Americans in Paris Often Feel Neither American Nor French — which sometimes allows them to see both countries more clearly. I have just completed a year living in the Fifth Arondissement while occupying the French American Foundation's Chair of American Civilization at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales. If my sojourn does not licence me to play Tocqueville to the Americans, it does let me watch my fellow Americans from a distance and the culturally distant French from close up.