James Baldwin In Paris
💣 👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻 ALL INFORMATION CLICK HERE 👈🏻👈🏻👈🏻
Get the latest information about timed passes and tips for planning your visit
Search the collection and explore our exhibitions, centers, and digital initiatives
Online resources for educators, students, and families
Engage with us and support the Museum from wherever you are
View a calendar of our public programs
Learn more about the Museum and view recent news
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
James Baldwin’s first experience living abroad was in Paris, France, where he relocated in 1948, in the hopes that a new place and time away would help him finish his first novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain (1953) and draft his famous collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955).
At the age of twenty-four, Baldwin arrived in Paris with only forty dollars in his pocket. He fell in love with the city, not only because of its beauty and culture but also because of the reprieve it provided from the racial and sexual discrimination he experienced in the United States. The space to be himself freed Baldwin creatively. It was here, and in Switzerland, that he completed much of the writing for Go Tell It On The Mountain. Beyond a place to work, Paris also provided Baldwin with inspiration and even models for his fictional characters. The city provides the backdrop for his second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956).
Baldwin lived in a series of cheap hotels throughout Paris, many in the Saint-Germain area, a neighborhood filled with artists and authors during the 1940s and ‘50s. Here Baldwin found a place within a diverse community of creative types. The social scene of that neighborhood gave him a respite from the constant tension that living in the United States meant for someone like him. He often worked in the Café de Flore, where writing and socializing went hand-in-hand, and where he met famous French intellectuals like Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The bars and nightclubs allowed the effusive Baldwin to dance, sing, laugh, and explore his sexuality in a supportive environment.
The Village of St. Paul de Vence in the South of France
Paris became Baldwin’s first international home, where he often returned for stays both long and short. But Paris was also the site of trouble. Shortly after relocating to France, Baldwin had a falling out with Richard Wright, his friend and mentor. Wright took personal offense to an essay Baldwin published in the French magazine, Zero, in 1949. In that essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,”(link is external) Baldwin argues against the protest novel genre, suggesting that it fails the reader as an honest, authentic literary form. He uses Wright’s Native Son (1940) as an example to illustrate his point and compares it to the sentimental, and by then infamous, anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Having made his career with works that focused more on social issues and less on nuances of individual characterization, Wright felt that Baldwin was personally attacking him. The pair had a shouting match on the streets of Paris, and their friendship never fully recovered. Baldwin wrote two more essays on his relationship with Wright; he regretted their parting of ways, but he did not change his opinion on Bigger Thomas, the main character of Wright’s Native Son.
Later, after Turkey, the South of France provided the writer with his last home, in St. Paul de Vence, where he went to recuperate following depression and illness caused by the assassinations, and the aftermath, of Medgar Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, all of whom were his personal friends.
Baldwin sits in his home in St. Paul de Vence in 1987.
Photo by Florence C. Ladd, June 1987
Upon his arrival in 1971 in the small village in Provence, Baldwin was not well-received. Baldwin author Jules B. Farber wrote that a friend of Baldwin’s recalled that “at first people in St. Paul-de-Vence, all white Presbyterians, looked suspiciously at this little, ugly, black gay man who had come into their midst.” But within six months, the villagers began to gravitate toward his gregarious personality.
An interviewee, Betrand Mazodier recalled the admiration that soon developed:
Most of the villagers are simple people who only talk about their crops, vineyards, fruit trees, the weather and they like to drink. But Baldwin, with his openness, humor and disarming smile, quickly integrated into Saint-Paul life, admired and loved for the genuinely good person he was. We were always used to well-known people living here but most remained aloof and never sought any contact with the locals. Jimmy was the big exception. He actually went out of his way to talk to everyone he came across in town.
Further, Baldwin’s acquaintance with Simone Signoret, a famous French actress, helped him gain acceptance in the village. The two had become friends two years prior, and she had urged him to stay in St. Paul after recuperating, finding him room and board with an older woman named Mlle. Jeanne Faure, who feared having a black man boarding in her house. However, in time, she too, not only came to accept Baldwin but also, over the years, developed a deep and abiding affection for him. After renting multiple rooms in the house, Baldwin would come to own the sprawling eighteenth-century home, buying it piece by piece with proceeds from his publications.
Photograph of James Baldwin standing with the owner of his French home
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of The Baldwin Family
Baldwin always felt the need to surround himself with people. As a result, he would soon become a welcomed visitor by the Roux family, who ran the nearby inn, La Colombe d’Or. Friends from the village, and even casual acquaintances he encountered during regular walks, joined him for meals and drinks at the inn. Dr. Roger Boizard became one of Baldwin’s “most trusted cronies,” and while he was the general practitioner responsible for handling the healthcare of everyone living in the Baldwin home for nearly ten years, he also became a dependable companion that shared meals and drinks with Baldwin several times a week.
Baldwin also grew close to villagers who had migrated to St. Paul de Vence as he had. These friends included French-American sculptor Armand Arman, born in St. Thomas Virgin Islands, and his wife Corice Canton; Wanda and Dick van Dijk from the Netherlands; and fellow author Nicholas Delbanco, originally from London.
Transatlantic Commuter
At Home and Abroad
Transatlantic Commuter
Baldwin in Switzerland
1400 Constitution Ave NW, Washington, DC 20560
Americans in Paris, James Baldwin: A Freedom Fighter Without a Home
25 July 2017 by Marilyn Brouwer 11285 4
First time logging in? CLICK HERE to create your password.
Forgotten your details? CLICK HERE to reset your password.
Even before I was seduced by Hemingway, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec to the inevitability of living in Paris, I had already read Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.
This small, sparely and simply written book set in 1950s Paris of a love affair between two men, vividly describes not only the emotional torment of each man, but also the underbelly of the seedier bars and clubs in the less salubrious quartiers of la capitale.
I still love the book. It lead me on, of course, to Another Country, Go Tell it on the Mountain, and Nobody Knows my Name.
James Baldwin always believed that Paris had been accepting of both his race and his homosexuality when America had proved too hard a place to make his life.
A passage in Giovanni’s Room (albeit from the view of a white homosexual) depicts the turmoil of a homosexual in the 1950s in his failed attempt to escape his sexuality by moving to Paris.
“There is something so fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard-the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.”
Baldwin moved to Paris in 1948. He was born in 1924, the eldest of nine children. His stepfather, David Baldwin, was a preacher and was especially hard on his stepson, with the result that James spent as much time as he could out of the home and studying in libraries. Their home was in Harlem and incidents of racial abuse by the NYPD heavily influenced Baldwin in his writing.
Baldwin was a gifted writer from an early age and was encouraged by teachers who recognized his talent. His stepfather was less impressed and although Baldwin followed him into a religious life– indeed drawing bigger crowds than him from the pulpit– he soon became disenchanted with religion and left the church. His stepfather died when James was 19 which gave him the freedom to make his own decisions, no longer under the influence of his stepfather’s often tyrannical rule.
He arrived in Paris with $40, not speaking a word of French. He had however already befriended Richard Wright in Greenwich Village who had helped him gain his first fellowship. (Here for a time he had shared an apartment with Marlon Brando who remained a life-long friend.) A second fellowship enabled his move to France.
Baldwin made straight for Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the beloved haunt and right of passage for so many young American writers before him. He lived in the Rue Verneuil, (Serge Gainsbourg’s home for years), hooking up immediately with Richard Wright in Les Deux Magots on the first night he arrived. (Although there was a famous falling out between the two, Baldwin always acknowledged Wright as the most important black writer in the world.)
Baldwin’s later books and essays were uncompromising and unflinchingly honest about being a black man in America. Although this theme dominated his work, he also wrote with the same brutal honesty about family and sexuality.
Like Hemingway and others before him, Baldwin wrote in the cafés of the Left Bank. Go Tell it on a Mountain was written in the Café de Flore, and the wonderful Art Deco cafe, Le Select in Montparnasse, saw Baldwin studiously writing Giovanni’s Room. These cafés, like Baldwin’s other favorite meeting places, Le Montana on Rue St Benoit, L’Abbaye and Chez Inez on the Rue Champollion, were not the rather bourgeois and expensive establishments we find today, but were slightly decadent, maybe even a touch louche. Baldwin also frequented Les Halles and Pigalle, neither of which had ever attempted respectability…
It was obvious when the Black Civil Rights Movement started in America that Baldwin would be a part of it, making friends with Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte and Lorraine Hansberry. He returned to America in 1957 to be a part of the movement despite equal rights for homosexuals not being part of their agenda. In fact, homosexuality was positively deplored. He was as outspoken verbally as he was in his writing. He was especially critical of Hoover and the FBI. Little wonder then, that FBI files from 1960 to early 1970s show 1884 documents on Baldwin, only 276 on Richard Wright and a mere 110 on Truman Capote.
Baldwin’s essays on police brutality resulted in almost constant harassment. His phone was tapped and disguised FBI agents even followed him abroad through France, Britain and Italy. Any thoughts of making America his permanent home again were gradually eroded and Baldwin always returned to France where he felt most at home and accepted for what and who he was.
Bladwin with Shakespeare, photo: Allan Warren
His involvement in the Civil Rights Movement brought him into contact with Martin Luther King, but after his assassination and the assassinations of Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, all close friends, Baldwin’s illusions of racial reconciliation were shattered. He nevertheless refused to align himself with the Black Arts Movement, who believed that their literature should be exclusively for black writers and attacked Baldwin for his interracial love affairs and confronting the issues of multi-racial societies in his books and essays.
In 1970, Baldwin with his partner, Bernard Vassell, moved to an old farmhouse in St Paul de Vence. His friends, a diverse group, including Ray Charles (for whom he wrote several songs), Josephine Baker, Sidney Poitier and Yves Montand with his wife, Simone Signoret, were regular visitors.
Baldwin continued to write up until his death of cancer in 1987 and continues to be the most influential and relevant black writer both then and now.
His powers of description, his eye for detail and his ability for the reader to so easily identify with situations or emotions of the characters in his books, still make this passage from Giovanni’s Room one of my most loved. I KNEW this woman– she worked behind the till in Le Conti in the late 1960s. Everyone in Paris who went to a café, knew this woman, but none could have depicted her with the accuracy and humor of James Baldwin.
“Behind the counter sat one of those inimitable and indomitable ladies, produced only in the city of Paris, but produced there in great numbers, who would be as outraged and unsettling in any other city as a mermaid on a mountain-top. All over Paris they sit behind their counters like a mother bird in a nest and brood over the cash-register as though it were an egg. Nothing occurring under the circle of heaven where they sit escapes their eye, if they have ever been surprised by anything, it was only in a dream-a dream they long ceased having. They are neither ill-nor good natured, though they have their days and styles, and they know, in the way, apparently, that other people know when they have to go to the bathroom, everything about everyone who enters their domain. Though some are white-haired and some not, some fat, some thin, some grandmothers and some but lately virgins, they all have exactly the same shrewd, vacant, all registering eye; it is difficult to believe that they ever cried for milk, or looked at the sun; it seems that they must have come into the world hungry for bank notes, and squinting helplessly, unable to focus their eyes until they came to rest on a cash-register.”
If you have never read Giovanni’s Room, read it now and imagine an impoverished black man scribbling away in Le Select in Montparnasse, never imagining the force he was to become in modern day literature.
James Baldwin may have died in his beloved France in St Paul de Vence, but he was buried in Harlem in Ferncliffe Cemetery, Greenburgh, New York.
He had come full circle on a remarkable journey.
Baldwin’s grave in Harlem. photo: Tony Fischer
Lead photo credit : James Baldin taken Hyde Park, London 1969. photo: Allan Warren
After some dreary years in the Civil Service, Marilyn realized her dream of living in Paris. She arrived in Paris in December 1967 and left in July 1969. From there she lived in Mallorca, London, Oman, and Dubai, where she moved with her husband and young son and worked for Gulf News, Khaleej Times and freelanced for Emirates Woman magazine. During this time she was also a ground stewardess for Middle East Airlines. For the past 18 years they've lived on the Isle of Wight.
Thank you so much Marguerite for your comment. I shall certainly investigate more black writers in France. I have an article on Josephine Baker, another black artist wonderfully before her time and of course Miles Davis, all who loved France and were loved in return. However, James Baldwin always has a special place in my heart. Thank you again.
Thank you for a beautiful essay about our Baldwin. I wonder if you could include other Black writers who have lived or emigrated to France and have written some of their work there. This is captivating.
I am so pleased you enjoyed 'Giovanni's Room' Dennis. It really is a book I read about every two years and never tire of it. Thank you so much for your comment.
Thanks very much for the tip, Marilyn. I just finished "Giovanni's Room" and found it excellent reading on several levels including the descriptions of Paris. Baldwin does put a lot of weight into a small book. He puts you there and makes you feel it. Great recommendation!
District:
All
1st arrondissement
2nd arrondissement
3rd arrondissement
4th arrondissement
5th arrondissement
6th arrondissement
7th arrondissement
8th arrondissement
9th arrondissement
10th arrondissement
11th arrondissement
12th arrondissement
13th arrondissement
14th arrondissement
15th arrondissement
16th arrondissement
17th arrondissement
18th arrondissement
19th arrondissement
20th arrondissement
Category:
All
Accommodation
Finance
French Language Services
Health & Wellbeing
Paris Art Galleries
Paris Boutiques
Paris Museums
Select
1st arrondissement
2nd arrondissement
3rd arrondissement
4th arrondissement
5th arrondissement
6th arrondissement
7th arrondissement
8th arrondissement
9th arrondissement
10th arrondissement
11th arrondissement
12th arrondissement
13th arrondissement
14th arrondissement
15th arrondissement
16th arrondissement
17th arrondissement
18th arrondissement
19th arrondissement
20th arrondissement
James Baldwin - Wikipedia
Baldwin in France | National Museum of African American History and Culture
Americans in Paris , James Baldwin : A Freedom Fighter... | Bonjour Paris
James Baldwin In Paris | The American Conservative
James Baldwin in Paris: On the Virtuosic Shame of Giovanni’s Room
Susan Floyd Nude
Malin Buska Nude
Mature Women P***
James Baldwin In Paris
