He’s the man of two worlds, of two revolutions and of two languages.
He’s a fellow who understands the politics of a republic, an empire and a kingdom.
He’s a citizen of France and an honorary citizen of the United States.
He’s Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette—call him Lafayette—and he’s returning to America for the first time in two hundred years.

Yes, Lafayette is back – in the new series Lafayette in America on Instagram, launched on September 23, beginning with Episode 1: The Awakening in Paris. New episodes will be posted weekly. Follow now as Lafayette prepares to embark on yet another American adventure.

Absurd, intriguing, irreverent, timely and occasionally historical, Lafayette takes to the streets of Paris before returning to the United States, where he reconnects with old comrades, meets Americans, does food reviews, and tries to understand how the country of his dear friend General George Washington has changed over the centuries.

Follow Lafayette in America @lafayetteinamerica now!

Why now?

At the invitation of the United States government, Lafayette made a grand tour of the United States in 1824 and 1825, visiting the then 24 states of the union, where he was celebrated as the oldest surviving major general of the American Revolution and a reminder of the promise of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the creation of the democratic republic of the United States of America. Two hundred years later, in 2025, told that he’s needed, he returns on a quieter but no less significant journey, on a secret mission at the behest of unknown figures, accompanied at times by the charmante Mademoiselle Lilly.

Yes, Lafayette is back!

Here are a few images from the upcoming series, filmed and photographed in France and in the United States.

Left: Lafayette tries to go incognito in Paris, yet, once recognized, he gladly poses with fans by the Eiffel Tower.
Right: Lafayette stands by the equestrian statue of his dear friend the General George Washington, a work by the American sculptor Daniel Chester French, on Place d’Iéna in Paris.

Left: Lafayette takes a seat at Les Parisiennes, 17 avenue de la Motte Picquet, 7th arr.
Right: Lafayette reflects on the evolution of the American project as he walks on Omaha Beach, Normandy.

Left: Lafayette with Axel Robb and fellow patriots at Washington Crossing Historic Park in Pennsylvania, with the charmante Mademoiselle Lilly by his side.
Right: Lafeyette and Will Krakower toast the memory of fallen soldiers of the Continental Army at Princeton Battlefield State Park in New Jersey.

Yes, Lafayette is back! Follow his adventures on Instagram @lafayetteinamerica.

© 2025

Learn about Lafayette’s tomb in Paris.
Learn about Lafayette’s relationship with George Washington.

The post Return of the Marquis: Lafayette in America appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

On the triple occasion of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, an exhibition of Ian Patrick’s portraits of Normandy veterans at the Army Museum at the Invalides in Paris, and the publication of the expanded second edition of D-Day Portraits: Héros Anonymes – Anonymous Heroes, his collection of portraits and first-hand accounts of veterans of the Invasion of Normandy who have returned over the years, I sat down with Ian to discuss his relationship with Normandy, with WWII veterans, and with the veteran who first awakened his interest in the “anonymous heroes” of the invasion that changed the course of the war: his father.

Ian Patrick is an American-born photographer, now a dual citizen, who moved to Paris in 1979 after launching a successful career as a portraitist in New York, where he photographed such well-known cultural figures of the time as Bob Marley and Andy Warhol, among others. It wasn’t until Ian was living in France that his father, William Patrick, when visiting, told him that he had taken part in the Invasion of Normandy 1944. Together, in 1980, they visited Utah Beach, where his father had landed six days after D-Day. Since then, Ian has returned frequently to the D-Day Landing Zone to photograph veterans of the Invasion of Normandy. With the disappearance of the generation that fought in the Second World War, his 44-year project of photographing veterans is coming to an end.

What do you remember of the first time you visited the D-Day Landing Zone?

It was 1979. I’d done a photography job in La Rochelle, and since my assistant and I weren’t in a rush to get the car back to Paris, we drove up the Atlantic coast and cut across to Normandy. I remember seeing the sign for Omaha Beach and driving down to the beach and saying, “Well, there’s nothing here!” We drove up and down the beach a couple times, unimpressed, and then went up to the cemetery where we got the jaw-drop view of the tombs and the channel beyond the cliff. But we didn’t spend much time in the area because we had to get back to Paris.

Then the next time you went back was with your father?

Yes. In 1980. My father flew over on a military plane, which he could do for free as a career military man. He flew from California to Dover, Delaware, from Dover to the Azores, from the Azores to Ramstein, Germany. Then he took the train to Paris, Gare de l’Est, and walked over to our apartment by the canal [Saint-Martin]. Sometimes he’d just show up, without letting us know he was coming. But this time we knew he was coming because he wanted to meet Véronique, my fiancée at the time, before we got married.

After a few days in Paris, he was bored and he said, “How about taking me up to Normandy?” And I said, “Sure, Dad, but if it’s Calvados [apple brandy] you want we can get it in Paris.” And he said, “Yeh, I’d like some Calvados, too, but I’d like to visit Normandy because I was there in the war.” I said, “You never told me about that.” He said, “Well, let’s go up there and I’ll tell you all about it.”

At the time I had a “Quatrelle,” one of those funky little Renault cars, that wasn’t exactly a bomb on the road. Dad didn’t want to go on the freeway but on the smaller national roads because he figured he’d recognize all kinds of stuff. As soon as we got into Normandy, which you do fairly quickly from Paris, he started noticing signs for Calvados and he asked me why were there so many of them. I told him that there are lots of farmers who make and sell Calvados. He said, “Let’s go get some.” We were still two hours from the beach. We went into one, where I introduced my father and told the farmer that he wanted to try some Calvados. The farmer said, “Here’s 7 years, 10 years, 15 years.” My father said, “Let’s start with the 10 years.” He tasted it and he said, “My god, this is so much better than the stuff we had during the war. Get three bottles of that.” I said, “Three bottles, Dad?” He said, “Yeh, one for you, one for me, and one for right now.”

So we started drinking it at 9 o’clock in the morning and by the time we got to Utah Beach, we were feeling “in our cups,” as they used to say, and he started talking to me about his time in the war. He landed at Utah Beach on June 12, so the beach had been won by then, of course, but there were still corpses around. My father had started off the war as a pilot but blew his eardrums out, so they put him on the ground, which he was really disappointed about. He was an armorer, making sure that guns were perfectly in alignment and worked and the bombs properly place, anything to do with ammunition. They had a special place on the airstrip where they could lift the tail up and fire at targets to make sure that the guns were aligned correctly. What’s incredible is that they actually had gun cameras on those machine guns and rockets so that same evening the films were developed and they would project them in the barn of the farm where they were staying and write down what needed to be done. And they saw the carnage they were creating for the Germans.

When he arrived on the 12th, the airstrip where he was assigned, which was just behind Sainte Mère Eglise, was still being finished by the Corps of Engineers. It was being made so that their P47s wouldn’t have to go back to England to refuel and rearm. He was there until the end of August, after the Germans had been hammered in the Falaise Gap. From there he went to Le Mans, then Nancy, then Saint Dizier, and also provided support for the Battle of Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. They put special pouches under the wings to drop ammunition and supplies to the men who were stuck in the Hürtgen Forest. They then moved into Germany.

I knew practically nothing of this before going to Normandy with him. I knew that he was in the war but he never talked about it. He was a career army man but he never talked about the war. I lived on army bases as a kid and saw army stuff all the time. When you’re a little kid you play army but you don’t necessarily ask your father if he ever killed any Germans or stuff like that. It was with our trip to Normandy that he started talking about it.

Why do you think it took your father so long after the war to come to Normandy given that returning there came to mean so much to him?

My parents came to Paris in 1950 on their honeymoon from Austria, where my father was stationed. My mother was already pregnant with me. I have photographs of him in his uniform at the Eiffel Tower—in those days you had to wear your uniform when you traveled. They also went to Nice. After I was born, we lived in Austria and later we lived in Germany. We’d go on vacation to the French Riviera or the Italian Riviera. They liked going to Vienna as well. But Dad never talked about the war. After we moved to the U.S., they loved coming back to Europe because they lived a long time here. But Normandy wouldn’t have been a place that he would think of going with my mother. So when he came to visit alone that time, it was an opportunity for him to go and for me to go with him. My mother had no interest in the war. But when she came with him later, she realized the effort and the massiveness of the invasion and… you can’t help, even if you’re opposed to the military and to war, you can’t help but take your hat off to those people who were a part of it and who lived through it. My parents returned may times, especially my father.

That trip with your father, to whom you dedicate “Anonymous Heroes,” your book of veterans’ portraits and their first-hand accounts, must have been the spark to your interest in photographing veterans.

Yes. We drove up and down the Utah Beach that first time. He showed me certain bunkers where he would tell me what kind of shell had hit it to make the hole or the mark on it, using all this military jargon. He was into ammunition because that was his job. Then he wanted to find the farm where the airstrip had been. Of course, the strip was no longer there, and there was no sign marking where it had been. Also, most farmers in the area didn’t want visitors. But we drove into one farm in my “Quatrelle,” where we met a lady named Alice. It was lunchtime, and she and the family came out with their napkins in their hands. “Oui, Monsieur?” she said to me. “Excusez-nous,” I said, “Mon papa est vétéran…” and right away she said to him, “Entrez, monsieur.” So we went in and they brought out two plates and we sat down to eat with them. My father was in tears, he couldn’t believe it. Their welcome was so sweet. At the end of the meal, the farmer went out to the barn, or wherever he went, and he comes back with a half-full dirty old bottle of dark alcohol, and written in chalk on the bottle was “1944.” He gave us each a little snort of it. It was absolutely delicious and my father started crying again. He said, “This isn’t the kind of stuff that we had in 1944. What we had was green rotgut, whatever we could find that the Germans left behind.” From there we went into Sainte Mère Eglise and we meet other people who then invited us in for coffee. My father couldn’t believe the welcome we were receiving. I took some pictures of him on the beach and in different places.

After that I decided to go up there every year on the sixth of June, and I would take pictures. Many times, there were no veterans at all. I would go each year, whether my father would come to France or not. Years later, I went to a fair in a hotel in Paris promoting Normandy for the upcoming 50th anniversary [1994]. By that time I’d already done a number of photographs. I met the secretary of the Comité du Débarquement [Landing Committee] and showed her some pictures. She said, “Oh c’est bien!” Then she explained that not only was she a part of the Landing Committee but she was also the director of the Musée de la Tapisserie in Bayeux, and she invited me to show my work in the Salle du Chevalier, which is the vaulted hall that later became the giftshop of the museum. So that was the first exhibition of my Normandy work, which I’d been taking just out of my own interest until then. From then on, she would send me an official invitation to the June 6th ceremonies every year so that I had actual credentials to go wherever I wanted to photograph veterans.

I also then started to interview the veterans, usually calling them on the phone after meeting them since there was no time to interview them during the ceremonies. On the phone, they would speak differently, more freely, as though to themselves, since they were alone and weren’t perturbed by my presence. Sometimes they’d go off track and I’d bring them back with another question. I asked them to tell me about their experience, whatever was bizarre or sad or happy that they wanted to recall. Most of them didn’t talk about terrible stuff. Some of the ones who landed on Omaha Beach did, in a very cold manner. A lot of them didn’t want to talk at all. I just tried to let them tell me what they wanted to tell me.

I wasn’t necessarily meeting them at the ceremonies. I would attend the big ceremonies, and I might come upon a smaller one here and there that I only learned about when I got there. Nine times out of ten it was just serendipity that brought me in contact with a veteran. I have photographed veterans I happened to come upon in the cemeteries while they’re paying homage to a particular person. I got the shot of Major Howard at Pegasus Bridge because the owner of the B&B where we were staying during the anniversary that year [1993] told us about an event that was taking place there on June 5th. So we immediately went there, and there they were, Major Howard and a few men popping Champagne. There weren’t that many people. There were no guys dressed up as paratroopers as you’d see more recently. There was just Madame Gondrée at the café by the bridge when I was in there talking with Bill Millin. Some years when there were few veterans, I would do landscapes, which is why there are some landscapes in the show and in the book, photographs of ceremonies and of places that reek with history.

In my first show for the 50th anniversary there was very little text next to the portraits. Just who they are, were they are, basic facts. Then little by little, as I took more portraits and gathered more stories, I realized that I had material for a book, which I put together with the backing of the Military Museum at the Invalides [in Paris] for the 65th anniversary in 2009. That year I also had exhibitions of my work at the Invalides and at the Museum of the Battle of Normandy in Bayeux, near the British Cemetery. That’s the first time that I put together the photos with the text [first-hand accounts] at an exhibition as well as putting them in the book.

After that first edition I continued to meet veterans, and even since completing the new edition last year I’ve met others. For example, I recently met some Belgian soldiers who managed to get to England during the war and joined up with a brigade that took part in the Invasion of Normandy under British command.

How often did your father return after that first visit?

He would come every two or every five years. He would come for the big ceremonies and some little ones as well. Even if it wasn’t the sixth of June, whenever my parents would come to France they would usually drive to Normandy, even without me.

In the early years of his visits, my father and I would be at Sainte Mère Eglise and school children would come up to him and ask him for his autograph. My father said, “Why do they want an autograph from me? I’m just an old veteran.” I had to bug him to put on his medals. He didn’t want to wear them, it embarrassed him because he thought it would be showing off. He didn’t even bring them for the 65th [2009] though I thought he might. I hadn’t told him in advance, but he was going to get the Legion of Honor at the Invalides that year along with 50 other veterans. I didn’t want to tell him before he got to France because I knew that he would be angry about getting a medal now. Finally, I told him about it when he got to France. He was kind of embarrassed. He hadn’t brought his medals, so I called my sister and asked her to dig through the drawers in his bedroom to find them and to send them asap. She did, and the day of the ceremony I pinned them on him. He complained, “Where the hell did you get those?” But he was enthralled by the whole thing, a big ceremony—he thought it was incredible. Then we all went to Normandy for the 65th anniversary commemorations. They reserved a train for the veterans, red carpet at the station, the band of the Garde Républicaine playing Glen Miller, wine and foie gras on the train. Then a bus took us from Caen to the American Cemetery. My father sat with all of the veterans on the podium, where they all shook Obama’s hand and Sarkozy’s hand. Then we all went back to Paris, exhausted.

He and my mother both passed away a year later, in 2010. They wanted their ashes spread together at Utah Beach, which we did.

Why did you want to put together a new edition of your book?

Because this could be the der des ders, the last flame. There are at least 25 additional veterans in this edition. I’ve met a lot more British and Americans but especially British through British families who live or have vacation homes in Normandy. I’ve gotten to know a lot of people in Normandy over the years. The British and the Dutch get together a lot, say for a drink on a Thursday or Friday evening, and a lot of them have fathers who were veterans. So I’d meet the fathers when they came over. Many of them have become part of the Deep Respect Association, with which I’m involved. [Editor’s note: Created in 2010, Deep Respect is a Normandy-based non-profit whose mission is to preserve and transmit the memory of veterans of the Second World War who contributed to the success of Operation Overload and to help veterans who participated in the Battle of Normandy visit the region.] We take around the veterans when they visit and it’s super interesting listening to them talk about their battles.

A series of your portraits and stories from the book are now on permanent display at the Overlord Museum Ohama Beach that’s located at the round-about where one turns to enter the Normandy American Cemetery. How did that come about?

The museum houses a tremendous collection of war materials—tanks, artillery, much more—started in the 1970s by Michel Leloup. He presented some of it in a museum in Falaise but as he grew the collection he began looking for more space and for a location with potential to draw a wider audience. He died before the project to move it to the site near the American Cemetery was completed. It was opened in 2013 by his son Nicolas.

For the 70th anniversary, in 2014, I had an exhibition at the round-about at Omaha Beach where the big monuments are located. Nicolas saw the exhibition and asked if he could buy some of the photos. I said, “Sure.” He bought about five. Since the veterans in the some of the photographs were at the event, we got pictures of them with the photographs, which they signed, which helped promote the museum. Over the next few years, the museum really took off, so Nicolas decided to expand the museum to show more of the collection, and in part of it he’s now consecrated one long corridor to presenting about 70 of my photographs—a lot of which he bought and some of which I donated—along with the text of the stories the veterans told me. My daughter Leah did the scenography and the soundtrack of 40s music and various sounds (waves, planes, bombs) for the exhibition.

You’ve now been photographing veterans for 44 years. With so few Normandy veterans still with us, and very few able or willing to travel, where does your project go from here?

I’ll still see some veterans this year and possibly next. But since I am basically a portraitist, there will soon no longer be men to photograph. That means that the project is now passing into the archival stage. It’s important to show them. I want to help maintain through the show at the Invalides, the permanent exhibition at the museum and the book the memory of those who are or will soon no longer be around to share their stories first-hand. The portraits are a way of people getting to know these veterans as they were as young men and as they were when I met them.

Where to see Ian Patrick’s photographic work

– His personal website Ian Patrick Photographer.
– Permanent exhibition at the Overlord Museum, near the entrance to the Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer.
– The book: Héros Anonymes – Anonymous Heroes: D-Day Portraits. The captions and first-hand accounts of veterans are in both English and French. The book is available at major museums in the Normandy Landing Zone—the Overlord Museum, the Airborne Museum in Sainte Mère Eglise, the Arromanches Museum, the Utah Beach Museum and the Pegasus Bridge Museum—as well as at the Army Museum at the Invalides in Paris. It can also be ordered directly from the author by contacting him at ianpatrickphoto@gmail.com.
– Temporary exhibition at the Army Museum at the Invalides, June 1 to August 26, 2024. The exhibition is presented under the arcades surrounding the main courtyard. Entrance is free as it isn’t necessary to purchase to museum ticket in order to enter the courtyard. 129 rue de Grenelle, Paris.

© 2024. Interview conducted by Gary Lee Kraut.
All photos © Ian Patrick.

The post An Interview with Ian Patrick, Photographer of Normandy Veterans appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Admittedly, war touring isn’t for everyone. After all, that’s far from the Eiffel Tower, isn’t it? (Well, no, you can actually see the Eiffel Tower from an American war cemetery.) And you’d rather be drinking Champagne, right? (Well, the largest U.S. WWI monument in France actually overlooks Champagne vineyards at Château-Thierry.) And you’d rather visit the Gothic cathedrals of France than the war shines of Americans. (You mean like those that you’ll pass along the way?)

OK, I won’t try to convince you. But if you’ll give a look and listen to the presentation below, you’ll see and learn why someone—maybe not you, but you’ve got curious friends and relatives, right?—might want to visit these sights.

Don’t just take my word for it.

Earlier this year I met with John Wessels, Chief Operating Officer of the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), to ask if the ABMC would be willing to participate in a Zoom talk with me to explain to readers of France Revisited the interest of knowing about and one day visiting the American WWI sights of France. He readily agreed. There was then a question of finding the right person to co-present with me.

I’ve written many articles about touring American war sights in France relative to both the WWI and WWII, I’ve have given lectures in the United States on the subject, and I’ve personally taken numerous travelers to visit these sights. But I’m a generalist regarding travel and touring in France. So I needed a true specialist to join me for the presentation, preferably a military historian who’s visited the sights to be discussed who could speak authoritatively about both major events of the First World War and the creation and evolution of memorials, monuments and cemeteries. Thanks to John Wessels and to the ABMC’s media and communications duo of Hélène Chauvin in Paris and Ashley Byrnes in Arlington, we found the perfect specialist for the program: Ben Brands, the ABMC’s historian and a war veteran himself (Afghanistan).

I now invite you to watch the France Revisited “Conversation with an Expert” below in which Ben Brands and I speak about the American WWI memorials, monuments and cemeteries of France. This presentation—illustrated with numerous maps and photos—was conducted and recorded via Zoom on November 10, 2022, with a live audience of readers of France Revisited. Several segments were rerecorded shortly thereafter so as to resolve technical problems and for coherence.

The timeline below the video indicates the list of topics, events and sights along with the speaker, whether Ben Brands (BB) or myself (GLK). The full presentation lasts 1½ hours. If you wish to watch only portions of the presentation, I recommend that you watch it directly on Youtube and on full screen so that you can click or tap directly on the timeline in the Youtube description section in order to arrive at segments of particular interest to you and better view details of the images. Be sure to watch my introduction and Ben Brand’s conclusion to understand the underlying reasons for organizing this presentation.

Video timeline

0:00:00 Introduction by Gary Lee Kraut
0:05:40 Ben Brands presents the work of the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC)
0:07:12 Who is Ben Brands? What is his role as historian at the ABMC? His tour of duty as a company commander in Afghanistan.
0:12:22 A comparison between a WWII map of the Invasion of Normandy 1944 and WWI maps of northern and northeastern France and Belgium. (GLK)
0:15:24 American entrance into war. Pershing visits Lafayette’s tomb in the Picpus Cemetery in Paris. (BB)
0:18:39 The annual changing of the American flag over Lafayette’s tomb in Paris. (GLK)
0:19:30 Origin and evolution of the ABMC. (BB)
0:23:35 The Lafayette Escadrille Memorial. (BB)
0:27:41 The Suresnes American Cemetery. (GLK, BB)
0:32:00 Mont Valérien, a major French WWII memorial, a 5-minute walk from the Suresnes American Cemetery. (GLK)
0:34:17 The American Naval Monument at Brest. (BB)
0:36:39 Why didn’t the Germans intentionally harm the Allies’ WWI sights during WWII? American involvement in the Somme. The Somme American Cemetery. (BB)
0:40:35 Cantigny. (BB, GLK)
0:42:09 Amiens and the American Red Cross huts at the former Cosserat Textile Factory. (GLK)
0:45:01 Art Deco design and architecture in Saint Quentin and Reims. (GLK)
0:46:33 The American Monument at Château-Thierry, Paul Cret, Belleau Wood, the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery. (BB)
0:57:52 The French-American House if Friendship in Château-Thierry. (GLK)
0:58:34 The Oise-Aisne American Cemetery. (BB)
1:01:04 Quentin Roosevelt, a president’s son killed in aerial combat. (BB)
1:05:08 Anne Morgan and the National Museum of French American Cooperation in the Château de Blérancourt. (GLK)
1:05:56 The Saint Mihiel American Cemetery and the Montsec American Monument. (BB)
1:09:20 Philanthopist Belle Skinner and the village of Hattonchâtel. (GLK)
1:10:18 Verdun and the Douaumont Ossuary. (GLK)
1:11:56 The Montfaucon American Monument. (BB)
1:14:18 African-American soldiers: segregation, heroes, awards and burials. Jewish grave markers. (BB)
1:20:52 The Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. (BB)
1:23:09 The Romagne German Cemetery, Jean-Paul de Vries’ Romagne 14-18, Sergeant York. (GLK)
1:25:17 The French and American Tombs of the Unknown Soldier. (BB)
1:27:25 Conclusions by Gary and Ben.

Sights discussed in this presentation are located in the Paris region and the departments of Finistère (Brittany), Somme (Upper France), Aisne (Upper France) and Meuse (Eastern France).

Text © 2022, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Where and Why to Visit the American WWI Sights of France appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Yet travel writers also dream of occasionally breaking out from the truth and using their knowledge of people, culture and place as the background for the enjoyment and conflicts of fictional character. Some then go on to produce stories and novels of great seriousness and psychological drama. Others prefer a lighter touch, as Corinne does in her new novel French Ghost, a romantic cozy mystery published in January 2022 by The Wild Rose Press.

French Ghost is the first of a three-part series featuring Melody Layne, an American ghost writer who gets stranded in Paris when the over-sexed, unloved French movie star who hired her to ghostwrite his memoir accidentally (or not) drowns before the interviews begin. A tall, dark and sexy Spaniard then offers her an alternative book contract, and more, leading Melody on a quest for truth and near-truth that leads her throughout Paris as well as to Rouen, Vichy, Bordeaux, Dijon and Cannes, with lots of Chardonnay, pains au chocolat, fine dining and some steamy romance along the way.

Corinne previously published Temporary Engagement, a New York-based romance published under the penname Cairenn Lawless.

Gary Lee Kraut interviewed Corinne LaBalme about her new book and the place of travel and travel writing in her novels.

What does your travel writing have in common with the romance and cozy mystery that you also write? And how does the former feed into the latter?

Travel writing is like a treasure hunt. It’s a quest, and what’s more romantic and mysterious than the time-honored quest narrative? Even if the quest of the editorial assignment can be as prosaic as hunting for “The Five Best Hotel Breakfasts in Bordeaux,” it still qualifies as a quest. Who knows what’s hiding in that innocent-looking jar of razzleberry jelly? Usually, it’s just razzleberries, but you’re there, on the scene, to investigate that jam, taste it, and report on it.

Until the 21st century made fake news into a dangerous art form, telling the truth (or aiming to tell the truth) has been the cornerstone of journalism. It’s always been my goal, even when doing recon for an article about crepes in Paris.

That’s why fiction is such a relief. You’re no longer constrained by facts. Fiction isn’t about what happened, it’s about the infinite possibilities of what might have happened. In French Ghost I was able to take facts that I’ve gleaned as a travel writer and use them as the background or décor for the fictional story that takes place in France.

French Ghost mostly takes place in Paris, but Melody Layne becomes quite the traveler over her first few months in Paris. She goes to Rouen, Vichy, Cannes, Bordeaux and Dijon. Why did you choose those cities in particular?

I’ve spent years as a travel writer, freelancing for the New York Times, for the luxury destination newsletter La Belle France, and now for the very congenial France Revisited. These are all cities that I’ve visited and written about. Paris is where I live but during lockdown, I used this book to “virtually” revisit so many French towns that I’ve written about for magazines. I missed them!

I especially wanted to highlight Vichy in this book. It’s had a very bad rep since WWII when it was the seat of the Pétain government but the town is really worth a visit. Vichy has been a resort for over 2,000 years (the Roman legions were especially fond of its healing waters) and the royals and uber-rich riff-raff who built stately pleasure domes around the spa spared no costs in their efforts to out-do the tsars next door. The main avenues are flanked by a delightfully flamboyant medley of overblown pagodas, ginger-breaded castles, Moorish haciendas, Gothic gargoyles and turreted fortresses.

Yes, I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the Napoleon III Festival in Vichy and of the Cannes Film Festival ? Were they as fun to write as they were to read?

I didn’t get to attend the festival in Vichy on my last trip there—wrong season—but there were posters and reminders about it everywhere. The festival was perfect for my purposes: I wanted Melody to preen in fancy dress and give history professor Carlos an opportunity to display his knowledge of Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie.

I also enjoyed writing about the Cannes Film Festival which, let’s face it, is just a snotty trade fair with celebs walking around in borrowed evening gowns in broad daylight. Taneesha, my character who freelances for a Hollywood studio, is based on a Belgian friend who babysits hapless American movie stars in France. And I really enjoyed writing about Charlene Trent, the booze-challenged, silicon-enhanced B-movie actress who’s in Cannes to promote Beach Zombies III. Charlene is crude, class-less, but she’s a gas.

Did you have to do much additional research for French Ghost beyond what you already knew?

I love research, but books 1 and 2 of this trilogy treat facets of French life—food, fashion, cinema—that I know quite well. However, for Book 3, I am definitely all over the internet map trying to figure out what makes an influencer hot.

Will Melody continue to introduce readers to various regions and aspects of France in books 2 and 3? Without giving too much away, what can you tell us about them?

Melody’s big trips in Book 2 take her to Switzerland, specifically Vevey and Geneva. She does something on the shores of Lac Leman that I did myself many years ago. I guess I inspired myself on that little episode.

Your protagonist occasionally pals around with a well-known food writer who seems to be dining out every day, everything from high gastronomy to fancy pizza. Is she based on anyone you know? Do you enjoy restaurant writing?

Jenna Bardet, the food writer, is based on little old moi. While I was writing for La Belle France, I spent two weeks on the road each month reporting on hotels and restaurants and the other two weeks writing about those experiences. I really enjoyed it at the time, but now I’m rather glad to be writing about something other than pea soup and grilled grouse. I’ve also become a bit too vegetarian to do that job well anymore.

Do you like Chardonnay and pains au chocolat as much as Melody Layne does?

Yes on Chardonnay. No on the pains au chocolat. I’ve never been wild about French breakfast pastry. Correction: I used to like croissants. Years ago, the bakeries sold two kinds of croissant: curled-up ones baked with lard and straight ones (more expensive) baked with butter. The ones made with lard were much lighter and fluffier but they went out of style. Those lard croissants, if I could taste one now, would be my personal Proustian madeleine.

The Wild Rose Press will be publishing another romance of yours outside of this series. Does it take place in France?

Summer People, which will hopefully on the bookshelves by July, is a Cape Cod mystery-romance that takes place in Brewster, Massachusetts. Like my fictional writing about France, those are places that I know well since I spent most of my childhood vocations on Cape Cod. The protagonist, an antique collector who’s got a statue with some rather murky provenance at her gallery, doesn’t much care for Europe. She’s got a French-Canadian accent, and a rude concierge at a Monte Carlo hotel once made fun of it. That woman sure does hold a grudge.

French Ghost by Corinne LaBalme, available in ebook and paperback. Published by The Wild Rose Press. Available from your preferred online booksellers and select bookshops.
Temporary Engagement by Cairenn Lawless (aka Corinne LaBalme), available in ebook and paperback on Amazon, on ebook only on Barnes and Noble and Kobo.
Corinne LaBalme’s numerous contributions to France Revisited can be found here, with more on the way.

© 2022, France Revisited.

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The Missouri-born entertainer, resistance fighter and civil rights activist arrived in Paris in 1925 and soon found fame in France and internationally. She became a naturalized French citizen in 1937, losing her American citizenship in the process (while also gaining an accent on the e in her first name).

The Pantheon, a major monument of the 18th-century, was built as a church then came to serve as the secular tomb of the great men and, more recently, women of France.

The first Black woman and first U.S.-born individual to be “Pantheonized,” Josephine Baker joins statesmen, scientists, authors, resistance leaders, economists, architects, generals, philosophers and others who, at the time of their induction, were held to represent exemplary values of France. Since 1958, individuals have been selected for Pantheonization by decision of the president.

While Baker’s remains are buried in Monaco, her presence in the Pantheon is marked by a cenotaph bearing her name and containing soil from places where she lived: the United States, France, Monaco).

Follow the steps to Joséphine Baker’s cenotaph in vault 13 of the crypt of the Pantheon in this video:

Video and text by Gary Lee Kraut. © 2021. All rights reserved.
Music: Opening of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue performed by George Gershwin and Paul Whiteman. Creative Commons.

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Watch below the wide-ranging video interview with Kristen Grauer, the U.S. Consul General in Marseille, conducted by France Revisited’s Gary Lee Kraut on October 8, 2021. (With apologies for pronouncing Madame Consul General’s title as “counsel” instead of “consul.”) Also see further below Marseille & les Américains, a documentary produced with assistance by the consulate about the U.S. presence in southeastern France during and immediately after WWII, from August 1944 until early 1946.

Timeline for the 25-minute video interview
00:00 – Introduction and Kristen Grauer’s background as a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State.
02:33 – How does the U.S. Consulate General in Marseille help Americans in southern France and Monaco? Lost passports, missing persons, natural disasters and civil unrest.
08:18 – Will the U.S. Consulate get me out of jail if I’m arrested?
10:07 – The U.S. Consulate’s involvement in American economic development.
12:21 – The consulate and the U.S. Sixth Fleet.
13:14 – Operation Dragoon and the invasion of southern France, “the Second D-Day,” in August 1944. (See further information about the landing and about Marseille and the Americans at the bottom of this page.)
17:03 – Kristen Grauer speaks about American WWII heroes Varian Fry, who helped writers, artists and other anti-nazis flee persecution in Europe (the square in front of the consulate has been renamed in his honor) and Vice Consul Hiram Bingham, who bypassed the official policies of the United States in order to provide visas and passports to allow many to obtain visas allowing them escape France.
19:11 – Kristen Grauer’s travels in and impressions of southern France and Monaco.
22:34 – Does Kristen Grauer enjoy the anise-flavored spirit pastis and the rosé wines of Provence? Does she play pétanque?

Kristen Graeur is a career diplomat who previously served in France as the economic officer at the American Embassy in Paris (2010-2013). She most recently served at the U.S. Department of State as the Deputy Director in the Economic Bureau’s Office of Economic Policy and Public Diplomacy. Earlier in her career, she completed tours as an embassy economic officer in Baghdad, Iraq, and Moscow, Russia, and as a political officer in Monrovia, Liberia and Cotonou, Benin. As a career diplomat rather than a political appointee, her assignments don’t necessarily follow the election cycle. She has held her current position as Consul General in Marseille, a 3-year assignment, since the summer of 2020. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan, completed a mid-career Master of Science in National Resource Strategy at the U.S. National Defense University’s Eisenhower School, and is a graduate of the Foreign Service Institute’s long-term economic course. She is married and has two sons.

The U.S. Consulate General in Marseille covers southern France (Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and Occitanie), Corsica and Monaco. For more information about services provided by the consulate, including its location and contact information, see here.

Operations Dragoon 1944 and Marseille & the Americans

Even among the millions who’ve toured the D-Day Beaches in Normandy, few American visitors to France are aware of the second major D-Day landing in France during the summer of 1944. Code-named Operation Dragoon, it involved the amphibious invasion on August 15, 1944 by the U.S. Seventh Army on a stretch of the Riviera just west of Saint Tropez.

After penetrating inland, forces veered west toward the Rhone Valley. Free French forces then entered the scene to capture the ports of Toulon and Marseille. Led by the Americans, together they pushing German forces to withdraw from the south. Within four weeks, the U.S. forces that had entered from the Riviera linked up with some of those that had earlier entered from Normandy to continue their northern and eastern drive.

Travelers to the region can visit the Rhone American Cemetery in Draguinan, 25 miles from the coast. It’s the burial site of 851 servicemen, with an additional 294 names inscribed on the Wall of the Missing.

After the southern landing and for the following two years, there were major American bases between Marseille and Aix-en-Provence through which two million soldiers would transit. The Consulate General assisted in the creation of a documentary about that American presence. The 4-part documentary entitled Marseille & les Américains is available in French and in English. Here’s Part 1 of the English version.

The Consulate General in Marseille also recently supported an upcoming film on Jamaican-American Harlem Renaissance author Claude Mckay who lived in Marseille from 1924-1929.

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… her streets were cold and gray. It was March 1952. My husband had been recalled for the Korean War and sent to France as part of a bomber wing Eisenhower promised NATO in the early days of the Cold War.

Twenty-four years old at the time, married almost a year, I arrived in the city of my dreams ready to be seduced by her warmth and historic charm. Expecting beauty and light in a city with echoes of Victor Hugo, Degas and Maurice Chevalier, we got somber darkness and bone chilling weather. We drove through grim streets, rundown houses on either side, to our hotel, a turn-of-the-century hostelry with a shabby lobby and a cage elevator. My husband had selected the one-star Napoleon Bonaparte, partly for its price, 3500 francs (about $10) for a double room, and partly for its view. The 1952 Michelin indicated that it overlooked the Arc de Triomphe. Obviously, M. Michelin had made his notes on a clear day. On this day, fog and drizzle prevented us from seeing more than an outline of that venerable monument or anything else. Looking out the hotel window, my only thought was: what was all the fuss about? I had traveled thousands of miles on the North Atlantic in February, retching all the way, to celebrate our first anniversary in this renowned citadel of love. For this? In 1952, my feminism had yet fully to emerge. Tired and disappointed, I had only one recourse. I burst into tears.

Luckily, my husband, who was also let down at his first view of Paris, had been trained for bravery in World War II. In his if-we-have-to-be-in-Paris-for-our-first-anniversary-let’s-make-the-best-of-it voice, he said, ”Let’s go out to dinner.”

We did, and even before we had our first sip of French champagne and realized it wasn’t imported, the joy of being together, wherever, prevailed. In the remaining three or four days of that first stay, although the dreary weather didn’t lift, our spirits did, and despite the gloom we started to feel some of the magnetism Ernest Hemingway or Gertrude Stein must have felt.

Notwithstanding the gloomy weather, it was heartbreakingly apparent France had still not gotten her act together. In 1952, six and a half years after the end of World War II, the grime of war coated even the most beautiful buildings, causing them to appear proud but worn. The Louvre, Notre Dame and Sacré Coeur were like elderly actors who hadn’t worked for a long time. The Champs-Elysées was only beginning to wake up with a few fashionable shops occupying some of the large storefronts that had been shuttered for many years during and after the war.

Even if I had not been wearing a bright yellow topcoat (from my trousseaux) when all the Parisian women were still in black, we would have been very conspicuous driving our 1950 Pontiac. Few Frenchmen had cars at the time, and we had ours only because the Air Force, which wouldn’t pay my way over to join my husband, was willing to pay his car’s way over. So much for family values in 1952.

Because there were so few automobiles in Paris and so little traffic, diagonal parking was allowed on the sidewalks along the Champs. Wherever we parked, we would come out to find our car surrounded with curious onlookers. The French were fascinated with American cars. People would touch the doors, the hood or the windows as if to share ownership for a moment. These observers who had no idea how our car had gotten there must have seen us as a rich American couple. Little did they know that the car was owned mostly by the bank, and the exchange rate was so advantageous that a Second Lieutenant’s salary allowed us to, if not quite live it up, indulge in a few more ooh-la-lahs than we might have at the same time in the U.S..

We could afford to eat in restaurants then we could only dream of today: Lapérouse, La Tour D’Argent, Lasserre. We could walk right into any museum or the Eiffel Tower, no waiting. We bought fine leather gloves for $5 a pair and with the purchase got a handful of samples of the leading French perfumes: Chanel #5, Arpège, Shalimar.

On that first visit, VE Day was still a living memory, and we were the symbols of liberation. We were treated with respect and admiration; the general thinking of the day seemed to be: if we were American, we had to be good. Not too hard to take for a young soldier and his bride. Rain and all, Paris had begun to claim our hearts.

The next time I saw Paris was in May of that same year. We drove up from Bordeaux, where my husband was stationed, with a windshield that had been shattered by May Day demonstrators. The Communists were expressing their opposition to the American military presence in France. Spare parts for our car were only available in Paris. Tough assignment. We had to go back.

The sun shone for the four or five days we were there. The trees were in leaf, the flowers were in bloom, the Boulevards looked Grand: the buildings that had appeared grim and sad only two months before, although no cleaner, now seemed resplendent with their softly rounded corners, balconies and mansard roofs. Lovers walked along the Seine, kissing in public. We held hands. Book stalls dotted the quays, and the Bateau Mouche had begun regular trips back and forth on the river. We were smitten. We hated to leave.

Once my husband had been transferred to Laon and we lived in nearby Soissons, 62 miles northeast of Paris, we were only an hour by train or car to the capital. Weekends, we would pack a bag, toss it in the car, and drive into “town.” Since our living costs in the small hotel where we were staying in Soissons equaled my husband’s salary (married couples without children were not given living quarters by the Air Force, just an allowance for housing) we depended on the small commission checks forwarded by my husband’s previous employer, and the favorable rate of exchange, to finance our weekend excursions. Mindful of our limited resources, we would find a small hotel, nothing as grand as the Napoleon Bonaparte, ask to see a room, check it out for fleas by shaking the curtains and bedspread, and if it proved to be insect free, check in. From here we would get dressed in our stateside finery and go out on the town to the Follies Bergère, the Lido or a small club with walls draped in dark red velvet where Edith Piaf, the Little Sparrow, sang in her sad waifish voice. Very often we would end up at Les Halles for onion soup at two o’clock in the morning before returning to our creepy but flea-less room.

By the time we were shipped back to the States, or rather my husband and his car were—I went on my own—Paris had become a part of us. Never mind the tourists who had come before. Forget those who would come after us. It was our town; our love.

The last time I saw Paris, her streets were cold and gray. It was April 2001. My husband and I had celebrated our fiftieth anniversary in March and decided to go back to the scene of our first anniversary. Remembering the weather on our first trip, we decided to wait until April. But the day we arrived was misty and overcast, and that was the best day of the week. On the drive in from De Gaulle Airport, we saw industrial plants, hotels, ordinary buildings. Except for the signs in French, we could have been entering any American city, until, all at once, in the distance the Eiffel Tower came into view, and then the street names became familiar: We were crossing the Rue St. Honoré, the Rue de Rivoli. We were at the Place de la Concorde, and suddenly we were driving over the Seine to the Left Bank. Our taxi driver took us to the Boulevard St. Germain where he turned onto a narrow street, Rue de Jacob. This is where our small Hôtel des Marronniers stood. This time I didn’t cry, but a few tears did gather as we entered the lobby and the tiny garden restaurant beyond. Because we were not alone. Having an early breakfast was our whole family: our two daughters and their husbands, and their children, our grandchildren. They had come to help us celebrate our fiftieth anniversary.

It rained off and on all week, even sleeted one day. The temperature hovered at 50; the lines were blocks long at the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and the Eiffel Tower. Our umbrellas dripped as we entered the Café de Flore for an aperitif. The view from the top of Notre Dame was mostly of other tourists. The banks of the Seine were flooded because of the “unusual” rain. It didn’t matter. We were here surrounded by our family. Paris never looked lovelier.

© 2021, Lyla Blake Ward, for first publication on France Revisited, francerevisited.com.

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Baldwin felt the burden of race and identity in America from the time he was a shy, but precocious child in Harlem. Born out of wedlock to Berdis Jones who bore eight more children when she married Reverend David Baldwin, James was humiliated, physically abused, and told repeatedly that he was ugly by the man he called father. Young James was aware of the boundaries set by white America and, indeed, the boundaries accepted by blacks. He recalls in The Fire Next Time, “the fear I heard in my father’s voice” when he realized that James believed he “could do anything a white boy could do.” Early on, however, teachers recognized his intelligence. One, Orwilla Miller, saw his devotion as a reader and talent as a writer. She convinced his reluctant stepfather, who deeply mistrusted whites, to let her take the 10-year-old to films and plays. Baldwin credits her with encouraging his intellectual development and they remained friends over the years. Orwilla called him Jimmy, as did friends and family all his life.

Baldwin probed race and identity relentlessly as an expat in Paris. In “The New Lost Generation,” an article in the July 11, 1961 Esquire Magazine, Baldwin attributes his decision to leave America to his recognition that attempts to deal with racism and inhumanity through political or social systems was a process that always led to “failure, elimination, and rejection.”

Considering realities such as the plight of blacks in the US, the Holocaust in Europe, and Hiroshima, he concluded that “all political systems . . . seemed morally bankrupt.” Dealing with issues of hate, intolerance, homophobia and alienation on a personal level was equally perilous as exemplified by the suicide of a close friend two years earlier who jumped from The George Washington Bridge in New York because of the relentless fear of living life as a black man in America. Considering the impossibility of ever attaining fulfillment as an ambitious, gay, black intellectual in the United States, Baldwin sought life in Paris to find the long heralded “refuge from American madness” that generations of artists and writers hoped to discover in the City of Light. More importantly, Baldwin wanted to explore and define his identity and “accept his own vision of the world”; this, he felt, was impossible for him in the United States of 1948.

Baldwin did not find utopia in Paris—and he did not expect it. In his 1972 memoir, No Name in the Street, he states that “I had never, thank God—and certainly not once I found myself living there—been even remotely romantic about Paris”; in fact, he had considered going to Israel to live on a Kibbutz. His flight “had not been to Paris, but simply away from America.” He later recalls, however, feeling the lure of Paris when he studied French as a high school student in Harlem with poet Countee Cullen. He credits reading Balzac for his understanding of Parisian institutions and conventions, but upon arrival he came to grips with everyday realities of being poor in Paris directly. He remarks in Esquire that surviving meant “not expecting to be warm in one’s hotel room,” and in Notes of a Native Son that poor expats, Africans and students in the Latin Quarter lived in “ageless, sinister-looking hotels” and were forced to “continually choose between cigarettes and cheese for lunch.” There was nothing resembling an American toilet, and toilet paper was day-old newsprint. He admits to “moments” of longing for familiar American comforts and missing family, but when he thinks of what he so resolutely left behind in America, he chooses to adapt and continue his search for identity.

Baldwin was lonely at first and mourns that he and other poor expats were “surrounded by quite beautiful and sensual people, who did not, however, find us beautiful and sensual.” Parisians generally kept travelers “at an unmistakable arm’s length” even though comporting themselves with “impenetrable politesse.” He recalls that it was a long time before he made a French friend and even longer before he saw the inside of a French home. In the essay, “Encounter on the Seine,” from Notes of a Native Son, he states that “the American Negro in Paris is very nearly the invisible man” ignored not just by the French but by Americans in Paris. In an “undemocratic discrimination,” white Americans did not expect to see blacks in Paris. When they did, they assumed the Negro to be “a needy and deserving martyr or the soul of rhythm.” While meeting a white countryman in Paris did not evoke fear as it would in the US, it did not inspire a bond of community between compatriots abroad.

In Paris, Baldwin became aware of France’s problems with race from its colonial past. He affirms in “Encounter on the Seine” that the African in France has “endured privation, injustice, medieval cruelty” and exploitation in his native land. In addition, he cites the “intangibly precarious” existence the African has in Paris as a colonial desiring freedom for his country. But Baldwin also notes that this “bitter ambition is shared by his fellow colonials, with whom he has a common language.” When the African in Paris meets a fellow-countryman, there is camaraderie, unlike the “lifetime of conditioning” that often keeps the white American traveler at an uneasy distance from the black American. The African has “not yet endured the utter alienation of himself from his people and his past.” A salient difference for Baldwin is that the Africans had the solace of belonging to a culture, the possibility of a homeland and a people to which they could return. The American Black, in contrast, is a “hybrid,” with the “memory of the auction block” and alienation from his own homeland rooted in America’s violent racial past.

In No Name in the Street, Baldwin recounts that after returning from a visit to the US in 1952, he “began to realize that I could not find any of the Algerians I knew.” He discovers that “Algerians were being murdered in the streets, and corralled into prisons, and being dropped into the Seine, like flies,” awakening him to the fight for Algerian independence and the consequences for Algerians in France. He muses on the irony of his coming to France for “the comparative freedom of my life in Paris” as he witnesses the harassment and abuse of Algerians. Still, he recognizes a shared, violent history of colonialism and concludes that he “was still a part of Africa, even though I had been carried out of it nearly four hundred years before.”

In the video below, James Baldwin expresses some of this when asked about his relationship with Paris during an appearance before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on December 10, 1986, a year before his death from stomach cancer. Listen to the full three minutes of his answer. (After reading this article, consider returning to watch the entire 55-minute video for a sense of Baldwin’s point of view, the type of questions in the air at the time and their relationship with America and the world today.)

Despite his initial poverty, loneliness, and familiar encounters with prejudice, Baldwin came to love Paris and lived there on and off for the next nine years, returning to the city and its environs after time spent in places including Switzerland, Corsica, Turkey and several visits to the United States. Upon arrival in 1948, he connected with the editors of an avant-garde English language publication, Zero, who took him to the second floor of Les Deux Magots, a regular haunt of artists and intellectuals since the 1890s including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Picasso among others. Richard Wright, the celebrated American author of Native Son, who had long encouraged Baldwin in his writing, was there to greet him. That night Wright helped him find a room at Hôtel de Rome on Boulevard Saint-Michel. Despite the camaraderie between the two, the next year, Zero published Baldwin’s essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel”—later part of Notes of a Native Son—rebuking literature that attempted to show the brutality of racism without a realistic representation of humanity. Richard Wright’s acclaimed Native Son was among the books chastised for the portrayal of its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, as someone whose “life is defined by his hatred and his fear” rather than in more complex ways. It caused a feud between the two that erupted publicly at Brasserie Lipp. Nevertheless, by 1950 Baldwin was hailed in Commentary Magazine as “the most promising Negro writer since Richard Wright.” They continued their relationship, somewhat tenuously after the outburst over the article, and Baldwin maintained his respect for Wright’s importance as a writer and influence throughout his life.

In James Baldwin, a Biography, Baldwin’s biographer, archivist and friend David Leeming states that once in Paris he eventually met some of his acquaintances from the lively Greenwich Village scene he had left in New York, and that before “long had no shortage of English-speaking friends in Paris.” He and other struggling writers and artists lived at the Hôtel Verneuil on rue de Verneuil in the 7th arrondissement. There he was part of a vibrant but impoverished group of men and women who shared rooms and friendship. He also found compassion in Mme Dumont, the Corsican woman who owned the hotel. Early in 1949, shortly after arriving in Paris, Baldwin fell ill. She exempted him from rent and cared for him for three months, allowing him to feel human kindness amidst the cool indifference of Paris. Leeming also notes that Baldwin “maintained non-Bohemian friendships as well” and eventually frequented the homes of “liberal, white, mostly Jewish middle-class Americans in Paris.” It was at dinner parties at these homes that he “met other American writers such as Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth.”

As he became integrated with life in Paris, Baldwin came to love walking through Les Halles, investigating the clubs and sex shops of Pigalle, and eating at Chez Inez, a jazz club and restaurant on Rue Champollion in the Latin Quarter specializing in fried chicken and emerging talent. Over time and with growing reputation, he met luminaries including Norman Mailer, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Truman Capote. In 1953, artist Beauford Delaney, cited by biographer Leeming as “the most important influence in his life,” moved to Paris. A close friend and mentor from his Greenwich Village days, Baldwin credits Delaney for being “the exemplar of the black man as functioning, self-supporting artist.” Delaney eventually moved to “an old house surrounded by a garden in Clamart,” outside of Paris, which became a refuge for Baldwin for many years.

Despite his increasing comfort with life in Paris and the jobs he picked up reviewing books or writing articles, Baldwin struggled financially for years and often felt lonely. He took loans from friends and family, but it exacted a toll on his sense of self-worth. Once, Leeming notes, a desperate Baldwin “agreed to take a job as a singer in an Arab night club” until a friend “saved him from that job by employing him as a clerk.”

It was in Paris that James Baldwin finally became comfortable with his homosexuality and found love. According to his biographer, “Lucien Happersberger was a Swiss who had left home in search of excitement and success in Paris.” Baldwin declared that in Lucien he found “the love of my life.” They shared an intimacy for two years that was new to Baldwin. Their complex connection lasted in various iterations of lover and mostly friend for thirty-nine years. Baldwin wanted a permanence that Lucien did not; Lucien married three times and fathered two children. With Lucien, as well as in other relationships, Baldwin had experiences that would surface in Giovanni’s Room, his beautiful and tragic 1956 novel about a gay, white American in Paris who comes to terms with homosexuality, denial and brutality. The bar in the novel, Guillaume’s, is reported to be modeled after Reine Blanche and Fiacre, gay bars frequented by Baldwin in Paris.

A painful experience for Baldwin was his arrest and imprisonment in Paris for eight days over Christmas in 1949. A New York acquaintance, a traveler, spotted Baldwin in a café and decided to move from his hotel near Gare Saint-Lazare to the Grand Hôtel de Bac where Baldwin was living. It was a dismal lodging described in his biography as one of the “enormous, dark, cold, and hideous establishments” typical in those years. The man brought with him a sheet with the name of his previous hotel on it. Since Baldwin was having problems getting the hotel to change linens, it wound up on his bed. Two policemen came looking for the stolen sheet and found it. He and the acquaintance were charged and imprisoned until the 27th of December when the case was dismissed. The experience was frightening for someone new to the language, to handcuffs, to the putrid shed in which men were initially squeezed together with a hole in the center for a toilet, and to the isolation of a cell. One of the interesting observations about the ordeal that Baldwin relates in Notes of a Native Son is that “the Frenchmen in whose hands I found myself were no better or worse than their American counterparts”; under arrest he felt fear and the unknown as he would have in the States. But he also notes that in the “commissariat I was not a despised black man” as he might have been in America. In fact, he observes that in New York he would have been described as “what” he was—a black man. In Paris he was described as “who” he was—an American.

Over time, Baldwin began to concentrate on writing and, in doing so, to explore his vision of himself as a man and as an American. It was in Paris that he began to seriously develop his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, setting up shop, like generations of writers seeking to escape their unheated rooms, on the second floor of Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore. Largely biographical, it recounts one day of a boy’s 14th year in Harlem where he awakens to the reality of racism, brutality within family and injustice on the streets and begins to pursue his own identity. The story had been incubating in Baldwin for years; it confronted his own history within family and in the racial divide of New York. It was published by Knopf in 1952 while he was visiting family in New York for three months. When he returned to Paris, Baldwin arrived with the resources so lacking when he first saw Paris in 1948. Following its publication, he won a Guggenheim fellowship and in 1956 he published Giovanni’s Room which is set in both Paris and the south of France. The novel was written mostly in France but not only in Paris. Baldwin also wrote essays in his early years in Paris that would become part of Notes of a Native Son.

In writing Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin was able to begin unlocking the identity he longed to discover and define when he first left New York. Leeming points to its “theme of the destructive fear and guilt at the base of racism.” This would be explored by Baldwin throughout his life’s work. By writing much of the text in Paris, he was—like so many writers in the past—able to look to look back to America with a new clarity through the lens of an observer. He had the freedom to be a writer and live without the fear and impenetrable barriers he felt in New York. His biography notes that in his “Paris years he never lost sight of his need to confront his ‘inheritance’ as an American black in order to achieve his ‘birthright’ as a man.” In 1955, in his introduction to Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin declares that “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Baldwin spoke no French when he arrived in 1948, but he did eventually become fluent, as you can hear in this extract from a 1973 interview in French.

Baldwin never idealized Paris or saw it through the “charm of legend” as he referenced the appeal it had for so many Americans; however, he believed that his life “began during that first year in Paris.” Baldwin returned to America for a time during the height of the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s. He traveled the country as a writer as well as an activist. He came to see first-hand the American South where so much violence was taking place. He met with leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Meredith and Thurgood Marshall and took part in the March on Washington in August 1963. He also raised support for the march from expats in Paris.

In 1962 he published The Fire Next Time, his seminal compilation of two essays that warn about white America’s need to confront and examine the reality of historic and systemic racism. It brought him international fame. In it he describes the “rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape, death, and humiliation” of “the Negro’s past” in America. He decries that blacks still feel “fear by day and night” and “doubt that [they are] worthy of life.” It is also a text, however, that concludes with the interesting and hopeful metaphor that “relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks” must “like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others.”

Once more, Baldwin left America. He traveled to Africa, Israel, Turkey, England, Switzerland and America again over the years, returning to Paris frequently but declaring himself to be a traveler rather than belonging to any country. (He also referred to himself as a “commuter” between France and the United States.) Leeming reveals that while visiting Paris in 1958, Baldwin “realized that he had changed a great deal in the years since his first arrival in Paris. Paris was no longer home, but it had been an important place in his life.” Later, after more travel and living in Turkey for a few years, Baldwin returned to France in 1970, this time to the south. For the last seventeen years of his life Baldwin spent a large part of every year in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. His home there became a refuge for his thoughts and writing, as well as a magnet for writers, artists, and intellectuals including Marc Chagall, Ella Fitzgerald, Yves Montand, Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone and others.

Baldwin’s need to explore race and identity and to define his life as a writer was pivotal in his decision to leave America in 1948, and he reflects on his decision to come to Paris in the 1961 Esquire article. “I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have difficulty accepting. Which is simply, that a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others.” He adds that Paris and Europe gave him “the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself. No artist can survive without this acceptance.”

© 2020, Elizabeth Esris
First published on France Revisited, October 2020.

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Photographs from nearly half a century ago lead Elizabeth Esris to revisit her first encounter with Paris with her then-boyfriend (now husband) and to rejoice in the timeless nature of travel discovery.

* * *

During lockdown I can travel virtually anywhere with a few clicks: to a book club in Pennsylvania, to an aperitif with friends in France, to an opera at the Met, to exercise with Olympic athletes, to meditate with Oprah. But I miss real travel and find myself journeying through memory as I spot mementoes around the house.

Two such souvenirs remind me of my first trip to Paris when I was 21, in 1971. With backpack and boyfriend—later my husband—I had set out on a “grand tour” of Europe.

Reaching up to a high shelf in a closet, I find a cherished copy of “Paris Match” that I had bought in Center City Philadelphia in August 1970. The tattered cover proclaims, “La Mini-Jupe est Morte” and foretells of radical changes dictated by the capital of fashion. From the mid-60s to that summer, mini skirts were de rigueur for young women. I remember being angry at the thought that mini-skirts, emblematic of the freedom, defiance and promise of my generation, could be so easily dismissed. But when I went to Paris the following summer, I saw calf-length skirts that I would soon be wearing and long, knit triangular shawls that draped the shoulder and reached down the back to the sandaled feet of beautiful Parisians. For me, it was the most romantic look I had ever seen. When I came home, my grandmother made a long shawl for me, and I wore it in the fall with my peasant skirts like an acclamation for haute couture on my college campus.

The “Paris Match” further reminds me of the worn copy of Julie Child and Simone Beck’s, Mastering the Art of French Cooking tucked between the French cookbooks in my kitchen. I purchased it when I returned from Paris that summer. I was determined to make croissants for my family, to amaze them by baking the most delicious pastry I had ever tasted. After twelve hours and endless handfuls of butter, I produced a cracker-thin crescent that brought me to tears. Still, I smile when I recall it and realize that my journey to Paris was more than a visit to monuments and literary mystique; Paris infused me with an urgency to make it part of my identity.

When I met Mike in college I confided in him a resolve that had been with me since devouring Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Balzac and Hemingway and being introduced to Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel in Madame Cooperstein’s French 1 class: I was going to explore Europe and see Paris while I was young, no matter what. I was leaving at the end of the spring semester with or without him.

By June we had a copy of Arthur Frommer’s Europe on 5 Dollars a Day, Eurail Passes and our paltry savings from after school jobs along with his Bar Mitzvah stash. We planned that the final stops on our travels would be the South of France and finally Paris. Paris was to be savored and left to steep within us for the flight home and beyond.

Mike and I purchased backpacks that are unrecognizable in today’s wilderness outfitted world. They had bulky, exterior aluminum frames onto which was strapped a thick nylon bag. As we crossed borders from West Germany to Poland and back into the free world on our summer journey, we bought and sewed patches on our packs to declare our wanderings. They hang in our basement today as mementoes of two travelers landing in Frankfurt so naïve that we didn’t know to exchange dollars for Deutsche Marks before trying to pay a bus fare.

Preparations for the trip also led us to buy matching pairs of the first true athletic shoes we had ever seen—Adidas. They were made of white leather with three distinctive black stripes and had a sturdy, supportive construction unlike the relaxed canvas sneakers we had worn since childhood; we were confident that our feet would survive the extensive walking we anticipated. Adidas were new to us, but they were sensations in Eastern Europe where people stopped us to see the shoes up close and to ask how Mike could have cut his jeans to make shorts. Levi’s and Lee’s and Wrangler jeans were highly prized by young Europeans who were fascinated by everything American.

We finally reached Paris after more than six weeks of travel, arriving at Gare de Lyon on a night train from Nice, a diesel that lumbered on for 12 hours and clanged into the station. We were tired and anxious to reach the pension we had selected from our guidebook. With map in hand we walked across the Seine on Pont d’Austerlitz and followed the Quai. Our eyes were drawn to the river, to Notre Dame, and the bouquinistes on the Quai de la Tournelle, but what imprinted itself upon me was the fountain at Place Saint-Michel as we turned left to head toward rue Saint André des Arts. Place Saint-Michel and the fountain were alive with young people—meeting, reading, embracing, walking, and looking like the literate, involved intellectuals that I had imagined. My literary passions may well have played a part in my perspective.

We were headed to Pension Eugénie on rue St. André des Arts, described in Frommer’s as offering cheap but decent room and board in the heart of the Left Bank, near to literary shrines that I wanted to visit. We booked a room for ten days with a shared hallway bath and WC for 8 Francs a night—about $2.50. The room was a tiny space that must have once been part of a bathroom; there was a defunct bidet about a foot from our bed. We had never seen one nor did we know how it worked. Other friends who traveled in those days said they used bidets to wash their jeans.

Our room had large windows that overlooked the noisy street. On most nights we watched a group of Hare Krishnas who chanted and smiled up at us. The most wonderful thing about Pension Eugénie was the breakfast of a large croissant with butter and preserves and delicious café au lait—included in the price—delivered to our door each day. We were cramped as we sat on the bed and bidet to eat, but we could not imagine more beautiful mornings. Years later, as parents with kids in college, we returned to the street to find a refurbished Hotel Eugénie offering rooms for over 100 Euros—breakfast not included. (It is now up to about 300 euros a night!)

Today, I’ve set up our old slide projector to match my memories with images. As the slides click by, I see all the tourist stops: views from the top of la Tour Eiffel, Sacré Coeur, and Notre-Dame; the Louvre without the Pyramid; Jeu de Paume and the Impressionists before Musée d’Orsay became a reality; Napoleon’s Tomb, Versailles, Samaritaine; and the obligatory stops at 27 rue de Fleurus, where Gertrude Stein lived with Alice B. Toklas, and La Closerie des Lilas, where Hemingway regularly drank and wrote at one of its marble-topped tables. We certainly could not afford a meal at La Closerie or any of Hemingway’s haunts, so there are no restaurants to note, but I remember savoring steak frites in unnamed cafes and vin rouge ordinaire that Frommer’s taught us to order. Like Hemingway, I had given the address of The American Express at 11 rue Scribe to family and friends as a point of contact. On the morning after our arrival we made our way there, marveled at the Paris Opéra and picked up mail feeling like heirs to The Lost Generation.

In the photos, structures in Paris appear grayer than today, with soot marring limestone walls or outlining sculptures such as those on the Arc de Triomphe. I am surprised by how light traffic seems to be in my pictures. There are many photos from both day and night where the streets seem quiet compared to the congestion and speed of Paris that I’ve witnessed on subsequent trips. Most cars in the pictures are small and boxy except for the occasional elongated Citroen or dilapidated VW bus, and I recall the many scooters and Solex mopeds that navigated streets and, occasionally, sidewalks.

Visible in all our slides are reminders of the endless walking we did in the summer of 1971 and the places we stumbled upon. Historic Les Halles, the legendary food market, had recently been torn down, but we would visit the Flower Market on Île de la Cité mentioned in Frommer’s—or so we thought. We were surprised when we arrived and found what looked and sounded like a jungle; we did not know that on Sundays it became the Bird Market. Walking through row after row of colorful birds in cages, in cars, and in the hands of those who came to buy, we reveled in exotic bird calls as well as the more familiar sounds of chickens. But it was the enthusiastic pedestrians who were drawn to them that captivated us. This was not the scene of a reluctant parent taking a child to buy a pet; it was a dynamic venue that existed because so many people delighted in birds of all kinds.

Birds intrigued us again when we walked to the Jardin des Tuileries and saw a gentleman in a dark suit feeding groups of frenetic birds and then enticing them to perch on him. Among the birds were pigeons and sparrows. Passersby were interested and a few stopped to chat, but they did not surround him as if he were an oddity. Years later we read that he was part of a long tradition of Tuileries Garden Bird Charmers, as they were called, with roots that date back to the 19th century. The original bird charmers were street performers who had been featured in French, British and American periodicals, including Scientific American in 1885. Whether this gentleman regarded himself as a performer or as someone who simply loved birds, we did not know; to us he was yet another wonder in a city that surprised with every turn of a corner.

In 1971, the Eiffel Tower did not sparkle with twinkling lights; rather, it was illuminated with a dramatic amber glow. Still, the image I see in my slides is as iconic as the bridges, the boulevards, and the churches. Without the intrusion of dated cars or clothing styles on pedestrians in photos, Paris’s beloved landmarks are timeless.

Among my favorite pictures is a long shot of a man in jeans sitting on the bank of the Seine. One leg hangs over the wall, the other is pulled up to his chest. This young man, my peer, depicts so much of what I find compelling about Paris. He seems at ease and thoughtful. His moment of intimacy with the river is natural. Surrounded by history and beauty but not constrained by it, he is part of a complex city that endures as well as changes. His sanguine presence, like that of the old bird charmer, suggests that Paris embraces the individual as vital to its identity.

My afternoon immersed in Paris 1971 includes the predictable nostalgia for youth and life about to unfold. It also validates my belief that Paris is alive and changeable yet cultivates a dignified permanence that seduced me then as it does today. In my adolescence I was drawn to Paris by literature. My first visit fulfilled my girlhood aspirations as reader and dreamer but also left me wanting to learn more about its history, read more of its literature, cook its food, find streets not in guidebooks, and visit again and again. My first trip to Paris ensnared me and I have been a willing captive ever since. This vicarious journey during quarantine allows me to savor the decaying pages of a 50-year-old “Paris Match” and look forward to my next moment on the banks of the Seine.

Text © 2020, Elizabeth Esris.
Photos © 1971, Michael Esris. (Photos taken with a Pentax Spotmatic.)

More of Elizabeth Esris’s illustrated personal essays about travel in France can be found here.

Readers interested in contributing an illustrated personal essay about their own long-ago travel experiences are invited to write to the editor at gary [at] francerevisited.com.

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Visiting, lecturing and touring have taught me a lot about American involvement in the First and Second World Wars. But my interest is not in war in and of itself, let alone the range of a 75 mm field gun vs. a 155 mm howitzer. What I’m especially curious about is the mindset of the contemporary American traveler. I’m interested in understanding how Americans of different backgrounds relate to their/our own history in France and, more importantly, how that reveals a sense of their individual and our collective place in the world. The First and Second World Wars are significant steps in that history and that place. But I am not a war buff. I am not a history buff. What I am is an American France travel buff. So I would be remiss not to visit American-related and other war sights and to try to understand how and why they came about and what they may signify today.

Yet I recognize that the vast majority of Americans of the 21st century have scarce interest in the First World War—and that despite the spring of 2017 marking the centennial of our entrance into the war and hence of the beginning of the so-called American Century.

Some historical events of 1917: The U.S. declared war on Germany on April 6; General John J. Pershing, commander-in-chief of the expeditionary corps arrived in Boulogne-sur-Mer on June 13; the first major contingent of American forces arrived in France at Saint Nazaire on June 26; American troops marched down the Champs-Elysées in Paris on July 4, and that same day Pershing visited Lafayette’s tomb in Picpus Cemetery.

As I write today, however, one hundred years later, Americans, in their vast majority, whether homebound or travel bound, as well as our elected officials, show little to no interest in the centennial. (We do actually have a national World War One Centennial Commission.) Not that every anniversary needs marking, but there are anniversaries that are uncanny reminders of where we are today and of the decisions and worldviews that we hold. The current centennial is one of them. The causes of WWI, the great debates about international intervention of a century ago and our eventual entrance into the war on the side of France and Great Britain, the development of our military and of our military industry, our role in the conflict’s military outcome and in its final treaty: all of those are echoed in debates and decisions today.

But examining history is not our national strongpoint. For some it may even be anti-American. Furthermore, between the America First attack on science, public education and critical thinking, on the one hand, and by the me-first sense that since Teddy Roosevelt shot game and I want to protect big game and since Woodrow Wilson was a bigot then I’ve got nothing to learn from their points of view, on the other hand, there isn’t much daylight for a national history lesson.

Personally, I prefer having a 13-year-old tell me that history is boring than an adult tell me that it doesn’t matter, because I can then tell a story and show a sight to the 13-year-old to spark interest whereas the adult will dig in to ill-informed convictions like trench warfare.

Nevertheless, despite our national aversion to history, we are very attracted to trends. Knowing and taking part in trends is important to us, even without understanding that they are trends since doing so would involve a minimum of critical thinking. Luckily, then, travel is frequently marked by trends.

We’ll always have Paris, of course, but other destinations that Americans select by broad measure in France shift from time to time. A destination will stand out on the map for the short- or medium-term thanks to some well-placed articles and advertisement, famous visitors, a big book or especially a big movie. Images of Ronald Reagan at Point du Hoc 1984, Bill Clinton in the Normandy American Cemetery 1994 or Saving Private Ryan 1998 may inspire thoughts of visiting Normandy some day.

France Revisited doesn’t have the pretension of influencing trends in tourism any more than we do of following them, but we do pride ourselves on helping to fill in the gaps left by other publications. So while awaiting to the trends set in motion by a blockbuster WWI movie, you can read archived articles about Quentin Roosevelt, “the most famous American killed during WWI,” about Belleau Wood and the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, about Chateau Thierry’s bond with the U.S., and about the American Escadrille Lafayette Memorial near Paris.

More articles about WWI sights, American-related and other, will appear on France Revisited in the coming months, written not by a war buff but by an American France travel buff. In the meantime, my travel research is well underway. Recently, shortly before the first round of the French presidential election, while touring Meuse, Lorraine (northeastern France), I took a snapshot of a desolate corner of the village of Hattonchâtel.

Desolate but very much alive, as the fresh flag and pole and newly pasted and defaced election posters demonstrate. I’m guessing that the posters were slashed by a fan of Philippe Poutou, candidate of the New Anti-Capitalist Party, NPA, whose face remains intact. The slasher may not be difficult to find since Poutou received only 13 votes out of the 967 voters here and in the surrounding 6 villages. Where do their sympathies lie? See here.

Visible behind the posters is one of Hattonchâtel’s scant medieval remnants, an arch that is part of the old entrance gate to the village. Not much to see, but a historical monument nonetheless.

The white monument is a rare example of a WWI memorial that only presents a female figure. The village was heavily damaged in the early weeks of the First World War when the Germans took over the village in September 1914. They were dislodged by American troops four years later.

Hattonchâtel was adopted after the war by Belle Skinner (1866-1928), a philanthropist from Massachusetts, who financed the village’s reconstruction, including the local château, village hall and a school, and the installation of a water system so as to bring drinking water into ever household.

So many stories in one desolate corner.

Far be it from me to suggest that this corner of this village in this part of France is worth the detour. But there you have it in a snapshot, a bit of American history along with much else, past, present and, with the election underway, future.

Most American WWI commemorative events in France will take place in 2018, centennial of our involvement in major fighting in France: Belleau Wood, Saint Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne and others. This summer, though, on private initiative, a transatlantic event called The Bridge 2017 will commemorate the centennial of the landing of the first major American contingent at Saint Nazaire. The ocean liner the Queen Mary 2 has been chartered for the occasion. She will be arriving at Saint-Nazaire, site of her construction, from her home port of Southampton, England, before making the transatlantic journey to New York, while four giant trimarans race against her during the crossing. In 1917 the Americans brought with them not only troops that would change the course of the war but also basketball and jazz, not to mention chewing gum and cigarettes. As part of the festivities, therefore the 3X3 Basketball World Cup will be held in Nantes June 17-21 and jazz will be a main feature of the June 21 summer solstice music festival in the area, as well as on board during the transatlantic crossing. I found a publication interested in my writing for them an article on the subject. It’s British. They liked the Queen Mary 2 angle.

© 2017, Gary Lee Kraut

For general tourist information about touring in three of the departments (French subregions) marked by battles involving Americans during the First World War, see Meuse (Meuse-Argonne Cemetery, St. Mihiel American Cemetery, etc.), Aisne (Aisne-Marne Cemetery, Belleau Wood, Blerancourt) and Ardennes (War and Peace Museum, Sergeant York

“The American Traveler and the First World War Sights in France” will be one of four lecture topics that the author will be proposing to universities, Alliance Française groups, libraires and other groups and organizations during his autumn-winter 2018-2019 guest lecture tour in the United States. If interested in this particular lecture write to Gary at gary [at] francerevisited.com.

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