Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age

Levenstein's whimsical chapter titles convey the primitive nature of early transatlantic travel: ""Getting There Was Not Half the Fun"" and ""Eat, Drink, but Be Wary."" For adventurous Americans, though, ""Paris offered tourists a cultural feast that was simply unavailable in the United States""--and for libidinous Americans, there were the famed maisons de tolerance. In the 1850s and '60s Baron Haussmann put modern buildings in the center of Paris while restoring old churches and other monuments and opening small plazas in front of them to make their prospect more pleasing to the eye; the result was a modernized city that still retained its Old World charm and thus drew even more visitors. By now, the didactic tourism of Jefferson's day was turning into leisure tourism, with visitors giving the Louvre a quick once-over and then going shopping. Some of the best writing in this engaging book deals with the effect France had on WWI doughboys who, after meeting chic mademoiselles, were no longer satisfied, as one diarist wrote, with ""Mamie and Gerty back at home with their passion for gum and ice cream sodas."" And having made their way freely through French society, African American troops wanted better treatment in the U.S. Indeed, these final chapters reveal how the title of this excellent study is just slightly misleading: especially in the 20th century, the subject is not merely tourism but the ways in which two countries mutually shape each other. (Sept.)