Dancing With De Beauvoir: Jazz and the French

When live jazz arrived in France towards the end of World War I, it was seen from the start as a fertile symbol of other things. It was an embodiment of artistic freedom, it was modernism, it was America, it was African primitivism, sexual liberation, social decadence and moral decay. Its energy and innovation helped produce an unprecedented explosion of activity in modern French art and thought.

Paris and jazz had a special relationship. From the United States flowed a stream of black jazz...