"Time is money!" The immigrant life in 1850s California

[San Francisco]. An anonymous French letter from San Francisco.

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A report on San Francisco, only four years after its annexation by the United States, discussing the life and institutions of a new, energetic and rapidly changing city. The style, the precision of the information provided and the expressions of concern over censorship in France, together with the provenance from a collection of journalistic correspondence suggest it was written to a newspaper. Although addressed "Cher père", there is no discussion of family matters such as one might expect in a personal letter, and it was in a collection of correspondence with journalists at Le Figaro, including Gaston Calmette, editor between 1894 and 1914.

The letter discusses the city and its buildings, the cost of living and the wages for various jobs in detail, particularly those done by the unskilled French labourers who arrive. Cafés and gambling houses are the only amusements, and the French community is unorganised and dwarfed by the number of Americans, whose attitudes the writer sums up with the phrase, "Le temps, c'est de l'argent! Tout bon Américain a ce proverbe gravé dans la cervelle; aussi dort-il, mange-t-il vite, et travaille beaucoup. Faire vite est la grande affaire".

The stay offers the author some political reflections: "Il n'y a pas de communistes, mais tout le monde mange; les revirements de fortune qui sont si fréquents rendent l'aristocratie impossible". The amount of freedom, he says, would be incomprehensible to readers back in the France of Napoleon III, who as the then-current president was on the verge of declaring himself emperor. A politically charged first-hand account of immigrant life in the growing metropolis of the American West.