They’ll Always Have Paris, Despite What Trump Says

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/opinion/theyll-always-have-paris-despite-what-trump-says.html

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PANTIN, France — At least since Benjamin Franklin arrived here in 1776, Paris has represented for Americans a cherished ideal, a place where the pleasures of food, wine, sex, art, thought and conversation can be pursued as they cannot in the United States. A host of American writers, from Henry James and Edith Wharton, to Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway, bloomed in Paris. African-American writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin felt far freer of the weight of racism in Paris than they did at home.

President Trump’s disparaging remark last Friday, that Paris was not what it used to be, would be something of a jolt to many American expatriates, who are more concerned about what was happening back home than in their beloved adopted city.

Mr. Trump was speaking at a conservative conference when he referred to “Jim,” who he said was a “a very, very substantial guy” who stopped visiting Paris four or five years ago because “Paris was no longer Paris.” He let the audience imagine why with the story’s punch line: “We are going to keep radical Islamic terrorists the hell out of our country.”

Among those who have learned what Trump means by stopping terrorists was the distinguished French historian Henry Rousso. Hardly a “radical Islamic terrorist” — in fact, he’s a Jew born in Egypt — Mr. Rousso said that he was detained for more than 10 hours and threatened with deportation by American border agents when he arrived at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport last Wednesday to attend a conference at Texas A&M University. Mr. Rousso — who has visited the United States without incident for 30 years, and who has been invited to such institutions as Harvard University, Dartmouth College and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — was cleared to enter the United States only after the university enlisted legal assistance.

“What I know, loving this country for a long time,” Mr. Rousso wrote on Sunday, in the French edition of The Huffington Post, “is that the United States is no longer quite the United States.”

More than 30,000 Americans live in France, including more than 16,000 in Paris. While most of the Americans I’ve spoken with here still believe the United States is the United States, they are deeply alarmed. (Democrats claim far more support here than Republicans.) They worry how Mr. Trump’s policies and pronouncements will affect their lives in a world that can no longer count on the United States to remain committed to the values of an open society and to the institutions that have kept the peace in Europe since the end of World War II.

John Fredenberger moved to Paris in 1971 after a tour of duty in Vietnam to work as a legal officer in the defense attaché office at the American Embassy. Eventually, he started his own tax law practice here. For Mr. Fredenberger, “Trump is just an embarrassment.” He worries that “Trump’s potential impact on Europe is devastating.”

Anne Lechartier, who moved to Paris in 1975 from Detroit, also finds Trump “deeply embarrassing.” She is grateful for the French medical system, which has provided her with excellent, virtually free treatment for the cancer she was diagnosed with a year ago, something she knows she would never get in the United States.

For many Americans in Paris, Trump’s election has been a call to action. Several people told me they had never demonstrated in their life, yet they marched in the Paris Against Trump protest last November and the Women’s March in Paris on Jan. 21. Mr. Fredenberger is encouraging Americans abroad to send postcards to the White House with messages that underline that they are citizens, they are watching — and they vote.

Scott Herr, pastor of the American Church in Paris, wrote in an email: “I feel challenged in a new way with the election of President Trump to speak out clearly on social justice issues and to make it clear that racism, misogyny, homophobia and any kind of disparaging of whole-people groups, especially those of other faith persuasions, is simply not acceptable.”

In contrast to Mr. Trump’s friend “Jim,” some well-heeled Americans apparently hope France will continue to welcome them too. According to Adrian Leeds, who runs a business helping Americans find homes in France, and who has lived here for 22 years: “Since the minute the election result came in, we have been flooded with calls.”