The end of the affair | 28 March 2009

Given the anti-Americanism displayed on every possible occasion by the French since the days of De Gaulle, and the crudely expressed contempt with which Americans have responded, particularly over the past decade, it is easy to forget that the two nations once enjoyed a relationship even more ‘special’ than the supposedly exclusive one between Britain and the United States.

That relationship, which began with Benjamin Franklin’s seduction of French society and Lafayette’s participation in the American revolution, blossomed into a love affair in the two decades following the Great War. Many Americans who had fought in it stayed behind. The comparatively low cost of living permitted penniless writers and artists, as well as society ladies, to congregate in Paris. The absence of prejudice against African Americans induced musicians and entertainers, such as Josephine Baker, to settle there. And with the outbreak of civil war in Spain, Paris became the point of entry and exit for American volunteers.

It was on the left bank, ‘Stratford-on-Odéon’, as James Joyce called it, that the relationship blossomed most spectacularly. The bookshop and lending library Shakespeare & Company was opened by Sylvia Beach on the rue de l’Odéon in 1920. It was frequented by Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and Henry Miller, as well as Joyce (whose Ulysses Beach first published), T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, to mention but the best-known, and brought them into contact with France’s greatest, from Valéry to Gide.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, many of the 30,000 or so Americans living in France gave active or moral support to the French cause. Most of them left when that collapsed in June 1940.