Americans in France

Unofficial figures indicate that up to 50,000 free blacks emigrated to Paris from Louisiana in the decades after Napoleon sold the territory to the United States in 1803.

Many American artists stayed together, and enclaves of them developed on the Left Bank, along the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and near the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian's headquarters.

Beginning in the 1920s, U.S. intellectuals, painters, writers, and tourists were drawn to French art, literature, philosophy, theatre, cinema, fashion, wines, and cuisine.

Among the Americans living in Paris during this period are Paul Bowles, Aaron Copland, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas.

When France officially declared war on Germany in September 1939, as a response to the Third Reich's invasion of Poland, an estimated 30,000 Americans lived in or near Paris.

[5] Although that declaration was followed by roughly nine-months of what often was called the "phony war" or "drôle de guerre," the inevitability of coming conflict led most of those expatriates to leave France while they could.

In June 1940, the inevitable occurred with massive German attacks and after scarcely three weeks of battle, Nazi troops marched uncontested through the gates of Paris and some 5,000 Americans still were in the French capital.

Americans who stayed in the capital endured most of the shortages and hardships of their French neighbors but to some extent for nearly a year and a half they were not imprisoned by German occupying authorities.

However, their lives were not easy and often tragic, in particular for African-Americans and Jewish Americans who were frequently singled out by the Nazis for harsher than normal treatment.