Letter from Paris

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895)
From Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology

Interesting Links

Interview with David Blight: “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom Recasts the Life of One of our Major Literary Figures” (Library of America)

“Helen Pitts Douglass and the Frederick Douglass Memorial” (National Trust for Historic Preservation)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Reconstruction,” Frederick Douglass
• “What It Means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States,” Mary Church Terrell
• “A Traveler at Forty: Paris!” Theodore Dreiser
• “Mon Amie,” Randolph Bourne

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Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology
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Monument to Alexandre Dumas, Paris, France, in the 1890s. At the base, a man, a woman, and a student are reading a copy of The Three Musketeers. Photochrom print, one of a series of more than five hundred images of sites in France produced in 1905 by the Detroit Publishing Company. (Library of Congress)

Before Gustave Doré died in January 1883, he finished his last major work, a bronze statue of Alexandre Dumas. Installation of the statue in La Place du Général Catroux was completed three months after his death and there it still stands today. As described in the letter reprinted here, when Frederick Douglass visited Paris in 1886, he was intent on seeing this prominent tribute to a writer of African descent. A year later he recalled “the bushy head and African features” of Dumas’s bronze figure and called it “one of the finest monuments in Paris and in the most aristocratic part of it.” Douglass’s high opinion of the author was diminished, however, by a conversation with the famous French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, who claimed Dumas “never said one word for his race.” While Dumas may not have been active in abolitionist circles, he did write Georges, an antislavery novel about a slave rebellion with a mixed-race hero. It was published in 1842—the year before The Three Musketeers catapulted him to international fame and six years before slavery was banned in the French colonies.

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While Frederick Douglass was on a lecture tour in England and Scotland in 1860, he planned to fulfill a long-cherished desire to see Paris. “The attempt upon the life of Napoleon III about that time, and the suspicion that the conspiracy against him had been hatched in England, made the French government very strict in the enforcement of its passport system,” he wrote in his memoir Life and Times. So, to obtain a passport, he wrote to George M. Dallas, formerly Vice President during the Polk administration and now the American minister in England. “But,” Douglass wrote, “true to the traditions of the Democratic party—true to the slaveholding policy of his country—true to the decision of the United States supreme court, and true, perhaps, to the petty meanness of his own nature,” Dallas refused to issue the passport “on the ground that I was not a citizen of the United States.” Upon learning of this, the French minister at Newcastle immediately stepped in and furnished the required documents.

Unfortunately, almost as soon as this diplomatic imbroglio had been settled, Douglass received word of the death of his daughter Annie, and he took the first available steamer back to Portland, Maine. Another twenty-six years would pass before he was able to fulfill his dream of seeing Paris.

In September 1886, seven months after he ended a five-year tenure as the recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia, Douglass sailed with his wife, Helen Pitts Douglass, for an eleven-month tour of Europe and the Middle East. After spending a month seeing old acquaintances and friends in England, they left for Paris. The train to Dover, the crossing across the English Channel, and the second train trip from Calais to Paris flew by, interrupted only by a stop in the Customs House. “They overhauled my luggage and underhauled it, and handled it somewhat recklessly and rudely, but happily for me nothing of a dynamite, contraband, incendiary, or suspicious character was found,” he recalled to an audience a year later when he was back in Washington. “Soon we were whirling away with a speed unknown to ordinary railroad travel in America, to the great city of Paris—the city of the dreams and visions of my boyhood—and which then I had not hoped ever to see.”

Arriving on October 20, the Douglasses ended up staying in Paris for more than two and half months. The American journalist Theodore Stanton, son of the women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, served as their guide for much of their visit. Stanton arranged for Douglass to meet Victor Schoelcher, who led the campaign that resulted in the abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1848. He also secured an invitation to attend a session of the French Chamber of Deputies.

Although early in his trip Douglass was disconcerted when he encountered advertising for minstrel shows imported from the United States, he was largely impressed and often overawed by Paris and Parisians. Reflecting on the treatment accorded him, as an African American man with a white wife, he told the audience in D.C. the following year:

I hardly need repeat here a fact so well known, and one which I have so often had occasion to state elsewhere, that I met in Paris no manifestation against men on account of race or color. I am not bound to account for this, but I think it is in part because the negro has never been seen there as a degraded slave, but often as a gentleman and a scholar, for men hate those whom they injure. Perhaps also , the absence of race prejudice may in some measure be due to the presence and prevalence of the Roman Catholic religion. For whatever may be its other faults and defects, the Roman Catholic church welcomes to its altar and communion men of all races and colors, and would contradict its assumption of being the universal church if it did otherwise.

For whatever reason, Douglass did not write entries in his journal during his entire stay in Paris, and his immediate impressions survive in the scattered newspaper articles by observers tracking his adventures across Europe and in a handful of his surviving letters, one of which we reprint below. It is addressed to two friends in Boston, one of whom is likely Lewis Hayden, whom Douglass had known since the 1840s. As Adam Gopnik noted when the letter was reprinted in the Library of America anthology Americans in Paris, it serves as “a kind of cornerstone for the approaching twentieth-century black American fascination with Paris as a potential paradise—a place where, as James Weldon Johnson would later write, a black man could have ‘the sense of just being a human being.’”

Notes: Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon coauthored Types of Mankind (1854) and Indigenous Races of the Earth (1857), works that promoted polygenism, the belief that various races developed separately, as distinct species, and did not share a common ancestor.

Former President Chester A. Arthur died on November 18, 1886, the day before Douglass wrote this letter. Although Douglass had been appointed as the recorder of deeds of the District of Columbia by President James A. Garfield—the first appointment of an African American to a federal office requiring Senate confirmation—he continued in the position in the Arthur administration after Garfield’s assassination. Douglass then held the office for the first year of Grover Cleveland’s term—even though Douglass was a Republican and Cleveland a Democrat. Douglass’s relationship with Arthur was fraught at best; the President avoided Douglass and never requested his presence at official occasions and ceremonies. Cleveland, on the other hand, nearly always invited both Douglass and his wife to state functions at the White House.

Founded in 1872, the Wendell Phillips Club (named in honor of the white abolitionist and civil rights activist who died in 1884) was a social fraternity for prominent Black men in Boston. On September 11, 1886, the club hosted a dinner in Douglass's honor and Lewis Hayden, a member and the likely recipient of this letter, escorted him there.

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This week’s selection appears in its entirety below.
You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

Letter from Paris

Hotel Britanique.
Avenue Victoria.
Paris: November 19, 1886

Dear Friends Hayden and Watson

I do not forget that I promised on parting with you in Boston to let you have a line from me during my stay abroad. Nothing has occurred during my absence thus far which could be of special interest to you or to my American friends. I have everywhere been received in this country and in England with civility, courtesy and kindness and as a man among men as I expected to be. I have felt however that my presence here even in silence, has a good influence in respect of the standing of the Colored race before the world. The lepros distilment of american prejudice against the negro is not confined to the United States. America has her missionaries abroad in the shape of Ethiopean singers, who disfigure and distort the features of the negro and burlesque his language and manners in a way to make him appear to thousands as more akin to apes than to men. This mode of warfare is purely american and is carried on here in Paris, as it is in the great cities of England and in the States. So that to many minds, as no good was thought to come out of Nazireth so no good is expected of the Negro. In addition to these Ethiopian Buffoons and serinaders who presume to represent us abroad, there are malicious american writers who take pleasure in assailing us, as an inferior and good for nothing race of which it is impossible to make anything. These influences are very bountiful and not only tend to avert from us the sympathy of civilized Europians, but to bring us under the lash and sting of the world’s contempt. I have thus far done little to counteract this tendency in public—but I have never failed to bear my testimony when confronted with it in private—with pen and tongue. When I shall return to England, as I hope to do, in the spring—I shall probably make a few speeches in that country in vindication of the cause and the character of the colored race in america in which I hope to do justice to their progress and make known some of the difficulties with which as a people they have had to contend. Notwithstanding what I have said of the malign influences I mentioned the masses of the people both in France and in England are sound in their convictions and feelings concerning the colored race. The best elements of both countries are just and charitable towards us. I had the great pleasure yesterday of an interview with a member I may say a venerable and highly distinguished member of the French senate, M. Schoelcher, the man who in the final hours of the Revolution of 1848 drew up the decree and carried through the measure of Emancipation to the slaves in all the French Colonies. Senator Schoelcher is now over eighty years old, but like many other Europian statesmen is still able to work. He attends the Senate daily and in addition to his other labors he is now writing the life of Toussaint, the hero of Haytian Independence and liberty. A splended testimonial of the gratitude of the Emancipated people of the French Colonies is seen in his house in the shape of a figure of Liberty in Bronze breaking the chains of the slave. The house of this venerable and philanthropic senator has in it many of the relics of slaveholding barbarism and cruelty. Besides broken fetters and chains which had once gulled the limbs of slaves, he showed me one more collar with four huge prongs placed upon the necks of refracting slaves designed to entangle and impede them in the bushes, if they should attempt to run away. I had seen the same hellish equipment in the States—but did not know until I saw them here, that they were also used in the French Islands. Monsieur Schoelcher spoke much in praise of Thomas Jefferson—but blamed Washington. The latter could have, (he said), abolished slavery and that it was his fault that slavery was fastened upon the american Republic. I spoke to him of Alexander Dumas. He said he was a clever writer, but that he was nothing in morals or politics—he never said one word for his race. So have nothing to thank Dumas for.

Victor Hugo the whiteman could speak for us, but this brilliant colored man, who could have let down sheets of fire upon the heads of tyrants and carried freedom to his enslaved people, had no word in behalf of liberty or the enslaved. I have not yet seen his statue here in Paris. I shall go to see it, as it is an acknowledgement of the genius of a colored man, but not because I honor the character of the man himself.

I have seen much here in Paris in the way of ancient and modern sculpture and painting which deeply interested me. The Louvre and the Luxombourgh abound in them. I have long been interested in Ethnology—especially of the North African races. I have wanted the evidence of greatness under a colored skin to meet and beat back the charge of natural, original and permanent inferiority of the colored races of men. Could I have seen forty years ago, what I have now seen, I should have been much better fortified to meet the Notts and Gliddens of america in their arguments against the negro as a part of the great african race. Knowledge on this subject comes to me late, but I hope not too late to be of some services—for the battle at this point is not yet fought out and the victory is not yet. Yesterday through the kind offices of Mr. Theodore Stanton who procured tickets for us, I had the pleasure with him and Mrs. Douglass of sitting in a favored part of the gallery of the French house of Deputies and listening to the deliberations of that august body. Answering to our house of Representatives but with powers more enlarged. It presents a fine appearance and though somewhat noisy it was in point of manners an improvement on our house of Representatives. I saw no one squirting tobacco, smoking, or his feet above the level of his head as is sometimes seen in our National Legislature.

Colored faces are scarce in Paris. I sometimes get sight of one or two in the course of a day’s ramble. They are mostly from Hayti and the French Colonies. They are here as students and make a very respectable appearance. I met the other day at the house of Pere Hyacinthe a Mr. Janveir of Hayti a young man of the color of our well remembered friend Samuel R. Ward who is one of the finest scholars and most refined Gentlemen in Paris. I was very much delighted to find such a noble specimen of the possibilities of the colored race and to find him so highly appreciated by cultivated ladies and gentlemen of Paris. If a race can produce one such man it can produce many.

I am not ignorant of what is transpiring in the states. To days cable gram tells of the Death of Ex President Arthur an able man and while it must be regretted that he has fallen in the midst of his years, there is nothing in his career as President of the U.S. that proves him to have had any sympathy with the oppressed colored people of the south. I see that Mr. Blaine is likely to be the Republican Candidate in 1888. All I have to say is that whether he or another shall be chosen as our standard-bearer I see nothing better for us then to follow the Republican flag. We have not gained all that we had a right to expect under it, but under it we gained all that we have.

Please remember me kindly to the Wendell Phillips Club. I shall not soon forget the pleasant Evening and the happy send off the members of that Club gave me on the 11th Sept.

With kindest regards to yourselves and your families.

Always truly yours
Frederick Douglass

This transcripton was published in the August 1985 issue of Amistad.