Paris in the Fifties

by Stanley Karnow, Annette Karnow (Illustrator)

In July 1947, fresh out of college and long before he would win the Pulitzer Prize and become known as one of America's finest historians, Stanley Karnow boarded a freighter bound for France, planning to stay for the summer. He stayed for ten years, first as a student and later as a correspondent for Time magazine. By the time he left, Karnow knew Paris so intimately that his French colleagues dubbed him "le plus parisien des Américains" --the most Parisian American.

Now, Karnow returns to the France of his youth, perceptively and wittily illuminating a time and place like none other. Karnow came to France at a time when the French were striving to return to the life they had enjoyed before the devastation of World War II. Yet even during food shortages, political upheavals, and the struggle to come to terms with a world in which France was no longer the mighty power it had been, Paris remained a city of style, passion, and romance.

Paris in the Fifties transports us to Latin Quarter cafés and basement jazz clubs, to unheated apartments and glorious ballrooms. We meet such prominent political figures as Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Mendès-France, as well as Communist hacks and the demagogic tax rebel Pierre Poujade. We get to know illustrious intellectuals, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and André Malraux, and visit the glittering salons where aristocrats with exquisite manners mingled with trendy novelists, poets, critics, artists, composers, playwrights, and actors. We meet Christian Dior, who taught Karnow the secrets of haute couture, and Prince Curnonsky, France's leading gourmet, who taught the young reporter to appreciate the complexities of haute cuisine. Karnow takes us to marathon murder trials in musty courtrooms, accompanies a group of tipsy wine connoisseurs on a tour of the Beaujolais vineyards, and recalls the famous automobile race at Le Mans when a catastrophic accident killed more than eighty spectators. Back in Paris, Karnow hung out with visiting celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Audrey Hepburn, and in Paris in the Fifties we meet them too.

A veteran reporter and historian, Karnow has written a vivid and delightful history of a charmed decade in the greatest city in the world.

Genres: History, France, Nonfiction, Travel, Memoir, Biography, Audiobook

352 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1997

About the author

Stanley Karnow was a well-respected American journalist and historian whose book In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines won him the coveted Pulitzer Prize for History. Karnow was a World War II veteran who graduated from Harvard and began his journalism career in the early 1950s. He is probably best known for his coverage of the Vietnam War.

Stanley Karnow died of congestive heart failure at the age of 87.

Reviews

[Jill H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Put on your beret, grab a bottle of wine, and join the Pulitzer Prize author on a trip through the City of Light in the 1950s. And what a trip it is!

Stanley Karnow worked as a reporter at Time magazine at the end of WWII and was transferred to Paris in 1950 where he learned the art of journalism and the French language. In 1997, he decided to put together all of his original dispatches which he had kept and wrote this book, which he states is a chronicle rather than a memoir and "might evoke the atmosphere of the period and provide some insights in French life ........" those many decades ago.

If you have been to France, you will soon see that it has changed dramatically from those days; yet to a large extent, as the old saying goes Plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme chose. He covers such diverse topics as the people's distrust of banks, their preference for "mom and pop" businesses, and their idea that debt was a crime. The reader is taken through the restaurants, bistros, shows with daring female performers, and bars which are everywhere. We are present when the last prisoners from the infamous Devil's Island are released to France and we have conversations with Ernest Hemingway, the Duke of Windsor, and Orson Welles.. And the list goes on and will keep you entranced

It should be noted that it helps if one speaks/reads French (which I do) since there are many untranslated phrases and sentences throughout the book. The only reason that I gave it four stars instead of five was the last chapter which took the author to Algeria as the uprising was beginning to foment to break the country away from France. It is well written but I wanted to stay in Paris!

There is a funny quote from President Charles de Gaulle which I marked in the book............"How can you govern a country with three hundred varieties of cheese". Delightful!!

[Susan Furber · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

A lovely book about living in Paris in the 1940s and 1950s. It captures the reality but also celebrates the romanticized notion of the 'American in Paris'. Wonderful details, though was more interested in some parts than others.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a Francophile, I loved the early chapters in this book when the author is actually talking about living in Paris post WWII. But later bits got boring with encyclopedic cataloging of French politics and politcians. The last few chapters don't even talk about Paris. If you're interested in a contemporaneous view of France's Algerian revolt, those chapters cover it.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, off-handedly witty, knowing and sagacious. Karnow was a great journalist, and these reminiscences of cutting his teeth as a reporter in Paris are wonderful.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an older book but a classic book about Paris written with affection and attachment. H e seems to have met everyone who was anyone of the era or said he had. very amusing read and for those of us besotted with Paris a transporting read when we really need to be in Paris right away-

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to live inside this book for the great majority of my junior year in high school. Have you ever heard celebrities or celebrity commentators obnoxiously talk about how someone is "channeling" someone else in their attire? Basically I tried to channel this book- the personalities and atmosphere conveyed were so overwhelming I couldn't not be sucked into it. My phase of Francophilia started because of this book, I went to Paris to study abroad probably, ultimately, because of this book.

Look, it's really not that great. I read it at an impressionable age. It's a bunch of gossipy stories about famous people and what life was like in postwar France. You meet Hemingway and Audrey, Elizabeth Taylor and Sartre, and Charles de Gaulle. The elite classes of the West who still had their money (and some that didn't) flooded the city and the country more generally- the war had taken one of the best vacation spots away (as they had post WWI, and even with the post-Napoleonic resumption of the Grand Tour by the English aristocracy). There's tons of people that show up in France in this period

But if you're into France and into early and mid century celebrities- whether literary, film, or politically famous, you'll enjoy this one.

[Richard · Rating 1 out of 5]

A painfully boring exercise in shallow, pedestrian journalism masquerading as memoir. Karnow has a rare talent for rendering inherently fascinating people and topics in dull and uninspired prose. In less than ten pages (late in chapter 5) he presents encounters with Orson Welles, Audrey Hepburn, and John Huston that provide less insight than their Wikipedia entries and demonstrate that he was the kind of reporter who could be completely rolled by a Hollywood personality's most distracted and disengaged PR shtick.

Welles certainly must have been sleepwalking through their encounter, if not drunk. He blathers banalities and generalizations that clearly impressed Karnow but are nothing like the insights Welles offers in those few interviews that he actually cares about. Hepburn simply snows him like a cub reporter from small town nowhere, and she no doubt forgot he had even been there five minutes after he left. And Huston sounds like he's just reciting routine bullshit, keeping himself entertained while he drinks and Karnow, the gullible young rube, feverishly takes down notes.

If you manage to get even that far, you've already slogged through dozens of pages of mundane accounts about Karnow and his nameless and forgettable acquaintances with occasional glimpses of famous artists and entertainers who are never so uninteresting as they are here. But even these parts are better than when Karnow plays popular historian and subjects you to retrospectives of French cultural history that an editor of textbooks would have trashed after a glance.

Karnow, of course, was known as a war correspondent, and the notable awards and accolades he earned over the years were for works very different from this one. The notes he used for this book date from his earliest days as a reporter, and he only fleshed them out into a book forty years later, when their inexperience and naivete were no doubt magnified by nostalgia and the distance of time. Perhaps there's little wonder, then, that the results are so underwhelming. But whatever the merits of his other books, there's nothing here for anyone who isn't already infatuated with this moment in French history or a masochistic completist for vintage celebrity culture.

[Karin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Christopher Hurt, one of my favorite readers. Some chapters were more interesting than others. Perhaps Karnow’s editors were justified in their cuts to his long essays.

[Alexandria Brake · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't sure what to expect, since I'm not crazily into Paris OR the fifties, but this was such a relaxing, refreshing read. Like taking the kind of behind-the-scenes, real-life-experience European vacation you dream about. No tourist traps here, just good food, rich wine, and a dabble into all the elements of French culture you can't get on the average 21st century trip!

[Kerry Dunn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I used to work in a bookstore and I shelved in the history section and this book's cover always attracted me. I bought it but it sat on my shelf for years. I finally picked up, got about 30 pages in and....nope. It's boring, uninteresting, and dry. Life's too short to waste precious reading time on boring books.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stanley Karnow was a lucky man. He survived the Second World War to study at the Sorbonne in Paris and get every journalist's dream job, stringer at Time magazine's Paris bureau. In those high and far off times, publications like Time were virtually coining money. Underlings like Karnow got to run around interviewing tout le monde for something called background. They wrote up their findings and editors in New York put the pieces together to make an article.
Paris ... is a comprehensive book about the City Of Light. We learn about French chefs, French wines, French fashions and fashion houses, French history and French politics. Truly, Karnow was not that much of a writer. A good, even great journalist, but not that great a writer. This book is sort of the first this happened, then that happened variety. However, if the reader is at all interested in history and how things came to be as they are today, this is a great book.

[Noble Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

The romance with Paris exploded after the end of the Second World War with the growing industry of commercial air travel. Stanley Karnow, who was freshly out of college in 1947, decided France was the place to be for the summer and ended up staying for 10 years.

Paris was trying to find itself after the devastation of the war, but because of its illustrious past, everyone also wants to join. Karnow takes readers into salons & ballrooms - meeting with some of the most well-known figures to grace the Parisian streets. From cuisine to fashion, from movie stars to intellectuals - the Parisian air is intoxicating as Paris was going through yet another rebirth all the while keeping its age-old reputation of being a city of passion and romance, and of style and elegance. Of being fashionable yet still adhering to that old world charm in its architecture. "Paris in the Fifties" is a memoir, a tribute to a love, to a time, to an atmosphere that few cities in the world could attain. Despite being dimmed by the horrors of World War II, Paris was still...the City of Light. 4/5 Stars

[Carina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Calling it quits and adding this one to the DNF shelf. The first half of the book chugged along nicely and had some interesting insights into life in the 1950s as an American living in Paris. I am nowhere near an expert or even an afficionado of early Cold War Europe, but I know enough of what went down in the '30s and '40s to catch problems in Karnow's writings, usually things that were exaggerated just enough to be bordering on inaccurate. Over time, enough added up to cut my enjoyment. And once we get the chapter on Ho Chi Minh and a few chapters beyond, it got really boring. I'm a bit disappointed, but I also enjoyed reading the parts about his actual experiences and learning to live in Paris.

[Richard Jespers · Rating 4 out of 5]

An award-winning journalist of his era (b. 1925), Karnow pens this lovingly written memoir of his time as a young man living in Paris in the 1950s. By way of these twenty-one essays, we learn French history, French cuisine, French politics. But most of all the French way. From history, we learn of Monsieur Guillotin, “reluctant” inventor of the most popular manner of execution for some time. From cuisine, we learn how wine is the only beverage to consume with a meal. And politics? Eh, bien. Karnow investigates all manner of the French polity. Overall, the essays are our treat, a way to enjoy a young man’s decade in France, at a time, in an atmosphere that may never be repeated.

[Patrick Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well written Paris memoir. The book written years later follows his apprenticeship as a writer in postwar Paris. It follows his rise from a struggling student in Paris and his entrance into and reporting of Paris Society. Stories of celebrities are there: Dior, Audrey Hepburn, and of course Hemingway. He brings the city to life; its food, car racing and peculiarities such as Paris' guillotine operator. The book is a lot of fun and moves Paris up on the must see list.

[William Guerrant · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting and enjoyable read, Karnow constructed this memoir of sorts from his dispatches and notes accumulated during his ten years as a Paris-based correspondent for Time magazine. While there is plenty of Parisian history and culture in the book, Karnow's duties took him all across France and North Africa, so anyone wanting nothing but left bank anecdotes and nostalgia will be disappointed. Those interested in France more broadly during the Fifties, will not.

[Timothy Holst · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, well-written, and entertaining (though Mr. Karnow sometimes seems a bit exasperated by his experiences in France). Not just a book about Paris in the '50s, but thumbnail sketches of French history and culture. If you are at all a Francophile, you will enjoy this book.

[Larraine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kind of boring. Didn't keep my attention.

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightful!

[Stephanie Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

c’est bien lol

[Ted Mccormack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very helpful in trying to understand France.

[Jan Vranken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leven in Parijs tot leven gebracht.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting rehash of columns already written years ago - efficient recycling.

[Streator Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great memoir of a time long gone by by the time I got to Paris, or least the Paris I saw. But fun to read nonetheless!

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part memoir, part journalistic coverage of Paris and France at a pivotal time in the 20th century. Pretty cool! Got a bit slow at parts but I enjoyed it

[Sherry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not enough about Paris in the 50s. Mostly about what he was doing in the 50's and things that interested him. Disappointed.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read The Other Paris at the end of 2019 and the start of 2020, and this book was an interesting contrast to that one. Paris in the Fifties is told through the lens of Karnow who, as a reporter and student subsidized by the GI bill and Time, is telling us about the Paris of the elites he interviewed and the stories he covered for Time. The Other Paris tells the story of Paris through the voices who are not usually given a stage in history: the poor, the social outcasts. I found that book more compelling because it gave the reader a front row seat to what it was like to be a non-historical figure in Paris and told the story of what daily life was like.

Paris in the Fifties does not do what The Other Paris does, and in telling the stories of elites, it was much less interesting to me.

Particularly since I like The Other Paris, the author's sometimes sanctimonious and elitist tone, particularly about French politics and social justice movements, put me off. He disdains them and their choices without accounting for the power of those they were up against or their circumstances. While I'm not an expert on the time period or the events, I have read enough history to have a healthy skepticism of his judgements, and it left me feeling that he was being unfair and somewhat inaccurate.

My favorite parts of the book, the ones that are the best, are his personal story of coming to Paris to study with GI Bill money and adapting to the French culture and way of life. Those evoke what it was like to live there and experience French life. He also reports well on the non-political events he covered like the race car event where a driver had a terrible accident and died. The reader learns more about French culture and life in the fifties through those chapters than the ones where Karnow pours judgment on the French and their politics.

[Anna Carlsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the Paris Herald Tribune, once handed a flower girl five hundred francs for a bunch of violets..."

Really enjoyed most of this book--it didn't just stay within the confines of the fifties but reminisced on the literary vibrance of the 1920s (with cameos by Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, etc), the scandals of the Belle Epoque, and the gory Revolution (including a brief history of the guillotine, of course). My only complaint is the excessive name dropping that plagued the second half of the book...there were so many brief mentions of noblemen, businessmen, and politicians that I found really unnecessary and distracted from the actual history. In general, however, Karnow imparts his experiences with a nod to both the historical and romanticized faces of Paris--a balance that had me captivated for the majority of my read.

[Roniq · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loving this book so far!!! Notes from Times coorespondent, Stanley Karnow while living in Paris.
A slice of life and time that takes me right back to being in this beautiful city. Funny and well written. Not a fast read but a book to be read slowly and savored if you are at all interested in France or French culture/life. One of those books where you find yourself taking notes while reading, full of great references to other artists/topics/books/. Throughly enjoyable....
Just finished last night up with the last few pages about the war between France and Algeria. I'm sad that this little treasure of a book is over, I will definitely be reading more of Karnow!!!

[Katie Young · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is more of a collection of stories and assignments that he covered as a Time reporter while living in Paris in the 1950s, so the title is misleading. Also, his tone is rather pompous and the first several chapters feel like he's trying to prove just how cool/famous by association he was. There are some good gems, like the chapter on Parisian youth, but there is a lot of ego that one is forced to slough through first. Also, he seems to have a slight fascination for paladins, there were three or four in this book, which (as any DnD enthusiast can attest) is two to three too many for 300 pages. Not the best thing I've read.