These cafés are very different from "Café Society." And also very different from Beraud's pictures of backgammon players and folks out to catch a buzz:
From H-net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online):
W. Scott Haine. The World of the Paris Cafe: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789-1914. Baltimore, Md., and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xix + 325 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8018-5104-9.Reviewed by Robert W. Brown (University of North Carolina at Pembroke)
Published on H-France (December, 1996)
Cafes and the Parisian Working Class
Paris had some 3,000 cafes in 1789, 4,500 in the late 1840s, 22,000 in 1870, 42,000 in the mid-1880s, and around 30,000 from the late 1880s to 1914. Moreover, Paris in 1909 had a higher ratio of cafes to residents (11.25 cafes to a thousand inhabitants) than comparable cities in Europe or the United States, and many were frequented by the working class (pp. 3-4). Numbers aside, cafes had a remarkable presence in the political, social, cultural, and intellectual life of nineteenth-century Paris. They have been associated with Gracchus Babeuf's "Conspiracy of Equals"; with true as well as literary crime, including the "exotic criminality" of Eugene Sue's fictional Tapis franc, or thieves' den, of pre-Haussmann Paris. Haine finds Parisian cafes in the first showing of a motion picture by the Lumiere brothers in 1895; in the songs of Aristide Bruant, who celebrated aspects of cafe life, and in the prints of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who evoked the ambience as well as the personalities of turn-of-the century cafes like the Moulin de la Galette. Although Scott Haine provides the evidence for this sketch of Parisian cafe life, his subject is the working-class cafe, offering workers a unique space within which developed a "distinctive subculture" with its own order, structure, and rituals (p. 2). The result is a stimulating, well-written, richly documented, not to mention entertaining and immensely informative study of the location and function of the cafe in Parisian working-class life and sociability between the French Revolution and the beginning of World War I.
The World of the Paris Cafe contains eight topical chapters, and they treat respectively the perception, regulation, and policing of the cafe; the cafe in the context of family life and housing; the cafe and work; the cafe and the drinking experience; the cafe and the publican; the cafe and the etiquette of sociability; the cafe and gender politics; and the cafe and politics. There is also a brief conclusion, a discussion of historiography and methodology, and a bibliographic essay. Most chapters are structured chronologically, which occasions some repetition and makes difficult both the delineation of a composite image of the cafe at a given historical moment and comparisons across different periods. Nevertheless, Haine traces changes as well as continuities in the perception and nature of the cafe and cafe sociability, and he stresses the positive function of the cafe in the evolution of working-class life since the eighteenth century. In so doing, he explicitly challenges both contemporaries, who viewed cafes as places of sinful behavior, dangerous opposition politics, or moral degeneration, and more recent historians, who have paid them scant heed. "The nineteenth-century Paris cafe," he writes, "was a transitional space between the essentially public world of early-modern lower-class life, epitomized by the street and the marketplace, and the essentially private world of late-twentieth-century workers, usually living in high-rise apartment complexes. As an informal institution that bridged the distance between public and private life, leisure and work, the individual and the family, the cafe provided a unique space in which the tensions arising from such juxtapositions could be articulated" (p. 236).
The nature of the cafe as an intermediate and mediating institution provides a unique perspective for the study of working-class sociability. Parisian cafes provided workers with "an accessible, public, and open forum for social life" (p. ix). And, they could become "cauldrons of conversation and thought" (p. 1), "a primary circuit for Parisian social networks" (p. 2), a "living room for the working class" and "an annex to the workshop and factory" (p. 59), a "theater of neighborhood life" (p. 163), substitutes "for the parliaments, clubs, and salons of the upper classes" (p. 235), and "potential bridge[s] between the ordinary world and the festival time of carnival and revolution" (pp. 237-38). Finally, and perhaps most important for Haine, cafe space and cafe sociability made possible the growth of a "proletarian public sphere" and helped foster "a latent class consciousness" that on occasion had political consequences (p. 207).
Haine groups working-class activities within the cafe space into the three broad categories of "shelter, incubator, and stage" (pp. 234-35). During the nineteenth century, when the life of the Parisian worker underwent wrenching dislocations--ranging from political oppression and inadequate housing to increasing workplace discipline--the cafe provided a sheltered space where the worker could fraternize and express himself. Second, the cafe provided space where political or labor actions could originate and grow and where the worker could protest, using methods ranging from the verbal insult to strikes and riots. Third, the cafe provided a space where workers, employers, and publicans could act out a variety of social roles. Such sociability, in short, "helped preserve the preindustrial connection between work and community life and provided a valuable space in times of strikes" (p. x); it enhanced the lives of workers who had few material possessions; and it included positive and varied roles for women. Accordingly, Haine argues that cafe sociability, far from undermining family life, actually enhanced it. In the substantial chapter on working-class politics, Haine treats the role of the cafe in the revolutionary eruptions of 1789-1794, 1830, 1848, and 1870-1871 and attempts to account for the failure of the French to develop a disciplined and militant organization, arguing nonetheless that cafe sociability helped create and spread new ideas during periods of free expression. During the times of repression following these revolutions, cafes served as shelters and as places where the working classes could express themselves by insulting government officials and the police.
Haine's book is based on an impressive range of archival and published sources. These include judicial records after 1870, especially those dealing with the sorts of petty incidents which took place in cafes....
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