Within the long nineteenth century that frames the first hundred years of the American republic, French writers, artists, and musicians became increasingly enthralled by the young nation's political experiments, vast land-scapes, and diverse culture. Following the American Revolution that upended the rule of British colonial masters (with strategic aid by General Lafayette and his compatriots), French observers often viewed the United States as a laboratory for the forging of new practices of liberté and égalité, in affinity with and as models for France's own revolutionary ideals and experiences. Tributes to American freedom, resiliency, and power and the natural beauty of the New World appeared in many forms, while competing with anti-American depictions of an inferior environment of fetid swamps, sterile deserts, and degenerated animals that had emerged in the influential naturalist writings of Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and Cornelius De Pauw; these authors’ imagined terrains reverberated with the anti-colonialist views of Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Guillaume Thomas Raynal. Although acclamations of America as an inspiration of revolution and freedom would peak in the early years of the French Revolution, French encomiums to George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and other symbols of Revolutionary America would continue to appear well into the nineteenth century, as Alexis de Tocqueville's De la démocratie en Amérique (1835) would reinforce the American republic's status as an icon of democracy. The Franco-American bond forged through revolutionary battles and the ‘exchange of revolutionary culture’ would also foster a political and moral rivalry, as proposed by Suzanne Desan. As political tensions rose between the two nations and the French landscape shifted between republican, monarchical, and imperial forms of government, the rivalry could be seen through the reshaping of anti-American tropes of backwardness, savagery, and degeneration in new cultural guises, including those of uncouth frontiersmen, uncultured businessmen, and aesthetically inferior artists and musicians. By the mid- to late nineteenth century, as the American capitalist economy expanded, condescension or revilement of the young country, captured in Baudelaire's condemnations of America's ‘greedy’ materialism, jostled against the promotion of renewed Franco-American alliances. One such coalition, the Union Franco-Amérique, helped to finance France's gift of the Statue of Liberty, erected in 1886 to celebrate, belatedly, the centenary of American independence, to commemorate cultural ties, and perhaps to resurrect shared ideologies between the two nations.

Most narratives of the cakewalk assert that, during its early life in antebellum America, this genre perhaps represented one of the very few safe ways in which Black slaves could respond to the cultural and social practices of their oppressors. Enslaved Americans observed social dances and developed the cakewalk as a parody of their masters’ dance movements. In such a parody, full of exaggerated gestures, the ultimate goal was to win the ‘cake’, an award given to the couple with the best moves. As slave-owners became aware of the origin of the slaves’ burlesque, they deemed such renditions of their dances non-threatening but, instead, entertaining. Since the cakewalk was not a challenge to their authority or a stern criticism of their own cultural and social values, slave-owners observed the slaves’ imitation as an aspirational activity – an attempt to emulate their sophisticated rituals. Seeing the cakewalk as a homage rather than a subversive practice, slave-owners developed a taste for the dance and incorporated its steps as created by enslaved Americans into their own repertoire of dances. Jayna Brown emphasises this racial and class inversion, pointing out the ‘satirical meanings hidden in full view of the masters’ and the ‘delightful twisting irony’ of the masters’ ‘mimesis’. After the Civil War, American minstrelsy not only would put African Americans and non-Black performers on the same stage, but would bring genres like the cakewalk to nearly every corner of the United States. The popularity of minstrel shows among audiences in northern urban centres such as New York during the early nineteenth century attracted the attention of impresarios and agents, who organised international tours and brought minstrel shows to European cultural capitals like London and Paris. By the early 1900s, African American music had become a strong cultural agent in such centres. However, the ways in which American-based racialised interactions, as well as transatlantic transformations of African American music, affected the European reception of genres like the cakewalk from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century are still under consideration, and comprehensive narratives of this complex subject are still under construction.

The seeds of this project took root in long, unbounded conversations in Paris and other locales, enriched by our shared love of France and the United States, our curiosity about cultural interconnections between them and within the Atlantic world, and our deep interest in interrogations of race, gender, and ‘silent’ areas of music historiography. This volume has also emerged out of a collective interest in the ways in which early encounters between France and America continue to resonate in today's geopolitical alliances, national com-memorations, and distinct but correlating ideas about transatlantic history. Events in the public spotlight in 2021, such as France's precipitous cancellation of its commemoration of French assistance in the American Revolutionary War over the AUKUS agreement in September, its decision to place the remains of African American singer-dancer Josephine Baker in the hallowed space of the Panthéon, or the puzzling responses to Haitian political, economic, and refugee crises by the United States and Europe, represent only a few examples that seem to echo the dynamics of past relations and perceptions. In this volume of collected essays, we have opted to interrogate French views of America, not only of the young United States, but also the wider ‘Amérique’ (or Amérique septentrionale’) that France knew in earlier centuries, encompassing parts of the North American continent as well as its own colonial islands of the West Indies.

As editors of this collection of essays, we quickly came to realise that our study of French representations of ‘America’ or ‘Amérique’ in music, theatre, dance, and spectacle could not escape revisiting the themes of revolution and race that played such prominent roles in transatlantic exchanges within our chosen time frame of the long nineteenth century. In light of present-day revolutions of thought and civic action that have begun to shine more powerful light on obscured subjects in the writing and teaching of history and culture – in particular, the history and legacy of transatlantic slavery – we have approached this project with a sense of urgency to contribute to the expansion of musicological enquiry about race beyond the more established studies of jazz-era Paris or the exoticism of Josephine Baker.