Happy Bastille Day to our oldest ally! and learn something....

[hellofromwarsaw]

Happy Bastille Day!! To the other great republic, and our greatest ally!

And please shut the F up, dittohead morons. Learn something- without France we would not have won the War of Independance. Huge amounts of money, more troops at Yorktown than Washington had, not to mention 26 ships of the line blockading. France was the only country that stood up to the Germans between the wars, our (Pub) isolationism was a disgrace, they fought as well as anyone, including US (we ALL had the same disastrous armor tactics), and I don't want to hear any anglophone BS about their revolution- their aristocracy was hopeless.

VIVE LA FRANCE!! check out the TOUR on Versus. Most visited country, #1 quality of life. Wake up! tyvm

 

[FuelRod]

We wouldn't have won the war of independence without slave labor either.

 

[Mr. H.]

The Thrilla in Bastilla!

 

[8537]

..and a Frenchman kept the yellow jersey!

France is a beautiful country. I pity anyone who looks down upon it because that's what their radio told them to do.

 

[syrenn]

Ally? You could fool me with that one.

 

[Mr Natural]

The French!

They have a different word for everything.

 

[8537]

The French!

They have a different word for everything.

Oh my! I haven't heard that skit in years. Funny shit.

 

[hellofromwarsaw]

"Ally? You could fool me with that one."

Because they mentioned maybe Saddam didn't have Nukes and maybe we should wait a second? Could've saved us 4000 dead, 150k wounded, 3 trillion dollars, and the world's disrespect. Idiot.

 

[hellofromwarsaw]

Happy Bastille Day! from David McCollough- read his new book- How France inspired the Founding Fathers, artists, architects, and inventors- BEFORE the Statue of Liberty...

 

[hellofromwarsaw]

THE GREATER JOURNEY
Americans in Paris
By David McCullough
Illustrated. 558 pp. Simon & Schuster. $37.50
Multimedia

The tradition began very much as a case of “Lafayette, nous voici.” The first pilgrims were nearly all single, wealthy men in their 20s, serious of purpose and ambitious by nature. A number of them had played a role in the French general’s triumphant return to America. They were provincial and inexperienced. They had never before sailed. They knew little French literature. They did not yet suspect that one could be seduced by breakfast. Following a tradition established years earlier by John Adams, they came to Paris to do their homework. Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Sumner and Samuel F. B. Morse looked to the city as library and laboratory rather than as liberation. The idea was to settle in Paris to “study hard,” a concept that would put most junior-year-abroad programs out of business.
In two panoramic chapters, McCullough introduces us to the travelers as they prepare for their adventure. “Emotions ran high on the eve of departure,” he writes. “Melancholy and second thoughts interspersed with intense excitement were the common thing.” The trip was arduous, the French drizzle constant, and bureaucracy evidently dates to Vercingetorix. But it was a fine time to make the game-changing discovery that the Old World really was old. There were probably fewer than a thousand Americans in the city through the 1830s. All were struck by the civility of their hosts. Wine was cheaper than milk. Though the Louvre opened to the public only on Sundays, foreigners could visit throughout the week.
One American who could reliably be found there was Samuel Morse. At his side for several hours each day was his dear friend James Fenimore Cooper, whose “Last of the Mohicans” graced every Parisian bookstore window. (As Cooper noted, the French understood that novel to be the only book published in America since the time of Ben Franklin.) McCullough devotes a chapter to Morse and Cooper — the two had met at the White House in the course of Lafayette’s visit — who attest to the transformative, transfiguring power of Paris. Morse arrived as a painter and left as an inventor. He took home with him in 1832 the germ of what would become the telegraph. With a second visit, he imported Daguerre’s ideas on photography.
For most of McCullough’s travelers, Paris represented a great awakening — the blood-tingling beauty of it all! — but also an education, an invitation to see the world anew. Any doctor worth his salt hoped to study there. Charles Sumner was struck by the science but also by the black medical students. He would go on to crusade for abolition. America’s first female physician, Elizabeth Blackwell, returned to New York to found a hospital run entirely by women. (In the plus ça change department, teeth were already an American specialty. The foremost Parisian dentist in the 19th century was a Philadelphian.)
By definition McCullough’s grand tour is impressionistic and discursive, proceeding by way of crossed paths and capsule biographies. This is history to be savored rather than sprinted through, like a Parisian meal. It amounts to a meaty collection of short stories, expertly and flavorfully assembled, free of gristly theory. McCullough has his favorites, and displays a marked preference for the visual artists. Generally he describes Paris with a painter’s eye: “It was not just that they had never known a city of such size or variety, or with so much history, but they had never known one where the look and mood could be so strikingly different in different light.” Only an ingrate would question his casting decisions. As he points out, often the minor characters tell a story best. Mark Twain would not be pleased.
Occasionally McCullough pauses to pit one national treasure against another. So Harriet Beecher Stowe spends a spellbound hour before “The Raft of the Medusa”: “She was sure,” he writes, “no more powerful piece had ever been painted. It was as though this one picture had been worth the whole trip to France.” The New York sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens plays a leading role in “The Greater Journey.” He began as a cameo-cutter, an apprenticeship to which McCullough devotes several pages. And like every dual national, his narrative maintains a foot in two places. McCullough’s is as much the splendid story of a nation growing up as it is that of a city coming into its own. In the course of these pages, Paris acquires bateaux-mouches , the grands magasins , the Folies Bergère and Haussman’s avenues.
The two histories combine most powerfully in his account of the Franco-Prussian War and Elihu Washburne, America’s minister to France between 1869 and 1877. A reliable topic of conversation in Paris, food was the principal one during the German siege, when cat meat revealed itself be a delicacy and Paris solved its rat problem. By the time German troops marched down the Champs-Élysées, on March 1, l871, more than 65,000 Parisians had died. The only prominent diplomat to do so, Washburne valiantly refused to budge even through the months of the Commune, one of the bloodiest chapters in French history. His was no paradisiacal Paris; as the atrocities mounted, the distraught Washburne noted that the city was “a hell upon this earth.” At one point the Seine ran red with blood. A team of 60,000 masons would be required to put Paris back together again. On Mary Cassatt’s arrival shortly afterward, the Hôtel de Ville looked like a Roman ruin.
The making of art is inherently less dramatic than the making of history, and the Paris Commune exerts a power that John Singer Sergeant’s painting of Madame Gautreau or Saint-Gaudens’s casting of Admiral Farragut may not. Saint-Gaudens brilliantly proves McCullough’s point, however; here was American history literally forged in France. The colossal bronze statue of the Civil War hero was shipped back to New York, all 900 pounds of him, to be unveiled in May 1881. During a later Parisian stay, Saint-Gaudens cast the Sherman on horseback that stands today on the edge of Central Park. Among the reasons to visit Paris, Saint-Gaudens’s son recognized one that would migrate with the times: Only in France could an artist “measure himself with his contemporaries, place his work before the world’s most critical audience, and learn, once for all, wherein it was good and wherein bad.”
THE GREATER JOURNEY
Americans in Paris
By David McCullough
Illustrated. 558 pp. Simon & Schuster. $37.50
Multimedia

McCullough takes us from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Isadora Duncan, which is to say that “The Greater Journey” ends before Theodore Dreiser spilled the beans. Its history and art were all very well and good, but Paris was about something else altogether. That something else was sex. No one in “The Greater Journey” seems to have noticed Twain’s “delightfully immoral” working girls. Instead, John Singer Sargent’s father waxed on about probity and the domestic virtues of Parisian life. Saint-Gaudens would draw a blank when asked later to recall any “amorous adventure” abroad, although, as is clear from these pages, the sculptor had a selective memory. Very possibly much of what happened in 19th-century Paris stayed in Paris.
What McCullough’s Americans took home with them were less sentimental educations than artistic and intellectual ones; the finishing school and the movable feast came later. These years were about shaping art and principles, tasks with which France assisted by dispatching the Statue of Liberty and Tocqueville in the opposite direction. It bestowed a greater gift as well. “Coming here has been a wonderful experience, surprising in many respects, one of them being to find how much of an American I am,” Saint-Gaudens wrote. Pining for all that had once seemed unremarkable, he returned home “a burning hot-headed patriot.” That lesson too endures. Paris is the city to which good Americans go to learn that they really do love peanut butter.

 

[Political Junky]

Cons deny themselves the enjoyment of Paris, the most beautiful city in the world. Well, all Cons except the top 1%, many of whom maintain homes in Paris or elsewhere in France.

 

[bodecea]

Happy Bastille Day!! To the other great republic, and our greatest ally!

And please shut the F up, dittohead morons. Learn something- without France we would not have won the War of Independance. Huge amounts of money, more troops at Yorktown than Washington had, not to mention 26 ships of the line blockading. France was the only country that stood up to the Germans between the wars, our (Pub) isolationism was a disgrace, they fought as well as anyone, including US (we ALL had the same disastrous armor tactics), and I don't want to hear any anglophone BS about their revolution- their aristocracy was hopeless.

VIVE LA FRANCE!! check out the TOUR on Versus. Most visited country, #1 quality of life. Wake up! tyvm

One of the coolest things I saw at Mount Vernon when we visited two years ago, was the Key to the Bastille that Lafayette sent to Washington.

 

[California Girl]

"Ally? You could fool me with that one."

Because they mentioned maybe Saddam didn't have Nukes and maybe we should wait a second? Could've saved us 4000 dead, 150k wounded, 3 trillion dollars, and the world's disrespect. Idiot.

Didn't have anything to do with the fact that they were selling weapons to Saddam, nope, nothing.

And, for the record, this conservative loves France, and the French. And my family own property there.

 

[bodecea]

And we STILL beat them in the World Cup semi-final!

 

[hellofromwarsaw]

Well, the French team was amateurs that had 7 players from the same town- they did great.
What about the men?

"Didn't have anything to do with the fact that they were selling weapons to Saddam, nope, nothing."

I call BS. And REAGAN was giving Saddam biological weapons LOL!!

 

[hellofromwarsaw]

In the middle of the Booosh-Cheney Jingoistic push for STUPID war- they mentioned maybe Saddam didn't have Nukes and maybe we should wait a second. Could've saved us 4000 dead, 150k wounded, 3 trillion dollars, and the world's disrespect. Idiot.

Glad and surprised you like France though. Bless you.

 

[bodecea]

Well, the French team was amateurs that had 7 players from the same town- they did great.
What about the men?

"Didn't have anything to do with the fact that they were selling weapons to Saddam, nope, nothing."

I call BS. And REAGAN was giving Saddam biological weapons LOL!!

Men play soccer? I thought they fall down and pretend they are horribly injured.

 

[California Girl]

In the middle of the Booosh-Cheney Jingoistic push for STUPID war- they mentioned maybe Saddam didn't have Nukes and maybe we should wait a second. Could've saved us 4000 dead, 150k wounded, 3 trillion dollars, and the world's disrespect. Idiot.

Glad and surprised you like France though. Bless you.

The French were selling weapons to Saddam. That's why they didn't support us... cuz they didn't want us going in and finding out that - yet again - they broke an embargo.

 

[bodecea]

Well, the French team was amateurs that had 7 players from the same town- they did great.
What about the men?

"Didn't have anything to do with the fact that they were selling weapons to Saddam, nope, nothing."

I call BS. And REAGAN was giving Saddam biological weapons LOL!!

Men play soccer? I thought they fall down and pretend they are horribly injured.

Oh...and Brazilian women too.

 

[hellofromwarsaw]

"The French were selling weapons to Saddam. That's why they didn't support us... cuz they didn't want us going in and finding out that - yet again - they broke an embargo."

Horse patoot from the Pub propaganda BS machine...LOL!