barnum -- all of them drawn to Paris like moths to a candle, but none of them united in purpose (or age) as the earlier band had been. For pages at a time Paris seems a background rather than a theme.

Then, in two superb chapters on the now obscure American ambassador Elihu Washburne, McCullough regains his momentum. Using a long-forgotten diary from Washburne's family papers, he reconstructs in thrilling detail the ambassador's heroic behavior during the Prussian Siege of Paris in 1870 and the bloodcurdling days of the Commune that followed. It is a wonderful fusion of character description and historical research. And from this point on, McCullough concentrates in satisfying and often moving detail on the careers of three great American artists who find their inspiration and release in the great Capital of Art: the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the painters John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt.

There are a few small errors of fact (Washburne, for example, was not present when Grant met Lee at Appomattox) and some readers may wonder why Emerson, who had a visionary transcendentalist moment in the Jardin des Plantes, is not given more space, or why no use is made of Peter Brooks's recent brilliant book Henry James Goes to Paris. But these would be quibbles. On the great central thing, the indefinable power of Paris to awaken a sense of beauty, he is exactly right. He quotes Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose love of Paris grew in part from her feeling that American life had cheated her: "With all New England's earnestness and practical efficiency, there is a long withering of the soul's more ethereal part -- a crushing out of the beautiful -- which is horrible."

But David McCullough, though he also lives in New England, has clearly suffered no such crushing of the soul's ethereal part. He is seventy-eight years old, yet his book reads like a young man's book -- full of enthusiasm, fresh pleasure, delight in the world, and delight especially in the great luminous city that seems as he writes to lie open before him like a poem.

--Max Byrd