Brooke L. Blower: A Paris Invented for the American Imagination

Brooke L. Blower is assistant professor of history at Boston University and the author of Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars.

Thanks to Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris and David McCullough’s book The Greater Journey, summer crowds are again satisfying their appetite for that guilty pleasure: the Americans-in-Paris romp. Such celebrations of the adventures of Americans in the City of Lights are certainly fun. But they evoke a version of the city that’s rooted as much in fantasy as fact. Like many guilty pleasures, they actually tell us a lot more about who we are, and about our yearning for an elusive American innocence, than they do about the gritty realities of the French capital.

In his chronicle of artists and apprentices who journeyed to France during the 19th century, McCullough gives us his trademark vignettes, so richly descriptive that you can feel the tight clothing and smell the candles going out. The Americans are well-meaning and hard-working. In turn, Paris is obliging, with picturesque rather than menacing poverty, and where, the author tell us, no drunks stagger through the streets.

With Allen we also get postcard Paris and a parade of illustrious expatriates ripped from history as we follow Owen Wilson’s character on his fantastical journey back to the 1920s. The film’s opening montage sets the tone: shots of Fouquet’s café on the Champs Elysées; the wind-milled Moulin Rouge; squares magically empty of traffic jams; and alleys mercifully free of noise, drug deals, or urine. While Wilson plays the incredulous but enthusiastic initiate, the French serve as scene shifters and helpful guides....