American Students in France in the 19th Century

 

From the beginning the American Colony had settled in the fashionable neighborhoods of the Right Bank of the Seine. There were also Americans on the Left Bank: students and art students, most particularly. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris had become the Mecca for young Americans wishing to perfect their knowledge of the fine arts, be it painting, sculpture or architecture. Of course some Americans turned towards Italy, Germany or England, but by the end of the century, the preferred destination by far was Paris' Ecole des Beaux-Arts and its attendant ateliers.

Starting with the Second Empire and trickling down after the Second World War, there was a real flow of eager young men and women coming to France, and more especially to Paris, in order to study art. Strangely enough, such a rush is unknown in any other field than art. Various reasons should be invoked to explain such an attraction to France: the increasing prosperity of the United States, along with its desire to gain access to the international cultural arena; the promotion of arts in France under Napoleon III and the Third Republic; the urge to go transmitted by those back home who had had the experience.

The Salons existed well before Napoleon III. However, under his reign, the image of France changed dramatically to one of a modern country enjoying renewed luxury, a new home for the arts, and a land of plenty as far as art commissions were concerned. The prestige of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, especially after the reform of 1863, started to outshine that of the Academies in London, Munich or Düsseldorf. Moreover, the bustling building atmosphere in the air pervading Paris from Haussmann on, all the new monumental sculpture then rising from the earth, the respect the art professions enjoyed in France, the attention given to art exhibitions by the media and the public, the stimulation and fraternity existing between art students in schools, all these feelings and events unknown in America were instrumental in making studies in Paris a unique experience, bringing to maturation many young artists from the United States.

__ Véronique Wiesinger, "Some General Ideas", Paris Bound, Americans in Art Schools 1868-1918 ; Edited by the Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris 1990 ; pp 13-14.

 

These young American artists were the precursors of today's intercultural exchanges. They came from the privileged ranks of society in a country in the midst of expansion. They were Francophiles for two contradictory reasons: one, in reaction against England as a dominating political force and two, in the tradition of their English "cousins"for whom, historically speaking, France was synonymous with Culture. During the early years of the new American Republic, native art had been limited to crafts and to the aesthetics of utilitarian objects. Fine Arts, on the other hand, had to be imported, hence the desire of the "cultivated"classes of American society to return to Europe to perfect their knowledge of art.

The favorable exchange rate and the absence of school fees (except for a modest allocation for "external" studies located outside the Ecole) encouraged Americans to come to France. Nonetheless, a long stay abroad represented a sizable investment in time and money. Most of these young people thus came from wealthy families; some even belonging to the "upper crust", such as Lloyd and Whitney (1864-1943) Warren, cousins of the Vanderbilts.

__ Isabelle Gournay, "Americans Studying Architecture at the Ecoles des Beaux-Arts", in Paris Bound, etc, op.cit., pp 48-49.

The enthusiasm for things French which then spread among Americans came not only from this desire to absorb European Culture, but also from the discovery of French culture as lived from day to day.

When I first entered the school I was the only American in the class, and it was owing to this that I gradually assumed French manners and ways. My friends were all French students and my habits of thought, artistic and otherwise, influenced by them. To get out of one's national skin is a great broadening of one's point of view, and on this I particularly congratulated myself as one of the advantages of living in France.

__ William Sartain (1843-1924), in a letter from 1873, quoted by Véronique Wiesinger, "Paris Remembrances", Paris Bound, etc, op.cit. , p. 27.

This tendency began to be institutionalized during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

A few scholarships were eventually created in the United States at the turn of the century (Alexander Phimister Proctor won the first Rinehart Scholarship in 1896, and Willard Dryden Paddock, the first grant from the Pratt Institute in 1895).

__ Véronique Wiesinger, "American Sculpture Students", Paris Bound, etc, p 61.

 

The First University Exchanges

Following the Civil War, the United States pursued its "manifest destiny" of internal expansion and became a modern nation whose international ambitions would be revealed by the Spanish-American War of 1898. In France, under the Third Republic, the need to create links with this newly-powerful"sister republic" began to be apparent.

A Franco-American Committee had been organized in Paris under the direction of the Ministry of Public Instruction, with the aim of creating university degrees for American students in Paris. In a meeting at the home of Dr. T.W. Evans, July 8, 1895, it was decided to form a local committee of Americans to promote this movement. This committee was named "The Paris-American University Committee", at a meeting held at Dr. Evans' Wednesday, July 19, 1895. Evans was named president of this committee, founded to cooperate with the Franco-American Committee, in order to help to extend French university privileges to American students and to promote their interests in their relations with universities in France.
[...]
Debate continued throughout the year 1896 and beyond. According to the American Register of December 26, 1896 : "The University Council, at its meeting of last Monday [December 21] adopted a resolution that a committee be named to study the establishing of a diploma to be conferred to foreign students, more particularly to American students, which they might take away as proof of their studies and knowledge gained in Paris." All these discussions would lead to the creation of the Doctorate degree at the University of Paris.

__ Henri Mondor et Lloyd James Austin, La correspondance de Stéphane Mallarmé, Gallimard, Paris, vol VII, p. 307.

The first exchanges of university professors were organized at the end of the 19th century and during the first years of the 20th. The first initiatives came from Harvard University. The French Club there, founded in 1886 for the production of French classical plays, began inviting French lecturers, thanks to a foundation created in 1898 by a wealthy and enthusiastic Francophile, former Harvard student James Hazen Hyde.

__ Y.H. Nouailhat, France et Etats-Unis, Août 1914-Avril 1917, Paris 1979, p. 62.

At this time, a significant proportion of the American East Coast elite attended the "Ivy League" colleges. Given the effect of this "old boy network", the fact that Harvard was to become pro-French would bear directly on the participation of the American elite in the French cause, from the very beginning of World War I.

 

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James Geddes. Jr. "Educational Advantages for American Students in France; with a History of the Recent Changes in its University System", 1917.

"Thus, from what has been shown, the signs of the times seem to point not only to a mutual desire on the part of France and of this country to bind more cordially together the old intellectual ties of sympathy that were so strong in the days of Franklin and Jefferson, but to a common world understanding that shall ultimately do away with intellectual barriers between nations."