While working on American travel narratives about Paris from 1780 to 1850, I have been especially interested in the first pages relating to their Parisian experiences. It seemed worth studying this precise moment of the first encounter, as one of my research objectives is to contribute to the general history of Franco- American relationships.
A large number of the 202 published travel narratives I found record very similar accounts of nearly identical trips and predictable comments on tourists' sites. But to my surprise this predictability does not always appear. It seems as if this moment when the traveller expresses what effect Paris had on him, sometimes evokes the most individual and subjective response. Most studies on travel writing remind us that travel authors borrow much of their material from predecessors. Examples of this practice are the journals kept by travellers during their travels through Europe as part of their education. Many of these authors had not spared their eyes reading traditional advice and information, but it seems they hardly looked around for themselves once on the scene. On the other hand, it does not mean that we must pass over the differences which exist between individual works.
I would like to discuss this "world of difference" in American travellers first impressions of Paris. What do I mean by first impressions? What did they see and how? Finally, were their first impressions very different than their observations on leaving Paris?
By first impressions I refer to what strikes the traveller on arriving, that is to say what characteristic trait did he see first and what effect had Paris on him.
For this discussion I will try not to summarize and present the comments of American travellers, their attitudes, responses and judgements as those of an anonymous "American traveller," but as those of singular individuals with specific motives for travel.
Writing about your impressions on arriving in a foreign place and while leaving it was a writing convention of the genre. But was it a codified phenomenon, with expected responses? This is precisely the problematic of my discussion. With detailed references from the original travel texts, I will try to show first of all that there was a common pool of experiences and observations which the Americans shared about Paris on their arrival, but that there were also less expected responses. I will question what objects particularly draw their attention, were they constant during our time period or on the contrary, did these objects change? I will also pause over the language used to record one's sheer wonderment at seeing Paris for the first time.
The reason behind this research has been to show an attempt to make use of a corpus of qualitative sources to analyze one step of the travel to Paris. Moreover, besides first impressions I could exploit these travel accounts relative to French history as material for the study of Americans' description of the conditions of their reception in Paris, and also study the relation between travelling and writing. Travel narratives, despite their informality of style and irregular qualities, stood the test of time and must be regarded--with caution though--as an important type of historical source. I would like to show with this discussion how and why they represent a challenging source for the historian, because unlike archives, each one possesses its own literary framework and singular flavor, but also how both qualitative and quantitative sources can be complementary.
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