The Other Americans in Paris by Nancy L. Green

Author:Nancy L. Green [Green, Nancy L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Emigration & Immigration, History, Europe, France, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9780226137520
Google: DgTrAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-07-07T04:05:12+00:00

FIGURE 7. Life in a garret. From Helen Josephy and Mary Margaret McBride, Paris Is a Woman’s Town (Paris: Coward-McCann, 1929).

CHAPTER 6

Down and Out in Paris

The Tailed, the Arrested, and the Poor

[Drifters, bartenders, pimps, shunned the Left Bank and] formed a motley colony of their own, along with . . . tourist guides, gamblers, confidence men, and vendors of pornographic pictures who had swarmed over to France during the years immediately following the war. They all constituted a demimonde that was half French, half American, a sort of weird amalgam of Brooklyn and Montmartre.

SAMUEL PUTNAM1

To the amused incredulity of the audience, a penniless American appeared in a 1928 play in Paris. Of course he turned out to be a millionaire.2 The idea of poor Americans just seemed (and seems) ludicrous to most French. And this in spite of all of those starving art students and “the legend of good-humored poverty, of mutual accommodation fairly raised to the romantic,” as Henry James put it.3 The poor American art student or destitute writer may be a fairly well-known figure to an American audience at least. The down-at-heel ex-soldier, the struggling English teacher, or the jailed American in Paris is not. Yet from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, stereotypes (and the two previous chapters) notwithstanding, not all Americans in Paris were rich. Nor were they all upstanding, hardworking lawyers, dentists, or manufacturers’ representatives on the go. The City of Light also attracted—and produced—underfunded, overspending Americans who had to turn to the American Aid Society for help. And the French capital was riddled with a small but lively assortment of wayward souls. Some were troubled, others made trouble on purpose. Some ended up in French jails, in spite of themselves or as willful crooks. Altogether this mixed lot of the financially “down” and the legally “out” were a frequent enough if frequently ignored phenomenon. We can start with the troublemakers, suspected or real, many of whom added prison to their Paris itinerary.

SUSPECTS AND TROUBLEMAKERS

The archivist at the Paris Police Archives arched a quizzical Gallic eyebrow when I asked about finding records of arrested Americans. Yet just as there were those Americans in trouble whose traces can be found in the consular and law firm records, others left their mark in the Paris police archives. Sometimes the Americans whose files are extant were simply under surveillance; sometimes they were victims who had filed a complaint, like the embassy attaché who had been belted by an offended garçon de café after he had complained about the drinks at the café.4 For the most part, however, the Americans in trouble, whether turning up at the consulate, their lawyer’s office, or the police station, were perpetrators rather than victims. The voluntary and sometimes involuntary miscreants had committed “crimes” ranging from “forgetting” to pay their hotel bill to shoplifting to disorderly behavior to outright wheeling and dealing. There were drunken soldiers and other irate and inebriated citizens. White Americans got into fights with black Americans who were hanging out with white women in Paris cafés.

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