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Alice Yaeger Kaplan

Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis Hardcover – April 2, 2012

by Alice Kaplan (Author)

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A year in Paris . . . since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision—and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. Dreaming in French tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary American women.

All three women would go on to become icons, key figures in American cultural, intellectual, and political life, but when they embarked for France, they were young, little-known, uncertain about their future, and drawn to the culture, sophistication, and drama that only Paris could offer. Yet their backgrounds and their dreams couldn’t have been more different. Jacqueline Bouvier was a twenty-year-old debutante, a Catholic girl from a wealthy East Coast family. Susan Sontag was twenty-four, a precocious Jewish intellectual from a North Hollywood family of modest means, and Paris was a refuge from motherhood, a failing marriage, and graduate work in philosophy at Oxford. Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a prominent African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, found herself the only black student in her year abroad program—in a summer when all the news from Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence.

Kaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of these young women, tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that they found there. For all three women, France was far from a passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, the year abroad continued to influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives. Jackie Kennedy carried her love of France to the White House and to her later career as a book editor, bringing her cultural and linguistic fluency to everything from art and diplomacy to fashion and historic restoration—to the extent that many, including Jackie herself, worried that she might seem “too French.” Sontag found in France a model for the life of the mind that she was determined to lead; the intellectual world she observed from afar during that first year in Paris inspired her most important work and remained a key influence—to be grappled with, explored, and transcended—the rest of her life. Davis, meanwhile, found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense of political exile from racism at home and brought a sense of solidarity with Algerian independence. For her, Paris was a city of political commitment, activism, and militancy, qualities that would deeply inform her own revolutionary agenda and soon make her a hero to the French writers she had once studied.

Kaplan, whose own junior year abroad played a prominent role in her classic memoir, French Lessons, spins these three quite different stories into one evocative biography, brimming with the ferment and yearnings of youth and shot through with the knowledge of how a single year—and a magical city—can change a whole life. No one who has ever dreamed of Paris should miss it.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

University of Chicago Press
Publication date

April 2, 2012
Dimensions

6.5 x 0.75 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0226424383
ISBN-13

978-0226424385
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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Kaplan (The Interpreter, 2005) recounted her revelatory passion for all things French in French Lessons (1994). She now offers uniquely discerning portraits of three very different yet equally trailblazing American women whose “lives were transformed by a year in France, and who, in turn, transformed the United States.” An elegant, socially well-connected book lover and “keen observer of beauty,” Jackie Bouvier Kennedy was a Vassar student when she went to France in 1949 and found her true home. As Kaplan follows Kennedy to the White House and beyond, she praises her “quiet power and uncanny intelligence” while tracking her lifelong fascination with French art and culture. Leaving her husband and young son behind, Susan Sontag landed in France in 1958 and immersed herself in bohemian Paris and the French literary works that became the foundation for her influential, often controversial writing. Angela Davis’ ardor for French propelled her out of segregated Birmingham, Alabama, to school in New York, then to Paris in 1963–64 as the only African American student in her year-abroad program. A woman of “intellectual intensity” and valor, she became a besieged activist and cause célèbre. Kaplan’s avidly researched, fresh, and astute biographical triptych reveals as much about the evolution of women’s lives as it does about how profoundly these three exceptional Francophiles deepened the American experience. --Donna Seaman

Review

"The #1 nonfiction book to look out for this spring." ― Christian Science Monitor

"An enduring group profile of three influential yet completely different American women, for each of whom Paris played a short but transformative role, over three tumultuous decades. . . . The much-admired Kaplan focuses sharply on three women of successive generations, providing a keen feminist-cultural picture of Paris’s enduring, if varied, impact."

― Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A fascinating group portrait of three different women from three different generations whose trajectories nevertheless converge in one surprising yet significant place: Paris. In this lively, original biographie à trois, Alice Kaplan shows how time spent living in the French capital and learning about its culture gave each of these sui generis heroines 'her own ideas of what counted'—and how those ideas in turn became an indelible part of the American political and cultural landscape."

-- Caroline Weber, author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

"An eloquent, brilliant, and often moving portrayal of three remarkable women whose personal and intellectual engagement with France transformed them, and by extension America as well. These intimate narratives of Jaqueline Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis feel not only vital, but also necessary to our understanding of their moral, aesthetic and political development, and just as importantly, to our understanding of each as a remarkable, flawed, and complicated human being."

-- Dinaw Mengestu, author of How to Read the Air

"Alice Kaplan's triple portrait of three iconic mid-century American women, dazzles beyond our evergreen fascination with the wildly disparate lives of Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis. Her lens--the 'junior year abroad'--proves to be a brilliantly revealing cultural magnifying glass. With her meticulous scholarship, a novelist's gimlet eye for detail and the sheer grace of her writing, Kaplan has given us an original and now essential model of that enduring American narrative--the American in Paris." -- Patricia Hampl ― author of I Could Tell You Stories

"Superbly perceptive. . . . Kaplan is a master at . . . selecting just the right aspect of everyday experience to illuminate an important point she wants to make. . . . Some books are well-written on a sentence-by-sentence basis; you leaf back through the pages to find you've underscored choice lines. Dreaming in French is the sort of book where you (well, I) draw vertical lines next to entire paragraphs. Kaplan produces some exquisite lines, yes, but she is positively incandescent on the level of thoughts and observations." -- Laura Miller ― Salon

"Lively. . . . The links Kaplan makes between these cultures and these women deliver fascinating insight to the conditions and changes surging through not only these particular lives, but those of Americans in general." -- Michel Basillieres ― Toronto Star

"Gossip is one of the key pleasures--but far from the only one--to be found in Alice Kaplan’s absorbing new book. . . . It's a book, to some extent, about the desirability of abandoning or attenuating one’s Americanness." ― Slate

"Dreaming in French is, in essence a collection of three short, stand-alone biographies. But Kaplan is a talented historian, journalist, and storyteller, and so she's crafted a book greater than the sum of its parts. . . . An informative, well-written work of biographical nonfiction." ― Boston Globe

"An elegant and entertaining work." ― Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"In this well-written triple biographical bite of a magical time in the lives of three ambitious women, Alice Kaplan plumbs the cultural vein that enticed a debutante, an intellectual and a political activist to the same smoky streets of Paris." ― Examiner

"Elegantly written." ― Jewish Chronicle

"Compelling and well-observed portraits." -- Lauren Elkin ― Daily Beast

“Kaplan admirably lets the three women often speak for themselves, through interviews, diaries or autobiographies. The portions on Bouvier are the most fun." ― Washington Post

"'We will always have Paris': Bogart's classic line from Casablanca could easily be applied to the three American women woven into a highly original triple micro-biography. Beyond their nationality, what could Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis have in common? Each of them spent a year studying in Paris and left the city transformed by it. Documented and written like a novel, this womanly and erudite walking tour is as gratifying as a Woody Allen movie set in Paris."

― L'Amour des Livres

"Kaplan follows these women's singular trajectories in lively and brilliantly lucid prose."

― MORE Magazine

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; 1st Edition (April 2, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0226424383
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226424385
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 0.75 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,102,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,888 in Author Biographies
- #5,396 in Traveler & Explorer Biographies
- #10,275 in Women's Biographies

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Jimmie Benbrook

Personal Remembrances through the Eyes of Three Famous Women

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 26, 2012

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Being something of an amateur Francophile, I read this book on a whim, but then was pleasantly surprised to find it full of some unexpected personal historical references. The common thread for three otherwise diverse personalities, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, is the fact that they all spent around a year studying abroad in France during the formative years of their early adulthood. In 1962-63, I also spent year and a half of my early adulthood in France, not as a student, but as an enlisted soldier in the United States Army. Granted, I was not immersed in the daily study of the French language and culture as these amazing women were, but I was definitely influenced by French society through my somewhat limited contact. Alice Kaplan, the author, explains my circumstances quite clearly: "For some Americans, the early 1960s was an era of idealism and service, Vietnam a cloud on the horizon." I took President Kennedy's "Ask not what your country..." speech literally as a high school senior and enlisted in the Army in 1961, two weeks after graduating high school.

Each of this book's three subjects had their own specific reasons for studying in France, and of the three, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy was the only one with a definitive French ancestry. She studied there during the 1949-50 school year when I was in elementary school, was a debutante, and moved among the upper crust of post-war French society. Although her schooling in France had nothing to do with my personal history, her subsequent years as First Lady certainly did. She was a friend and admirer of Charles de Gaulle who ordered all American troops out of France when I was stationed there (my unit subsequently transferred to Germany). I didn't realize how much Jackie loved the French culture until I read this book and now wonder how much she would still be admired these days in the current American political climate.

I found the motives of Susan Sontag to be the most difficult of the three to understand and accept. As a prodigy she had attended several major universities in the United States (including UCLA, my alma mater) before studying in France in the late 50s. She was in her early twenties at the time, married, and had a child whom she basically abandoned to study in Paris, and her infatuation with an intense lesbian love affair dominated all else.

Angela Davis was teaching at UCLA when I was a student there, but my interests were in studying, not in following her concurrent controversies. I can, however, attest to the evils of the segregated South in 1961 while I was attending Signal School at Fort Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia. Upon arriving at the Augusta Airport from Los Angeles, I saw the "Whites Only" and "Colored Only" signs on the airport water fountains and bathrooms, quite a shock, even then, for a young man born and raised in California. A few weeks later a group of us student soldiers went to downtown Augusta on a weekend pass. One of the members of our small group was a black kid from Chicago, and someone suggested we go into a diner for a bite to eat; he refused, saying he was not allowed to go in there. This same kid who we had meals with in the mess hall every day was not allowed to eat with us outside the post. It still amazes me to this day that this existed in my own country.

26 people found this helpful

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Gloria B.

Study in a foreign land will change your life

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 27, 2015

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I find myself wondering whether generations other than mine will find this book interesting. I grew up with the 3 women. I had never heard of the Sorbonne until Jackie arrived on the scene. She became our new icon for beauty (replacing Marilyn) and intelligence and grace. I went to Paris in 1961-62 in part because of her. Michigan did not have a junior year abroad program at the time so I got on a boat my sophomore year and enrolled in the course for foreigners, finding my own housing. It was tough but also an educational breakthrough, my introduction to painting and literature and French politics. (Only now are we learning about the atrocities against Algerians, even in Paris in those years.) Sontag went to Paris a couple years later and Angela Davis after that. Kaplan reminds us of Davis's stirring story. I did not know that she had had such stunning support from French intellectuals during her incarceration and trial, even as the culture acted in racist ways against their colonies.

So for me the book was in part a trip down memory lane. Kaplan is not always the best of writers but she did tons of research. It is interesting that Angela never granted her an interview though this is in many ways the richest part of the book. I would have liked to hear about Kaplan's own year abroad. Perhaps she did not want to repeat herself, having published "French Lessons" before (I never thought a book about learning a language could be interesting but Kaplan proved me wrong). Being an academic, she is negotiating general interest and research while avoiding the too personal.

Living with a German family in the Black Forest at 16 and studying in Paris at 19 (and then hitchhiking through Europe in the summer of '62) changed my life. I went on to get a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Berkeley (4 foreign languages) and in recent years have studied Spanish.
All of this is a great privilege, which makes one a citizen of the world. I wish we could make it possible for more young people to experience the big, wide world beyond their one language and one place.

7 people found this helpful

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Unique triple biography

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 28, 2018

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Dreaming in French is the triple memoir of three iconic American women during their one year as a student in Paris – all in their 20s, before they knew their career pathways, before they became public figures. In Paris they were young and virtually unknown – they could be themselves. The years span 1949-1964.

Kaplan begins with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s 1949-1950 junior college year in Paris and Grenoble. Susan Sontag was in Paris in 1957-1958, and Angela Davis from 1963-1964: ‘If you reduce them to identity labels, they are the soul of diversity: a Catholic debutante (with upper-class connections), a Jewish intellectual (with European opinions), an African-American revolutionary (with a sense of justice and fearlessness), from the East Coast, the West Coast, and the South.’

Kaplan focuses on how the college year transformed their lives. From the single year in Paris, the City of Light, to their lives back in America – Kaplan continues post-Paris to describe its influence on the rest of their lives, hopes and ambitions: intellectually, socially, culturally, politically, and independently. Does Kaplan draw a tenuous line from Paris to post-Paris? Did one year in Paris when in their 20s really change ‘their relationship to their bodies, to their words?’

What is known is their ongoing relationship with France, to the arts, and to ‘liberty, egality, fraternity.’ They were loyal to Paris, and Paris remained loyal to them. Readers can draw their own conclusions through Kaplan’s final chapter in this excellent, thought-provoking and unique biography.

6 people found this helpful

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Hildy Gottlieb

Great insights into 3 brilliant women

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 28, 2020

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The thread of an American in Paris, in 3 different timeframes, is truly interesting. Writing lags a bit, heavy on details, less so on story. But I learned a ton and enjoyed it immensely.

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Mrs. L. A. G. Andrews

present

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 12, 2013

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This book gives a different perspective on JBK and my husband is enjoying reading it. Very good description of life in Paris.

tee

Interesting and Original

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 29, 2014

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Enlightening comparison of 3 very different figures from the 1960s. Very readable but also challenging and in some cases surprising.

Thomé Madeira

A touch of Parisian passion, to change the world!

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on July 10, 2021

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A Marvelous and touching narrative; Paris , always , let its mark in all experiences we live - I have some unforgettable - and , as said Hemingway, never leave you; three women so different in style , life and ideals, but Paris touched all of them, and from there , they came to change the world! Marvelous!

Jacqueline Berben

What Draws Us to France?

Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on December 23, 2014

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I admit to being an Alice Kaplan fan since "French Lessons." We share many a common yearning. Having discovered in this book that Angela Davis and I had both spent the same "Junior Year Abroad", she in Paris, myself in Aix-en-Provence, I began to realize more of the forces that were to shape my own outlook from then til now. As for a peek at the young Jackie Bouvier Kennedy--and how her year in France contributed to the public person we have all come to know--the Paris of the immediate post-war period, the joy of "survival" for many of those who surrounded her, perhaps that dream so many embraced of the Kennedy White House years as "Camelot" finds its roots in these pages. Susan Sontag was a revelation, not only as a brilliant academic, but also as a woman ahead of her time, choosing a rarely trod path, however shocking, however scandalizing. This is a book about self-discovery through engagement with a foreign, if fascinating culture, one that wounds and heals and that we forgive and continue to love.

4 people found this helpful

Sylvie F.

Pour découvrir deux femmes qui ont marqué leur temps sous un nouveau jour

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 16, 2013

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La France de la fin des années 80 et du début des années 70 a profondément marqué ces deux femmes qui ont révolutionné leur temps et milité pour une juste cause. Un nouveau regard sur leur démarche...

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