The Coffeehouses That Changed Human History Are Still Open for Business

This article is from the WeChat public account Europe Value; Author: Ye Kefei; Editor: Zheng Daqian.

A scholar once wrote: “Whenever coffee is introduced, it fuels revolution. Coffee is the most extreme drink on earth; caffeine stimulates thought, and once common people think deeply they want to rebel, endangering the tyrant’s throne.”

As early as the 16th century, coffee was called a “troublemaker” in the Arab world. The governor of Mecca, Beg, found satirical poems against him flowing out of coffee houses and decided to ban coffee. In 1511, all Mecca coffee houses were forced to close, and other Arab rulers successively declared coffee an illegal drink; those who drank it without authorization could even be executed. But people loved coffee, and in the end the law could not punish the multitude, and the matter fizzled out.

Later, coffee reached Europe and quickly won Europeans’ favor. The café became a symbol — a base where intellectuals gathered to criticize the times. In the late 17th century, Englishman John Rayton said: “Coffee houses not only do not lead people to evil, but promote the progress of civilization; the rich and poor, the learned and unlearned all meet here, advancing art, commerce and all kinds of knowledge.” Balzac wrote: “The café counter is the people’s parliament.” In Paris, where coffee was most popular, intellectuals gathered daily in cafés to discuss philosophy and politics; revolutionaries debated how to oppose and overthrow the government, and the French Revolution was practically paved and catalyzed in the cafés.

It can be said that cafés were an important vehicle driving the progress of human civilization. Monica Porter also wrote: “To say that coffee houses and the hot black beverage consumed in them played an important role in shaping the modern world is not far-fetched. For centuries this pairing drove revolutions that toppled regimes, hosted brainstorming sessions and debates of clashing ideas, gave birth to new philosophical thought, brought scientific progress, and sparked artistic and literary movements. Coffee houses were the second home (sometimes even more a true home) of rebels, innovators and forward-thinking minds of every age, crossing the bounds of politics. They helped people establish a way of life, and what we call ‘society’.”

Monica Porter, born in Budapest, raised in New York, and settled in London since the 1970s, spent her life in the company of cafés of every style. Even her parents met at a Japanese café in Budapest shortly after World War II. “It was an elegant 19th-century-style café known for its large clientele of artists and men of letters. My father was a writer, my mother a singer and actress; a mutual theater-director friend had arranged for both to meet there. The director introduced them; six months later they walked into marriage.”

In her book “European History in 12 Cafés,” she unfolds a café journey spanning six centuries and nine European countries. Of the 12 cafés, the oldest opened in 1686 and the newest in 1911: Queen’s Lane in Oxford, Procope in Paris, Florian in Venice, the Caffè Greco in Rome, the Central and the Sperl in Vienna, the New York Café in Budapest, the Flore in Paris, the Odeon in Zurich, the Luitpold in Munich, the Gran Café de la Paix in Madrid, and the Slavia in Prague — most still in business today. Behind these ancient cafés appear many familiar names: Bentham, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Shelley, Keats, Franklin, Jefferson…

Among them, the earliest, the Procope in Paris, was the birthplace of the Enlightenment; Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot gathered there for years, half of the Encyclopédie’s ideas taking shape in its collisions; Franklin negotiated U.S. independence diplomacy there. The Vienna Central Café rooted Freud, Zweig and poet Altenberg, becoming the spiritual parlor of the Austro-Hungarian intellectual age. It was at the Vienna Central that Zweig wrote, “I am not in the café, or on the way to the café.”

The most famous in the book is of course the Flore Café. The book writes: “In 1887, the Flore Café opened on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Its name comes from the sculpture of the Roman flower and spring goddess that once stood across this tree-lined avenue. Today, replacing the sculpture, the café’s awning above the white-and-green lettering is lush with greenery.”

“The Left Bank Saint-Germain district where the café sits has long been a gathering place for Paris’s Bohemians and intellectuals, a stronghold for musicians, artists and writers drawn by its legendary cafés and bars. Besides the Flore, there is its longtime rival and next-door neighbor — the Deux Magots (named for the two mysterious Chinese-figure statues inside); across the street is Lipp, where in the 1920s Ernest Hemingway was a regular; and the famous Procope. Fresh out of Reading Gaol and penniless, Oscar Wilde spent his final days at the shabby Alsace Hotel nearby. Today that bar still exists but has been renamed the minimalist ‘L’Hôtel,’ transformed into a luxury ’boutique’ hotel the down-and-out poets and playwrights can no longer afford.”

As a gathering place for famous 20th-century literary and artistic figures, thinkers and creators, the Deux Magots has a glorious history. Yet the Flore may enjoy greater fame, for here were born more “isms” (surrealism, existentialism), more books (such as Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist work “The Second Sex”), and more publications.

For Parisians, the Flore’s legend peaked during World War II. In 1939 the Flore changed hands; the new owner Boughbou installed a huge charcoal stove in the inner room. Soon Paris fell; the Flore’s warm glow not only comforted hearts but gathered many anti-fascists — especially writers — around a cup of hot chocolate, expecting or awaiting victory.

Over the next four years, Sartre and Beauvoir met there daily, at the same table, writing or talking. Sartre said: “I walked the Flore road for four years; it was a road to freedom.”

The book writes: “When war broke out, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, two then-emerging writers and philosophers (also a famously open couple), were writing novels in the Dôme, the Rotonde or other Montparnasse cafés. After Sartre was conscripted, Beauvoir decided on her way home to drink a coffee at the Flore. Moved by its warmth, she resolved to make it her new writing world, arriving early each morning to claim a table near the heater. In 1941, Sartre (after nine months as a German prisoner) returned to France and joined Beauvoir at the Flore, restoring their co-creative routine. By then Paris had been occupied by the Nazis for a year, and as they consumed more of the city’s food and fuel reserves, Parisians began suffering all kinds of shortages. The Dôme was now occupied by German soldiers; Sartre painfully noticed they brought their own tea and coffee for the café to brew specially, while locals could only make do with poor-quality substitutes. Perhaps because it was not yet famous, the Saint-Germain cafés attracted fewer Wehrmacht soldiers than Montparnasse, so the Flore was relatively untouched by the Nazis. This created a more relaxed atmosphere for regulars, who said the place ‘exuded the scent of freedom.'”

Some interesting details: “Beauvoir’s debut ‘The Guest’ is a fictional novel about a love triangle during the war among herself, Sartre and a French actress. Published during the war, it drew wide attention. It touched on existentialist themes around individual freedom and the self’s relation to ‘the other.’ People began going to the Flore specifically to talk with her. Harassed, she insisted on advance booking at a more convenient time, limited to 15 minutes each.”

Before WWII? The Flore’s district was once desolate; during the French Revolution it held only messy tenements. It was Baron Haussmann’s urban-renewal plan that laid the foundation for its later trendsetting.

The first to record the Flore in print was probably writer Moha. A nationalist, he founded the publication “L’Action Française,” advocating national egoism against individualism and cosmopolitanism, seen as a precursor to fascism.

He wrote a political-career memoir titled “The Omen of Flora.” In 1898 he wrote: “Upstairs is a coffee area, a simple restaurant; above the former door once stood a statue of a spokeswoman — the young Flora — and they deliberately endowed it with fateful sayings, hoping under the omen and blessing of the spring goddess to widely promote and drive our first wave of ‘L’Action Française.'”

That a radical nationalist opened the Flore’s written record is somewhat ironic, but it is fact.

In 1913, poet Apollinaire invested in the Flore, turning the ground floor into the editorial office of “Paris Nights” magazine. It was Europe’s most brilliant moment; people believed glory would last forever, and the civilizational fire of the industrial revolution would light humanity’s future. But no one expected the gloom already descending. In 1914, the cruel First World War broke out.

During WWI, Apollinaire still came here on schedule daily. In 1917 he introduced Philippe Soupault and André Breton, soon after Louis Aragon; the Dadaist core took shape. That same year, sitting in the Flore, they coined the word “surrealism.” The next year Apollinaire died.

The Flore was not perfect then, but pre-WWI Paris perhaps represented Paris’s most glorious era, the most glorious of Europe and the world.

Walking into the Flore today, the old form remains. High-backed booths, low wooden chairs, dark partitions, beige walls, gold rails and mosaic floors… even the waiters wear uniforms identical to the old days.

Yet today’s seated guests are not the figures of old. Tourist proportion is very high; they do not linger long, treating it as a sight, making a pilgrimage, drinking a coffee or hot chocolate, then seeking the next target — perhaps next door at the Deux Magots.

Upstairs, you see the table Sartre and Beauvoir fixedly occupied. While writing “The Second Sex,” Beauvoir wrote: “This afternoon, I was upstairs at the ‘Flore,’ near the window; I could see the damp street, plane trees swaying in the sharp wind; many people, downstairs very noisy.”

Looking down from upstairs now, Paris is still that Paris. Yet it is no longer the center of thought and culture. Centuries of social change chose none of the French path. Paris remains charming, but the elite’s sense of disillusionment is deep-rooted. Even the glorious Left Bank now seems only to reminisce about past glory.

The Left Bank of the Seine is Paris’s glory, but originally it did not belong to Paris. Strictly, today’s 5th, 6th and 7th arrondissements did not belong to Paris when built. Similarly, today’s artsy Montmartre did not belong to Paris when built.

If the Left Bank must be geographically defined, it should be the Saint-Germain, Montparnasse and Saint-Michel boulevards along the Seine’s left bank. Paris’s most famous cafés, bookstores, art galleries and museums concentrate there.

The Left Bank’s cultural aura contrasts sharply with the Right Bank’s commercial one; it has no flashy side, is not the symbol of Paris’s power and wealth, but is Paris’s soul. Someone wrote: “The Seine is the natural boundary of two worlds. Its right bank is the Paris of amusement, commerce, luxury, news and entertainment; the left bank is the Paris of thought, publishing, university, antiques and bookstores. One hurried, impatient, restless; the other suits people weaving through café terraces, bookstores and galleries, or unable to resist searching the old riverside bookshops…”

In 1903 Stein came to Paris; in 1939 Henry Miller left. Those thirty-plus years were “the Lost Generation’s” journey in Paris. Then Paris was gentle and inclusive. “Lost Generation” representative Hemingway wrote on the flyleaf of “A Moveable Feast”: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

They wandered Paris, gathered in Paris, wrote in Paris. In 1909 Stein published “Three Lives”; in 1925 Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby”; in 1926 Hemingway “The Sun Also Rises”; in 1934 Henry Miller “Tropic of Cancer”…

Then came WWII; the Flore became a symbol of freedom-in-occupation, but that bittersweet warmth was what kind of liberalism? At least compared with pre-WWI, both Paris and the Flore were on the downslope past their peak.

When Paris grew comfortable again, the Flore and the Left Bank welcomed a new generation of intellectuals. Beyond them, all kinds of stars. People recorded: “Sharon Stone liked a glass of champagne; Robert De Niro liked observing passersby through long mornings. Johnny Depp had no fixed time — morning, afternoon, evening. In spring, Isabella Rossellini liked lounging on the terrace. Jack Nicholson bit a cigar, basking in the first sun.”

Of course, before that, there were Jane Birkin and Jane Fonda, and Roman Polanski. French stars of their own would not miss it either, like “French Marilyn” Brigitte Bardot.

Yet the Left Bank’s and Paris’s glory are long gone; a couple of years ago a French writer even said: “If we sold fewer Chinese-made Sartre statues, the old days would return.”

In 1984, owner Boughbou handed over the Flore he had run for 44 years. His only two conditions for the buyer: uphold the literary tradition, and keep the signature dish — boiled egg with bread and butter.

The sight-ification of classic cafés is already a common phenomenon. Monica Porter wrote: “True, today those who patronize these precious historic legendary cafés are more tourists than the ‘trendsetters’ who gathered here to spark world-changing ideas. Overall, these cafés’ prices are somewhat higher than in the past — keep in mind that back then even the most down-and-out poet or artist could afford to sit here hour after hour, reading the paper, chatting with friends or keeping warm. But even so, cafés can still provide some of the most romantic and dramatic backdrop to life’s drama.”

This is glimpsed in the many film scenes set in cafés. The Budapest New York Café appeared in several Hollywood films, including the 2012 “Bel Ami” starring Uma Thurman and Kristin Scott Thomas, where it stood in for a Belle Époque Parisian café. It was also the contemporary Moscow luxury restaurant in the 2018 “Red Sparrow” with Jennifer Lawrence and Jeremy Irons.

To this day, the book’s line still holds: “The best place to learn new things is the café… no other institution in the world can compare. It is in fact a democratic club where anyone who can afford a not-expensive cup of coffee can take part.”

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