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The French in Philadelphia of 1790s

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楼主
发表于 7-16-2014 18:47:44 | 只看该作者 回帖奖励 |倒序浏览 |阅读模式
Frederick Brown, Fraternité in the Land of Liberty. Exiles flocked to the new nation’s capital. Talleyrand speculated in land. Brillat-Savarian gave violin lessons. Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2014
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702303734204580015542060289392
(book review on François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French; Five refugees who shaped a nation. The Penguin Press, 2014)

Note:
(a)
(i) The German and Jewish (Ashkenazic) surname Fürstenberg “[was name of] a place in Swabia, so named from the genitive case of Old High German furisto ‘prince’, modern German Fürst + berg ‘mountain’, ‘hill.’”
(ii) Fürstenberg (principality)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BCrstenberg_(principality)

(b) “In the letters Alexis de Tocqueville wrote from Philadelphia, the young Frenchman described a city unlike any his correspondents had ever seen. It was 1831, and America's former capital stretched 2 miles from one river to another in a grid of sequentially numbered streets. * * * The [American] notables with whom Tocqueville mingled were men of infinite good will, seemingly impervious to insult, but they chewed tobacco and spat in his presence. * * * his companion, Etienne de Beaumont, who spoke English laboriously”
(i)
(A) Alexis de Tocqueville
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville
(1805-1859; best known for his works Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes: 1835 and 1840); his father was Hervé Louis François Jean Bonaventure Clérel, Comte de Tocqueville)
(B) Alexis (given name)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_(given_name)
(derived from the Greek word aléxo, meaning "to help, defend;"  The name was traditionally male, though it has been in use as a girls name in the United States since at least the 1940s, when actress Alexis Smith (born Gladys Smith) began appearing in movies)
(C) There are a handful of places in France whose name is Tocqueville. The right one is Tocqueville-les-Murs, in the Seine-Maritime département (in Normandy), where one can
RENT the Château Alexis de Tocqueville
chateaudetocqueville.com/fr/the-castle/
(ii) Philadelphia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia
(Philadelphia served as the temporary capital of the United States, 1790–1800, while the Federal City was under construction in the District of Columbia)
(iii) correspondent (n): "one who communicates with another by letter"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/correspondent
(iv) Etienne de Beaumont
(A) Étienne
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Étienne
(a French equivalent of Stephen)
(B) The en.wikipedia.org have eighteen (18) places in France whose name is Beaumont.
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沙发
 楼主| 发表于 7-16-2014 18:48:23 | 只看该作者
(continued)

(c) “Immigrants to the city [Philadelphia] were, for the most part, refugees from the turmoil of revolution. Thousands came from France, where, after 1792, Robespierre's Jacobins held sway, and thousands more from Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti), France's immensely prosperous colony, which had been set afire by sparks from the mother country. Even before a Parisian envoy in Saint Domingue issued an emancipation proclamation on behalf of the French Republic, slaves—of whom half a million worked on sugar and coffee plantations—rose up, burned the cane fields and laid waste the port city of Cap-Français, known as ‘the pearl of the Antilles.’ Fleets of cargo vessels normally used to transport sugar sailed north bearing French-speaking fugitives and whatever these former colonists had been able to salvage of their possessions.”
(i) Maximilien de Robespierre
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximilien_de_Robespierre
(1758 – 1794; reign of terror; guillotined without trial)
(ii)
(A) Jacobin
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin
(Society of the Friends of the Constitution, commonly known as the Jacobin Club; It was so named because of the Dominican convent where they met, which had recently been located in the Rue St. Jacques (Latin: Jacobus), Paris)
(B) Jacobin (n; from the group's founding in the Dominican convent in Paris)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jacobin
(iii) Saint-Domingue
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Domingue
(1659-1809; "In 1791, the slaves and some free people of color of Saint-Domingue began waging a rebellion against French authority. The rebels become reconciled to French rule following the abolition of slavery in the colony in 1793, although this alienated the island's dominant slave-holding class"/ section 1 Overview)

(d) “It is estimated that, by the mid-1790s, Frenchmen ranging in social status from landed aristocrats to bakers made up 10% of Philadelphia's population. * * * It did not take long for goods and services never before available to appear across the city [Philadelphia]. * * * French watchmakers, jewelers and silversmiths set up shop. ‘Grocers hawked mustard, wine, and brandy; merchants advertised luxury goods like wigs, pomades, and perfumes.’  When George Washington established himself in Philadelphia, his staff called upon French decorators to embellish the presidential mansion. Where George Washington led, Philadelphia's nouveaux riches followed. They studied French. They bought French furniture. They took instruction from French dancing masters. They hired French chefs. The shift from English fashion to French redounded to the advantage of the upper-class American palate. Among the Binghams, Shippens, Chews and Biddles, food became cuisine.”
(i) pomade
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomade
(section 2 Origin of the name)
(ii) redound (vi)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/redound
(iii) cuisine (n; French, literally, kitchen (and share, with English noun “kitchen,” the same Latin root--Latin noun coquina “kitchen”, from Latin verb coquere “to cook”)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cuisine

(e) “Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, later renowned as the author of ‘The Physiology of Taste, or Meditations on Transcendent Gastronomy,’ resided in Philadelphia, though obscurely, giving violin lessons. Brillat-Savarin, a lawyer by training * * *”

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Anthelme_Brillat-Savarin
(1755-1826; born and died in France; moved to Holland, and then to the new-born United States, where he stayed for three years in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Hartford, living on the proceeds of giving French and violin lessons)

(f) “Such men as these met regularly at a Philadelphia bookstore opened by Mr Furstenberg's fifth refugee, Moreau de Saint-Méry, a Creole lawyer educated in Paris, where his parliamentary work and outspoken allegiance to colonial planters put him in bad odor with Jacobin abolitionists. * * *  From this perch at the edge of the affluent neighborhood Society Hill, the five shared not only their views of America but, like shades who had encountered mayhem in Elysium, their feelings of isolation. The French community in America was rent by the same divisions that had made reformist gradualism impossible at home.
(i) odor (n): “REPUTE <in bad [or ‘good’] odor>”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/odor
(ii) Society Hill, Philadelphia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_Hill,_Philadelphia,_Pennsylvania
(a neighborhood);  named after the 18th century Free Society of Traders, which had its offices at Front Street on the hill above Dock Creek)
(iii) shade (n): "a disembodied spirit: GHOST"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shade
(iv) Elysium (n)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Elysium

(g) “Most famous of all, with a name recognizable even today, was Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the impious bishop of Autun and future mastermind of French diplomacy. * * * Talleyrand arrived with letters of recommendation to Alexander Hamilton, who soon became his bosom friend, sparing time as often as possible to converse over dinner—most likely in French, which Hamilton spoke fluently—about revolutions, free trade and finance. * * * Talleyrand was always known to be venal, speculating in State funds as bishop of Autun; in the US, he reinvented himself as a real-estate agent, charging commissions on the sale of virgin American land to Europeans. ‘There are here more ways of re-making a fortune than in any other place,’ he wrote to Germaine de Staël, his former mistress (and daughter of Jacques Necker, Louis XVI's last minister of finance). * * * Noailles and Liancourt were fired by Talleyrand's enthusiasm for the alchemy of buying land on credit and transforming it into gold, though the high-minded Liancourt could not regard American avidity without scruple. The mercantile spirit bred egoism, he declared. A foreigner received more than two invitations from Philadelphians only if he were assumed to have disposable income. ‘In that case the civilities continue as long as they think he wants to buy land, and even longer, for the homage to wealth is the religion around which all sects unite.’ Still, Liancourt did not refrain from associating with William Bingham in a land deal that he thought gave him financial security. * * * And the ever-resourceful Talleyrand played his part in the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire, in 1799, serving Napoleon as foreign minister and enriching himself in the emperor's reorganization of Europe. It was Talleyrand who a few years later, in negotiations with President Jefferson's representative, Robert Livingston, proposed that the United States purchase not only the city of New Orleans but all of the Louisiana Territory, covering 828,000 square miles, north to Canada. Napoleon's foreign minister thus consummated his career as a real-estate agent in the United States.”
(i) impious = not pious  (but these two adjectives are pronounced differently)
(ii) Autun
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autun
(iii)
(A) Germaine de Staël
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_de_Staël
(1766-1817; "born in Paris, France [of Swiss origin]. Her father was the prominent Swiss banker and statesman Jacques Necker, who was the Director of Finance under King Louis XVI of France")
(B) Germaine is a female given name in FRANCE.
* Germain (adjective masculine; feminine germaine; from Latin Germānus)
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/germain

is defined as “German, from Germany.”
www.sheknows.com/baby-names/name/germaine
* Germanus
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanus
(“the Latin term referring to the Germanic peoples. A probably related meaning for the word in Latin is ‘brother’")
(C) In UNITED STATES, Jermaine is a MALE given name. See Jermaine
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jermaine
(derived from the French given name Germaine; popularized in the 1970s by Jermaine Jackson (b. 1954-), a member of the singing group The Jackson 5)
(iv) BUT SEE

The French surname Germain (and its variant Germaine): “from the Old French personal name Germain. This was popular in France, where it had been borne by a 5th-century saint, bishop of Auxerre. It derives from Latin Germanus ‘brother’, ‘cousin’ (originally an adjective meaning ‘of the same stock’, from Latin germen ‘bud’, ‘shoot’). In the Romance languages, especially Italian, the popularity of the equivalent personal name has been enhanced by association with the meaning ‘brother (in God),’ and in Spanish the cognate surname is derived from the vocabulary word meaning ‘brother’ rather than from a personal name. The feminine form, Germaine, which occurs as a place name in Aisne, Marne, and Haute-Marne, is associated with a late 16th-century saint from Provençal, the daughter of a poor farmer, who was canonized in 1867.”
Dictionary of American Family Names, by Oxford UNiversity Press
(v) William Bingham
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bingham
(1752-1804)
(vi) Coup of 18 Brumaire
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_of_18_Brumaire
(Nov 9, 1799)
(vii) Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de (1754-1838), in Junius P Rodriguez (ed), The Louisiana Purchase; A historical and geographical encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, Inc, 2002, at page 327
books.google.com/books?id=Qs7GAwwdzyQC&pg=PA327&lpg=PA327&dq=louisiana+purchase+Charles+Maurice+de+Talleyrand-Périgord&source=bl&ots=hPpk1m4I5H&sig=rS5PoG4cVRh6384voeFhWN6zdj8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=gy3HU6vbK-3nsASNqYCoCQ&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=louisiana purchase Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord&f=false

This book said the same about Talleyrand’s role in Louisiana Purchase. However, en.wikipedia.com
(A) in the Web page for “Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord” did not mention Louisiana Purchase, and
(B) in the Web page for “Louisiana Purchase” instead contended Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours played that role.
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