Feature: One hundred creative artists who have chosen France

Since the Renaissance large numbers of artists of all kinds have come to settle in our country to work here. What is it that draws them? What is the constant fascination exerted by France? We offer a few answers, from Josephine Baker to Atik Rahimi, by way of an introduction to the current picture.

"I have never stopped being in France, and I will be in France when, somewhere in Buenos Aires, kindly death hails me. I will not talk about the evening or the moon, I shall recite Verlaine. I will not talk about cosmogony, I shall say the name Hugo, not friendship, but Montaigne." This is how Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges celebrated the country he considered his second homeland, for France has always been a welcoming and inspiring land for creative people from all over the world. It all began in the late Middle Ages. Europe at that time underwent what French writer Michel Houellebecq might have called an "extension of the domain of travel". So who was the first great artist to set foot on French soil? Perhaps it was the Italian composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully. At least it was he who, allowed to dance for the future king Louis XIV, was the first to have an influence on the course of our history, by founding what later came to be known as "French opera".

Countless writers, painters, musicians and dancers followed. For foreign artists, France is, indeed, not so much a country more an idea of a country, an idea of happiness and of good living. That is surely what attracted Josephine Baker, the famous black American singer and dancer who ended her life in Périgord (in the south-west of France) where the light alleviated the poverty of her final days; or American novelist Henry Miller, who, in the 1930s, in Clichy (near Paris), enjoyed some turbulent times hungering for sexual liberation.

They arrived in Paris, the Hemingways, the Faulkners, all the other great English-speaking writers of the 20th century, to stroll beside the Seine, chatting informally with the secondhand booksellers, to spend evenings out and about in Montparnasse until five in the morning, like the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, who lived in the 13th arrondissement and staggered home under the effects of alcohol and the late hour, not dead drunk but drunk with living. A romantic Paris where jazz musicians too were welcomed with open arms: from Sidney Bechet to Miles Davis, through Bud Powell, Duke Ellington and Hal Singer, it was in France that people were best able to discover them.

For foreign artists often found our country a land of refuge for their misunderstood genius. It is to France, in short, that people come to make themselves understood - Irish writer James Joyce managed to get Ulysses published, thanks to Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, who had a publishing house in rue de l’Odéon, Paris; and the American of Russian origin, Vladimir Nabokov, launched his subversive Lolita with the assistance of Maurice Girodias, his courageous French publisher. Then what about the foreign film directors who only achieved respect through France’s enthusiasm for the cinema? A great many came to stay in Paris at the behest of the Cinémathèque Française, and saw their work praised and applauded at the Cannes Film Festival, and ultimately were only able to work through the efforts of our producers, and Gaumont above all. This was true for Italian filmmakers Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini, as it was for German filmmaker Wim Wenders, Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras and Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.

Thus emerges a romantic journey through the streets of the French capital and through the years. First, we see American writer Henry James, author of The Turn of the Screw, who has just met Paul Verlaine and who returns alone to his freezing room. Then that well-dressed woman, who moved into rue de Varenne in 1906? Why, it is the American novelist, Edith Wharton. Now who is she, who has come to take lessons from Monsieur Degas? Her name is Mary Cassatt, an American painter. We follow the black American novelist James Baldwin, who hung out in the shady hotels of Saint-Germain-des-Près during the 1950s. Here we have New York writer, Paul Auster, wandering around the same district some twenty years later. A great actress, with dark glasses and a scarf pulled across her face, dogged by the paparazzi waiting outside her house in the Avenue Montaigne? Why, Marlene Dietrich, of course. Then Jerome David Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and then... American artists and writers have felt a constant fascination for France, passion and suspicion too, towards their French counterparts.

And in our own day? Some have come to seek political asylum, like Atik Rahimi, the Afghan writer now living in Paris, who has managed to find a publisher in POL and in Bernard-Henri Lévy a producer for his first film, which has just been completed. Once again, the tradition of artists fleeing dictatorships and finding refuge in our country is not new, witness the Spanish trio Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel who settled here. Their paintings and films have become an essential part of our heritage.

Jorge Semprun and Michel del Castillo, two novelists of Spanish origin, live in France and write in French. Milan Kundera, having fled his native Czechoslovakia, ended up adopting our tongue, as did Cioran, the Romanian writer, Vassilis Alexakis, the Greek writer, or again François Cheng, the most accomplished of the Chinese writers writing in French.

In short, these artists settle into our culture in much the same way as they move to any new address, and with this they increase the influence of France, they expand its frontiers, they make it more universal, attracting yet more foreign artists. The work of the French cultural institutes worldwide, whose libraries acquire a million new items each year, book fairs and cultural festivals undoubtedly also play a large part in this.

"They perform Racine in the original in Krakow, Molière in Nouakchott, they discuss the Goncourt winners in French in Glasgow," wrote Academician Jean-François Deniau recently. Because France attracts, it welcomes and continues to fascinate. It is currently estimated that there are about 25,000 foreign artists living and working in France. We cannot mention them all but they include Roman Polanski, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emir Kusturica, Angelin Prejlocaj, Jordi Saval, John Galliano, Anselm Kiefer and many others.

France is, above all, a land where foreigners love to live. How many actors and film directors have been seduced by the sweet life of the Côte d’Azur (coastal region beside the Mediterranean)? H. G. Wells, author of The War of the Worlds, was a regular at the Hôtel Négresco in Nice, and could be seen driving his saloon up and down the Promenade des Anglais. Today, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood spends several months each year in Provence, as did British writer Graham Greene before her, who retired there. They come here to enjoy the peace and tranquillity, and they breathe our country’s good air. Happy as a foreign artist in France...