Research and Innovation

In June 1835, writer John Sanderson traveled to France, where he stayed until May 1836. Upon his return to Philadelphia, he published his Sketches of Paris: In Familiar Letters to His Friends by an American Gentleman, which met with great success on both sides of the Atlantic. Printed in Philadelphia in 1838, the Sketches were published in London the same year with the title The American in Paris. A few years later, French novelist Jules Janin produced a successful adaptation in two volumes. This article contends that the Sketches were written by an author whose perspective represents the paradigm of American democracy as described by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s: Sanderson observes and attempts to understand French mores and institutions through the prism of equality of condition, decentralization, public participation in politics, social mobility, the separation of powers, and the influence of commerce and industry. The second portion of the article examines Jules Janin’s adaptation of the Sketches of Paris in his two volumes titled Un hiver à Paris and L’été à Paris. Contrary to what Janin would have his readers believe, the volumes are a very loose adaptation rather than a translation of Sanderson’s work. Whereas the American writer was highly critical of French society under the July Monarchy, Janin portrays Sanderson as an enthusiastic “Yankee,” an “American LaBruyère,” who was supposedly a fervent admirer and defender of the culture and institutions of Louis-Philippe’s France. The history and legacy of Sanderson’s Sketches represents, therefore, an intriguing form of cultural, literary, and political transference: in order to show that the July Monarchy was the logical, inevitable, and admirable outcome of French history, a French author – who, in 1870, was elected to the seat of Sainte-Beauve at the Académie française – appropriated the work of an American author who examined France through the prism of the young American democracy.

This article deals with representations of France–United States relations at the time of the treaties of Paris and Versailles (1783). It provides a study of the numerous texts and abundant iconography that dealt with the treaties in the years 1783-1784 on both sides of the Atlantic. Written from the perspective of cultural history, its goal is to go beyond traditional historiographic perspectives and show that the French and the Americans did not share the same vision of the relationship between their two nations. As the American War of Independence ended and a new world order arose, a divide soon developed between, on the one hand, an idealized vision of the French–American friendship and, on the other hand, the realities of international trade and politics. The images and representations analyzed in this study played a key role as France–United States relations were being shaped: as such, they provide important insights into interactions between the two nations in the 1780s and beyond.