>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. [ Silence ] My name is Mary Lou Reker and on behalf of the Library of Congress' Office of Scholarly Programs and the John W. Kluge Center, I welcome you to a lecture by Dr. Thierry Rigogne entitled "Creating the Parisian Cafe, 1660 to1800." After receiving his MBA in France, he became a commercial attache for the French Government assigned in Melbourne, Australia. However, Dr. Rigogne soon was drawn back to the academic world and went on to receive both an MA and a PhD from Princeton University in the field of history. His book "Between State and Market: Printing and Bookselling in Eighteenth-Century France" was published by Oxford Press in 2007 and reprinted in 2008 by the Voltaire Foundation. He has had a number of articles published including one in the book, "Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment" edited by Charles Walton and published by Penn State University Press in 2011. In 2005, Dr. Rigogne joined the staff and faculty of Fordham University where he is now an assistant professor in the Department of History. With his John W. Kluge fellowship, he has been completing the research for the last stage of his book, on the creation of the French Cafe. Now, before I go on, I want to say a couple things. First of all, make sure that your telephones are off please so we don't have ringing in the middle of the lecture. And secondly, please know that if you do ask a question at the end, which you will be welcome to do, that you will be granting permission by asking the question for it to be recorded and taped and put on the website. And thirdly, I want to say we hope you indulge in coffee or tea, this is a rarity for the Kluge Center to put anything like out-- like this out for one of the fellow's talks but we couldn't help ourselves in this case. It seems so appropriate to talk about the French cafes. As we all know, the cafe is an essential part of Paris and a symbol for a certain aspect of French life, but why? And how did coffee houses and cafe culture get started in France? And perhaps even more profoundly, what is the debt that intellectual history owes to coffee? [Laughter] Please, help me welcome today's speaker, Dr. Thierry Rigogne. [ Applause ] >> Thank you Mary. Close for-- oh no. Is this better? Closer? Okay-- yeah, okay, well first, thank you Mary Lou for your introduction. And before starting, I want to thank very, very warmly the Kluge Center for putting me and all of us in the absolute best conditions to do a research. I want to thank Carolyn Brown for providing great intellectual leadership and having created such a wonderful environment that it reflects very much her personality. Thank you Mary Lou for your constant availability and you're going to transfer all the dumbest questions that I asked you all the time. I also want to thank Elizabeth for organizing this and for the very nice touch with the coffee, Joanne, Alicia, everybody else, and of course, all the other scholars for creating such a rich environment, a great environment for sharing, exchanging ideas. Also, I want to thank the staff of the Library of Congress and particularly, all the librarians who had been extraordinarily helpful. And that was a bit of a shock to me, you know, I do a lot of my research in France. So I have one word of advice, never go to France, please. If you go there, you'll realize that you don't have actually to go out of your way to help researchers but I'm very glad you do and it's been a great change. What I'm going to do today is to give you a brief synopsis of my research in general and I will try to leave as much time for questions as possible. This is a very vast project, there's no way I can cover everything but I want to give you a bit of sampler, a bit of a sip of what's to come. I came here to research the book I'm writing on on the history of the French cafe. The overall project is very simple. I just want to write the history of the French cafe from its creation somewhere in the 1660s until 1800. This is all about the creation of a new institution and its phenomenal success that happened very quickly. I will end the project around 1800 because that's pretty much in my duty and-- of the French Revolution and the scholars argue with this but I want to see how this story plays out and feeds into the French Revolution. Now, the first question I always get is-- I mean, has any done-- has any of it been done before? Are you really sure? I mean, people in French libraries are still not convinced that's-- it's a legitimate project. It's incre-- I mean, it may sound incredible; we do not have a decent history of the French cafe. There have been lots of books that have been published on the topic. But the work of reference to this day is a study by the archivist Alfred Franklin, Alfred [inaudible] actually, he's French, published in 1893, it's not exactly the freshest. [Laughter] If you look in bookstores, you'll find a lot of very beautiful illustrated histories of coffee and cafes. The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous and I'm using a number of them today, but don't read the text. It is very, very-- how do you put it, charitably thin. What happened since 1893 is essentially, a lot of people have made very big claims, but have never been able to substantiate them, a lot of big claims, very little evidence, and a rehashing, a recycling of the same stories, the same anecdotes over and over again. So, what I'm doing in this project, and that's the reason why I'm here, why I spend all this time in the Library of Congress is I'm putting together a brand new purpose of text. I'm gathering hundreds of text, images, archival documents that have never been used for the study of the cafe. Now, to be fair to my predecessors, what I'm doing now would have been almost impossible 10 years ago. I'm able to use text mining, a lot of the-- a lot of text are on the internet and I can get access to just that little snippet that one mention of this particular writer going to a cafe or this-- buried deep in the correspondence of someone, there will be a reference. And now that I'm able to bring all that there is a chance to really have a lot more evidence and to ground my claims. [ Pause ] Let me start with how the French took to drinking coffee and how they set up the first coffee houses. Coffee and coffee houses both came from Arabia. The tree, Coffea arabica which you see here in the 17th century presentation was first cultivated as-- I'm sorry, originated in Ethiopia, we're not exactly sure when but we know-- what we just know, it was a very long time ago. It started being cultivated across the Red Sea in Yemen in the late 14th century. Now, how the Yemenis got decided that it would be a good idea to take the berries of the coffee tree to roast them, grind them, and turn them into a brew, we'll probably never know. And because this is literally unknowable, Europeans have invented very huge stories. In particular, there's a great legend about a shepherd, a goat shepherd, and sometimes a camel shepherd, but it works better with goats. Well, the goats are jumping up and down all night and he, you know, inquires very improbably. Actually, he goes to a nearby monastery in 15th century Arabia. And the monks figured out that it was the coffee berry and it's wonderful because then the monks can stay awake during their prayers. What we know for sure is that coffee drinking spread within the Arabian Peninsula on the hills of Sufism, the Muslim mystics being famous for their very long nightly prayers and having actually rituals that involve the passing around of coffee. Coffee houses had opened in Mecca by 1511, they have reached Cairo by 1532, and then they moved up to Levant to Damascus to Aleppo reaching Constantinople in 1554. Everywhere along the way, they met with great success despite the occasional theft with zealous imams-- I'm sorry, European travelers to oriental city discovered coffee and coffee houses at the same time somewhere in the 1580s. The first coffee bales reached Europe in the early 17th century, and the-- and coffee drinking started to spread very slowly at first. The coffee started as a drug then it became a social drink somewhere in the 1630, 1640, and the first European coffee houses opened in Oxford, 1650; London, '52; Amsterdam, 10 years later and you can go down the list. The earliest French cafe was found in 1671 in Marseille. Marseille being the Mediterranean port through which coffee entered France. In Paris, an Armenian named Pascal, that's all we know about him, opened in 1672 a stand at the seasonal Foire Saint-Germain, there was a Saint Germain Fair, you'll see a representation here. This was a hugely popular seasonal fair. He opened a lemonade stand and here we go, this was the first place where coffee was sold in Paris or the first cafe in Paris. The Armenians, Gregory, and Maliban, the Parisian Makara enjoyed some measure of success, but it was short-lived. And the problem here is that all the commentators said that they were not able to attract a clientele that would go beyond fellow Levantinef, Knights of Malta, or travelers who are already accustomed to the beverage and to the establishment. In short, the coffee houses were too oriental for Parisian good society. [Foreign language] as the French say this were the tone setters of the day. Enter Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, there's a great story about his name but I'll save that for later, Frenchified into Francesco Procoppio Cuto, that's supposed to be him on the picture. Yeah, the Italians are laughing and I know why. "Procope"-- we call Procopio a "Procope" was a Sicilian, he's a former waiter at Pascal's in the Fosses-Saint-Germain. And he had a great intuition. His intuition was to translate the features of the Ottoman coffee house into a medium that spoke to a French taste or French sensibilities. So what he did is he provided a much more open, airy space, no pipe smoking, seats and tables instead of pillows on the floor, and voila, the French cafe has been created. He opened in former banos, Turkish bath in 1686 and the cafe is actually still in operation at the same spot in the Latin Quarter. And now, they serve really over-priced food on top of extremely bad coffee. [Laughter] Yeah, don't go there. I mean, go to visit, don't go to eat or drink anything. Procope was soon imitated throughout Paris. By the end of the century, there were 150 cafes in Paris. It doubled 23 years later, 1723, 7 to 800 in the 1770s, doubled again by the beginning of the French revolution and about 4000 when the revolution was over. So this is a very spectacular success. Okay, one of my favorite lines in the French literature of the 18th century comes from a-- the work of a very obscure hack. Now, this is how it starts. It tells the reader half of what I'm going to tell you is true but I won't tell you which half. Well I should tell you that most of what I told you is not true but I won't tell you which one or rather what I just gave you here is the story of an, you know, oldest coffee table books. This is the standard narrative. This is the standard story and the problem with it is most of it is false. A lot of it is either mostly exaggerated or completely misleading. So I won't correct every single detail but let me focus on France. Okay, first cafe, 1672 Pascal, this is great except that I have the diary of an Englishman who goes to a cafe run by an Englishman in 1664. In 1666 I have another one, in 1667 a third one, and so on. So there were cafes way before that. Pascal's shop almost certainly existed. We have good evidence for that but it looks like in fact, it was very successful and the legend is that because he was too Armenian, this cafe was too oriental, he was not particularly successful when he tried to open a permanent store outside of the fair grounds and then he had to leave for London or Amsterdam. It seems also that the other Armenians and Persians, Gregory, Maliban, and Makara were fairly successful as well. So here goes the too oriental for Parisians. And by the way, the presence of these cafes also invalidates my favorite myth about coffee at this time which is that the French were introduced to coffee, discovered coffee in 1669 on the hills of the Ottoman embassy on Suleyman Aga. The story, the [inaudible] and actually, I was able to trace it back to its author, he's a writer in 1715 and I wouldn't have time to get into the details but he's essentially projecting a Parisian embassy of that year into 1669. So the story was the Turkish envoy spent sometime in Paris. It was kind of holding courts there and being a very witty and charming man, all the good society was flocking. He was serving coffee, everybody was charmed by the ambassador and his coffee and that's how the Parisians started drinking which of course doesn't make any sense if they already had cafes. Also, there's a little detail if you look at the statistics of the port of Marseille, they were importing dozens of tons of coffee in 1669 already. But, you know, who checks these details. Okay, let me just show you, this is a picture of Suleyman Aga and this is a-- in 19th century, on top, this is 19th century representation of Suleyman Aga, the Turkish Ambassador holding court and receiving people. And if you notice in the background, you see the Palace of Versailles and how likely is that? That the Ottoman Ambassador would be having a picnic in front of the windows of Louis the 14th. If you know anything about Louis the 14th that's not his style, that's not his-- that's not something he would [inaudible], plus we know that he was actually stranded in Paris because Louis was refusing to grant him his letter. He was persona non grata at that time. Okay, let's move to Procope now. Procope and his great intuition. Well, the problem with Procope's great intuition is that he already had run a coffee house before mov-- before the one, [inaudible] Fosses-Saint-Germain in 1686. So if he had that intuition, why did he not apply it to the first establishment? By 1686, there were about a dozen or more cafes doing very good business in Paris. A guild had been incorporated in 1676, 10 years earlier. So there were already dozens of master cafe owners. The little detail that they usually fail to mention when they talk about Procope or actually that they blur, is that in 1689, 3 years after he opened Comedie-Francaise which was the main theater in Paris, moved right across the street from Procope. So intuition is great, it's very nice. Location is much, much better. [Laughter] Now, the story of-- the Procope story actually cannot be found anywhere until the 1780s. Actually it was created by one of the successors of Procope at a time when the business was nosediving and the business was taking a nosedive because the Comedie-Francaise had moved to another location at that time. So, they felt like they have to drum up a bit of marketing. And it was revived in the 19th century and embellished again by another successor of Procope [inaudible] with very nice additions. For instance, if you go there, you can see Voltaire's table, the table where Voltaire wrote. If you look at Voltaire's correspondence, it probably doesn't seem like he did much writing there and it's chipped. It has been chipped by [inaudible] in a fit of revolutionary rage not when they moved it of course. And my favorite is this, if you go there, you can still-- you can see this beautiful oil painting that shows you-- that showcases all the great writers. That one there is Voltaire of course, Rousseau, Diderot, Ben Franklin on the upper right corner, and on the upper left corner, Moliere who had died in 1673 as a great [inaudible] and intellectual say [inaudible]. But he was there in spirit, okay. Part of my project is the debunking of layer upon layer of myth. So I'm going to try to debunk it, rectify it but I'm also going to study it in its own right because I think it tells a very interesting story. Why did people feel like they had to make up these stories, why these fabrications, and in-- many of them actually arose in the 18-- in the-- sorry, in the 18th century. So, I think what the point is to point-- they signal points of tension at that time. Why choose Procope over the Armenians? Well, one is a Sicilian, is European, and he was naturalized French. That's when he became Procope Cuto. That was probably a more palatable founding figure than these Armenians we know very little about. And if you study myth a little bit, all the scholars would talk about myth, define it as ideology in narrative form or, you know, something around that. And what ideology was more powerful than nationalism. Particularly, in the case of an institution, coffee houses, and a beverage coffee that came from Muslim Ottoman lands, so they needed to be domesticated, they needed to be nationalized, Frenchified, and a lot of the myth or origin in that context. Okay, what did Parisian cafes look like? If you push the door to the Cafe Porcope or one of those, what would you see? What-- oops, actually, I'm going to use a number of images to give you a feel for that, but I want to place a little caveat before that. Historians have done a phenomenally terrible job, appalling job at interpreting images, particularly historians of cafes. They have to treated every single image as if it was a-- as if it were a snapshot, as if the artist would have just decided to go into a cafe and record whatever he was seeing for posterity instead of looking at images like you would at text. They were produced by a particular person for a particular audience out of particular date and actually dating images is very, very tricky. With a particular purpose, some of them are caricatures, some of them are book illustrations. There are conventions, genres that apply to these. And this has been completely shoved aside by former historians. Let me give you one little example of this, this image that you will see in many, many places. Usually, it will be-- you will be told that this describes the Cafe Porcope in the 18th century. And the bolder historians would tell you that you can see Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, Diderot and anyone, everyone. None of them looks anything like any of these writers but that doesn't really matter. Okay, so far, so good. Well, the problem with images is that all of them are cut and often times, you miss a little thing at the bottom like a caption. This one has a caption. [Foreign language] "Establishment of the new philosophy: our cradle was the cafe." That says something suspicious already right there. This may not be exactly what it seems. So, when I saw that, I started digging and I found that this is actually an illustration from a book published in 1777 by [inaudible] a noted enemy of the Philosophe. So this book is pamphlet against Voltaire, Diderot and the Philosophe. And, it's actually making fun of them for being idle, you know, cafe talks for spending their times in cafes and studying [inaudible] there. So, it becomes a very different picture now that you look at that and certainly it has very little to tell us about what to place at the Cafe Porcope. This is an imaginary recreation and a caricature to boot. So, I won't do the same kind of analysis with all the images. And now here, I'm really showing them as illustration more than as evidence. Okay, so let's go back into our cafe, what do you see? Light, lots of light. All the text that describe cafes talk about palace illuminae, illuminated palaces, [inaudible] houses of glass, chambers of mirrors. The picture on top, it's a-- I think that that's a good job, I don't know if it's clear enough after recreating a little bit of that brightness that the cafe owners created. If you want to get a feel for it, you have to watch Barry Lyndon, the movie by Stanley Kubrick. He has a phenomenal rendition of the kind of light, the very warm light that all these candles give and actually created a special camera to do it. So I highly, highly recommend it. The light was coming from crystal chandeliers and was reflected in mirrors. Oh wait, this is not-- yeah, crystal chandeliers as you could see. At the top here, you have candles on the tables, and it was reflected in mirrors, very large mirrors on the walls. Now, mirrors were very expensive. This is the late 17th century when the first cafes opened. It's the time when the French are just starting to crack the technology for making large mirrors. They stole it from the Venetians. Mirrors are immensely expensive. Well, think about the [inaudible] Louis the 14th. He built Palace of Versailles, what is the center piece, the center piece? The Hall of Mirrors, inaugurated 1684. Just a large cafe really. [Laughter] Now, all the images also show you another prominent detail which is stoves. They're very central in all the illustrations; they provided heat in the winter, and seating. People could sit around them. They also provided a pipe in which you could pin posters, gazettes, like the characters in that illustration, actually, reading some stuff that is posted on the stove. Like mirrors, stones were very-- were new, relatively expensive and very hip. People sat at small tables as opposed to long communal tables that you would find in taverns or inns. It could be round, it could be square, they could be rectangular but they were always tiny individuals. So you can sit there by yourself. You could isolate yourself in the cafe which you could not do in the tavern. Or you can have a small group or larger group by putting tables together. You sat on stools, upholstered stools so there's an element of comfort going there. You can see there are sometimes, chairs. The problem with chairs though is that it's very hard to sit on a chair with a sword and you can see one of the characters here. Now, think about it for a second, you know, it's actually not that easy, so it's mostly stools. The design of the interior space promoted visibility and transparency, individuality and modularity, novelty and luxury, practicality and a very new concept at that the time, comfort. And all that for [inaudible] or, you know, a few pennies, the price of a cup of coffee. Now, who would you see under these chandeliers and these mirrors around these stoves? I wish I knew. It's almost impossible and most impossible to tell but looking at text and analyzing them in images, police reports, you name it, you know, gather all the sources we can get at first sense. First, it is a respectable crowd and every single text insists on that. At least to the point where it's likely suspicious, they insist perhaps a little too much and the way I read that the insistence on respectability-- respectability is that as the number of cafe multiplies, when you reach 400 or 500 with a 1,000, they reach deeper into the social strata. And there's an anxiety about social mixing, an anxiety that is reflected into these comments. But in any case, you don't see workers. You don't see, you know, the lowest part of the people of the city. You don't see high nobleman either, you will see if a few nobleman and you can tell by their swords. But typically, there will be young man or there will be the [inaudible] nobility. The high nobility, the high aristocracy has its own circles for socializing and it would be slightly demeaning for them to be seen in a cafe. Mostly, it is the middle class, royal officers, the professions, merchants, men of finance, master, artisans, and shopkeepers that make up the bulk of the clientele. Another large group is foreigners. For instance, all the Englishmen gathered at the cafe [inaudible], a couple of English coffee houses where they can get the newspapers from England and talk with compatriots. Provincials, diplomats, traders, and provincials having business in Paris are also very often found in cafes. A third group, writers, playwrights, comedians, nothing has changed, they like to hang out in cafes, cafes are often located across from theaters. They're one of the earliest and remained one of the most important clienteles of cafes. I mentioned comedians and that includes actresses which raises the question, the second question I always get, were there any women in cafes? And that's a big question, it's a lot of ways not easy to answer but, yes, there were women. First, there were-- let me see, oops, there was always one woman constantly present in every cafe. The [inaudible] the wife of the cafe owner or the owner herself which is a widow. You can see her in every image, she's always described, she's there. Probably [inaudible] very interesting, they try to desexualize her as much as possible, she is respectability. She also has a bit of a moderating socializing influence, sort of civilizing influence on the crowds of men in the cafe. So, that's a given but are there any other women? And yes, I have plenty of evidence that women went to cafes, not all women, not all the time, not to all cafes but some women, some of the time in some place. They were all sorts of codes that regulated the presence of women in public places. And these apply to cafes as it did to all the rest of social life. You can see in some of these images and you'll notice of course that women were always accompanied. They were never by themselves when they went to a cafe, So, I mean it just-- on this issue of gender, it is a predominantly male space but it's one that welcomes or accepts women. And actually, a much more complex relation to the presence of females within the cafe then we could suspect. Now, what did people do in cafes? Another difficult question but here we have more evidence. The first thing they did then as now is hang out. Cafe is a place where you can rest, relax, take a break during the middle of the day. Paris was a very busy city. And we have plenty of evidence of people just stopping to relax. The thing to remember as well is that Parisian apartments in the 18th century are extraordinarily uncomfortable. They are small, they are cramped, they have very little furniture, barely any heating, I could go on and on. So this is a much better alternative to spend time then hold-- unless you are extremely wealthy in which case you don't go to the cafe anyway. The cafe was a place for leisure not for work. There's only one category of people who work in cafes, they were prostitutes, which merely writers as well. But all the others are not there to do business. Now the-- [ Pause ] The cafe in many ways-- served as an extension of the two main forms of leisure in Paris in the 17th and 18th century, the theatre and the promenade, the walk. All the theaters included the cafe, there was a lemonade stand or a cafeteria Procope actually was the one running the lemon stand or the cafe at the Comedie Francaise. Looking at all the plans for all the new theatres that are built in the 18th century, they incorporate a particular space for the cafe. And if you then walked out of the theatre, there would be plenty of cafes in the streets into which the audience would spill after other show and prolong their representation into the night. By the same token, the cafe is completely integrated with the promenade. The main public gardens, the Jardin du Luxembourg, on the boulevards, the Champs Elysees and so on, you find cafes. And people walk, they stop but actually, the cafe is not so much an escape from the promenade but it's a continuation. You are there and you're still part of the scene, it's all about seeing and being seen, and you can see here, people sitting, walking. And seeing and being seen is really the essence of public leisure in the 18th century and the cafe works very nicely for them. The cafe also quickly became a place for play, not gambling but games like dominos, checkers, chess. You can see a chess player or a couple of chess players or checkers players in about every image of the cafe, a lot of novels, plays has them in the background, we're just giving you a few examples here. Several cafes became famous for the games that were played there. The cafe [inaudible] on the left bank was the place for checkers. And actually the owner [inaudible] wrote a famous treatise on checkers. The most famous was the Cafe de la Regence near the Palais-Royal. This was where the best chess players in France and possibly in Europe were having games, games that were watched by enormous crowds. And this is interesting phenomenon that actually takes place around the Cafe de la Regence. You see the beginning of a celebrity culture. If you go to the Cafe de la Regence, you're pretty certain, you're going to able to see Philidor. Philidor is a big star at the time. He's a great composer and he's considered the best chess player-- the best chess player in the world. You can also see Jean Jacques Rousseau. Actually, Rousseau-- we know Rousseau played chess at the Cafe de la Regence and we have a 1741 text-- oh no, sorry 1787 text that relates that when Rousseau went to the cafe, there was such a crowd that the police had to station an agent in, you know, permanently in front of the cafe. We don't know how well Rousseau played chess but that was not the point. You are there just to see the big writer. So leisure, games, of course, it was a place where one-- I'm sorry, this is a representation of Rousseau playing chess at the Cafe de la Regence by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, a famous writer who went there but I'm not exactly sure which one is Rousseau but, you know, he wrote on the page that this was a sketch of Rousseau playing chess and we have to trust him, at least the one on the left 'cause he had that Armenian hat. So, cafes were also a place of consumption. You went there to drink, to drink what? You want drink coffee at first and coffee was-- in French, cafe is the same term that you use for the beverage and the establishment. So, the beverage coffee lent a lot of its imagery to the coffee house. This originally has to do with stimulation, its intellectual beverage, sobriety and all these in opposition to wine. So the cafe is in opposition to the tavern like coffee is in opposition to wine. This one is so exotic, it comes from the orient through the port of Mocha and then it's going to be drawn in the Caribbean later. And it's novel, there's an element of novelty that is very, very important. Coffee was a support of the new era of globalization, these exchanges of goods that suddenly make a lot of beverages, drinks, and other products available. So you could drink coffee but you could also drink-- I'm sorry about that, tea from China, chocolates from America and this is the funniest piece of a treaty on coffee, tea, and chocolates showing you allegory. But it was more than hot beverages. You could also drink lemonade. And actually, the official name of the cafe owner was Lemonadier, lemonade seller. Lemonade came from Italy in the early 17th century and it was also a very fashionable drink for awhile. Other cold drinks, you could drink sherbets, sherbets from Turkey, you could drink various syrups from fruits and flowers as well as ices which is another recent import from Italy and the cafes were really the place for ices here. This is a representation of the Cafe del Cabo famous [inaudible] coffee and I don't know if you can read but on the right, we have in this here which gives you the ice cream flavors: So, hot beverages, cold beverages, ices, and liquores. The lemonadier, the cafe owners had the monopoly for the sale of liquors, the retail sale of liquors. They had wonderful names. Was it like ratafias, rosolios, [inaudible], creme de barbedos, oil of venus, these are labels from bottles at that time and that could go on and on. The list of liquors is extraordinarily poetic. Then we can pick a different from wine, it's an alcoholic beverages but nothing to do with wine or beer. These are drinks that you sip. You have these tiny little glasses that you can see in some of the images, this is not like the big, you know, mug of or a stein of beer that lets you down. This is delicate, this is just like drinking coffee with a cup. It's to be enjoyed not-- it's not for getting drunk. Cafe also serves biscuits, macaroons, cookies of various types but they-- there were students in competition with a new creation, the restaurants the resto home [phonetic] which came in the second half of the 18th century and the cafe owners went out of the business of selling food at that time for the most part. There's a great text from 1741, it's a dictionary of commerce and it describes these aristocratic ladies, high aristocraty-- high aristocracy driving or having their coaches driven to a coffeehouse and have the waiter come out with a silver tray on which he would put a cup of coffee and slide it through the door. Essentially, they invented the drive-through. It's remarkable. It's just very, very odd to find that in 1741. Fashion and novelty were absolutely vital elements in the identity of the cafe. They were expressed in the mirrors and stove, but foremost in the beverages that went to buy it there. What else could you do in the cafe? Well, another element of novelty is news. This was the place for news. If you wanted to figure out what was happening, you went to the cafe. That was the place. Many of the owners subscribe to gazettes, the official newspapers to the unofficial [inaudible] there are manuscript news sheet that have all the good stuff in them. Since 1743, a police officer reported that [inaudible] subscribed to a notorious manuscript news sheet which he made available to his patrons. For this, he paid 5 pounds [inaudible] amongst the journalist plus a Cafe Au Lait each morning. So news, Englishmen went to get there English papers at the Cafe Au Lait. In most cafes you found peddlers who made their rounds and offered gazettes, pamphlets, reading material to patrons and if the peddlers were not doing it, the waiters would also offer that service. You try news in print, in manuscript, manuscript news sheet, letters were passed around in cafes, they were read, they were copied but also, of course, all raw information. In the cafe, you had a very important figure the novelist, the newsmonger who would-- this is probably one of them-- and this one who would comment all the news of the day. So it would bring news from whatever source you found it in. Another cafe, a newspaper to private letter and would relay it around. One way actually to distribute news in the cafes was given to us in a report by a police spy, the chevalier [inaudible]. In this, he describes how, for the worst material, the one that's really dangerous, the really nasty songs and the stuff that really could get you in the bastille. What he would do is that he would casually walk by the cafe and drop little pieces of paper on the table. And so this was a testimony to the-- to this presence of news everywhere. [Inaudible] is interesting. He was a writer. He was the agent of Voltaire in Paris and he organized [inaudible] for Voltaire in the Cafe Procope and other places. He was a journalist so he was one of the writers of the [inaudible] and he was a police spy as well which is-- would give you a sense with the range of activities you can do in the cafe. Here, you have a caricature of the novelist, they are full of those but there were an important element. What I described about reading and talking about news, applies very, very broadly. People went to the cafe to read, to read the news but they could also read pamphlet, the works for literature, poems, we have lots of examples of writers, reading their latest piece to an audience of friends. And something that is actually not obvious is the cafe is probably the best place you can go to for reading. There is light and lighting is expensive, the candles, and so on. And for a lot of people, this is their reading room, this is their reading space. People read and then people talk. And if you look on the bottom left corner, you have people engaged in a mix of reading and conversation and that's very, very typical. A conversation was in the cafe's DNA, it's a key feature in the French cafe as it was in the Ottoman coffeehouse. There's been a lot of writing about cafe conversation and it's very difficult, almost impossible to capture because a lot of the text that relates to coffee conversations are actually prescriptive, they're not really descriptive. A lot of them are written by moralist who worry about what people talk about, how they talk about and so on. In any case, we know there was conversation and we know that when the conversation stopped as it did during the darkest days of the revolution, it was very notable. This is a report from a police spy on February 21st 1794 at the Cafe Foy in the Palais Royal. This cafe is so busy, so teeming with politics as they filled as nearly all public places only with indifference. Deaths, news, people who feared to hear or speak up. Yesterday in the evening, they were reading a newspaper which was followed by such a constable crowd that the line extended into [inaudible] office. After the reading, deep silence. Conversations whispered in one's ear or about irrelevant topics, games and drinking. The deep silence must have felt as chilling than as it is now. But anyway, it shows that even in the midst of the terrain, we are really in the middle of it here. Police spies were surprised and unsettled when the buzz of conversation stopped in cafes. Well, this particular police spy is a typical presence in cafes, we have evidence that the Paris police placed spies as early as 1701. And throughout the 18th century, they had a special branch of the police in charge of cafe surveillance writing daily reports about who was saying what. [ Pause ] So what was so frightening about people talking in cafes, politics, news. People were not supposed to do that, they were actually not even-- they were not allowed to it. This was a crime. Politics was [foreign language], the king's secret, the [inaudible]. Anything that was public. War, ministerial affairs, the administration that was off-- that was out of bounce for ordinary people. That was one of the basis of the Bourbon Monarchy. And it's when that the cafe was threatened. It's one that really-- it's pretty much destroyed and the monarchy made several attempts at preventing this kind of talk but quickly, they realized that the best thing they can do is manage it. So, if you can't forbid it, if you can't prevent it, at least you can have your spies reporting or spreading this information, or spreading the government's view in the cafes. So, what's going on in there is discussion, conversation and this is the age of the enlightenment, critical thinking, rat-- and this leads to what? To literary criticism, this leads to people thinking differently about politics and we know the end of the story. Okay, why-- so why does all this matter? These are great stories, I really enjoyed telling them but there has to be, you know, something slightly more important about it. If you look at all the scholarship on the 18th century, all the historians agree that the cafe was an important place. I could-- They'll bring you quote after quote after quote. What's remarkable in all this is-- they were very uneasy about it because there is no clear sense for what's going on in there? What are people doing? What-- you know, it's there, it's in the middle of everything but we don't know what's there? So, let's say it very briefly, what I think is happening and why it's important. If we understand what's happening in the cafe, we will have a chance to revise a number of important theses. The first one is Habermas' thesis on the Rise of the Public Sphere. Habermas' thesis always study on the English coffeehouse and the French salon. Brian Cowan has shown that what he stated about the English coffeehouse is pretty bogus and [inaudible] has shattered everything that he said about the French salon. So, if we put all these pieces together now with the French coffeehouse, the English salon, the Masonic lodges and so on, we have a chance to rebuild it from the ground up not that the insights are necessarily invalid. But we have-- I think that the mistake that Habermas made is that he confused representations with practices. He read all these text thinking that these things were happening when they were actually just prescript-- perceived as text. Now, if we correct that and build from the ground up, then we can see what's left of the thesis or how to modify it. What we're dealing with is the rise of public opinion, what we're dealing with is ultimately, the origins of the French revolution. The great French historian, that Michelet in the 19th century talked about the prophets assembled in Procope's den who saw at the bottom of the black beverage the future array of '89. This is a little overly poetic perhaps, but there is clearly something that is happening, a desacralization of the monarchy, a rise of popular politics that takes place in the cafes. And we need a solid study of that to see how he placed into the causes of this great event. A couple other points very briefly, the rise of the Bourgeoisie. So nobody believes that the French revolution was caused by a frustrated Bourgeoisie that confined political power. This is the old Marxist thing. But at the same time, another-- historians are frustrated by the fact that social history-- the social aspects are being shoved aside. When I look in my cafes, what I see is a lot of Bourgeois. When I look at what they write about cafe, I see a lot of Bourgeois values being created from the ground up. So the issue here is not to rehabilitate Marxist history but maybe to get a sense that there is something happening in terms of the formation of a social class and the formation of a Bourgeois identity in the coffeehouse. The last one I will mention is consumption. We know the problem with the French as George Bush famously says is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur. Well, actually, they have a lot of entrepreneurs in the18th century and historians here again have typically not paid attention to commerce. The French don't like commerce and Marxian historians have privileged production over consumption. Now with the cafe, we have a very important place of consumption and we can look at all the vitality, all the thing that is happening in this society that is profoundly, profoundly transforming it. So, as a very, very brief conclusion, if we put this together, the public sphere, public opinion, democratic politics, I should have added gender actually in this formation, gender are very important. Consumption of Bourgeoisie, what we have really is the M word. This is the birth of modernity and I think in the end, the cafe is one of the places where modernity is being worked out, where it arises and the cafe in many ways, gives it its shape which is I think why it's such an important topic and why it's so interesting today because I do believe we are at the end of the modern period. We're moving into another post-modern world. And by looking at how the people of the 18th century dealt with these changes, how they dealt with the overload of information that happened at that time. How they had these place where suddenly, they could find out about what was happening in the world and so on. I think we can see a lot of ourselves. And of course, the last reason what we should care about it is, this is a great institution and it's fun to study in cafes. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Thierry, are you finished here? >> Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. [ Pause ] >> I have a question about the conceptualization. Overall conceptualization [inaudible]. Because, I mean, starting from the top point [inaudible] the same time we want you at the smaller framework. That, you know, they keep talking about, you know, too large in order to possibly fit the frame in Paris. Together, [inaudible] them up rather too small, talk about [inaudible] within an [inaudible] phenomenon. That includes London and, you know, Vienna. What about Vienna [inaudible]? >> Yeah. Absolutely. So in the project, I will talk about the rest of France, Marseille, you know, and so on here, I just focused on Paris. But Paris is so dominant, in contrary, that's I think-- it is a European phenomenon. One of the biggest mistake of all the scholarship has been to look at the French cafe in isolation from the English coffeehouse, from the German, the Viennese, the Italian. Actually, one of reasons why they didn't realize that the first French cafe was opened by an Englishman. They didn't look there. Now at the same time, I can't do a-- I don't want to do a comparative study. It's just way, way too big. But I'm doing one, I'm definitely doing one that has the [inaudible] out for what's happening elsewhere. And when you look at the Parisian Cafe alongside these other coffee houses, you can see actually a lot of the defining features much more clearly. So yes, somebody is going to have to write that book. Somebody is going to have to write that European study of coffeehouses, you know, maybe next project. [ Inaudible Remark ] I see, the onset is the late 19th century. Music, it starts in the 1770s. The cafes on the boulevards, so that's only on the outskirts of Paris, would have more space, start to hire orchestras and musicians to perform there. And that's a tradition that will last. Visual arts and workable sculptures in the Cafe du Caveau, it started mostly as interior decoration. Actually, there was a lot of focus on how the cafe was decorated. But it's really going to be a 19th century phenomenon and this is really linked to the monarch crowd, the second half of 19th century when artists were hanging out in cafes with paintings and so on. So in 17th, 18th century, there isn't much in terms of association with the visual arts, music is-- and music is starting really at that time. [ Inaudible Remark ] Yeah, yeah. No, that's-- yes, the question is about the evolution of the sociability in the cafe. You're looking at what the cafe has become and are there other places now that sort of fill the functions that cafes did in the 18th century? That's a great question. I don't see the 18th century cafe the way Habermas does it as the absolute pristine, public sphere that, you know, and it's all downhill from there. Of course I don't think it's downhill from there and if that it is not that pristine to start with. But let's see, at first, my theory was that Starbucks was a recreation of the French cafe. I really thought it was in the sense that you could also, you know, the internet was the equivalent of the gazettes that it was that place where you could, you know, be by yourself or in a crowd, and so on. I'm not sure I would go that far today. I think what's missing as you say in the 21st century especially Starbucks-type of cafe is conversation. And that's something that was absolutely essential in the 18th century. Are there any other places where you can find it with that tons of books bemoaning the absence of that or where it well then burst third place or, you know, rebuilding your loan type of rent? But you can still talk in the cafe. It's, you know, if you bring your friends, you'll have a conversation and I'm not sure that we really should believe all this text that tell you that in the 18th century, you walk into a cafe and chat with the first person next to you. I'm actually pretty certain it's not true. So, you know, was it easier than it is now? I don't know. But it's not a straight line, it sort of goes in-- the evolution is relatively complicated. [ Inaudible Remark ] Yeah, 1800 is fairly arbitrary but the cutting point is the French revolution. Before the French revolution, you can do politics in the cafe but it's forbidden. It's clandestine. It's illegal. You know, the police is spying on you. And so after 1800-- no, actually after 1815 upto 1820, when Napoleon is fairly repressive in terms of public opinion, your liberals, they can actually meet in cafes, they can have political parties, they can have clubs out in the open. So to me, that's the point. So I don't know if 1800 is the right cutting point. But to me, that's different, open politics, organized against something that's very much underground and that's-- and precisely, the importance is that it's going to burst out in 1789 and after. So what-- that's the part I'm trying to capture. And the reason why I don't push it further is because there are good studies on the 19th century, French cafe and I think that's the part that has been done. Now, you're right, there's a danger to overdo, to overdo all these. And I'm very aware of it. I'm not trying to do everything in the light of the origins of the French Revolution. Actually, when I started the project, I didn't even want to go to the French Revolution but now I feel like it's really important to get there. So there will continuities, there will be things that-- but I think really what we see after 1789 is freeing of everything. Newspapers become free, people can talk about whatever they want, they can form clubs, they can form parties in cafes and that changes not in the politics but the cafe itself. It will never be the same. >> Thierry, I'm afraid we're going to have to cut this short as obviously, you had everybody's attention and I know there's a lot more questions. >> Right. >> But there's coffee, the cafe is here and it's open. >> Great. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.