As the Procopio became successful with his changes, the other opening cafés adapted his ideas. French people liked the idea of going to a chic place and spending hours there. Even though café concept became cultural and popular through the end of the 17th century, they still have their impact on the modern Parisian cafés. Decoration of the inside and outside of the cafés in terms of its elegancy and outfit of the waiters has barely changed since the establishment of modern cafés. In the mid 1670s, when the coffee was made available to the public, the servers on the streets wore black clothes and large, white clean napkins tied around their waists, which is the base for modern servers’ outfits in today’s high quality cafés.
Right from the beginning of the emergence of the cafes, the owners began to have tables and chairs outside the café as well, especially on nice, sunny days to carry the glory of the cafés to the outside to attract the crowd on the streets. Thus, people started to interact with the outside world as well. They did not only socialize with the people inside, but also the people outside. This characteristic of the cafés became very popular later on, and it is the most important property of cafés in the modern society.
In the meantime, cafés started to be established in the other parts of Paris. In 1689, the city’s most famous theater, the Comedie Française took up the quarters right across the street and started to serve coffee in small cafés near the theatre. Thus cafés became the place for actors and the audience of the plays. Despite the cafes that were established after Procope, Procope always had the most important role and always was the one to bring up the new ideas. While other cafes were opening their doors to the public, Procopio tried to develop his own café. In 1689 he set up a small stand to serve light refreshments such as pastry products. Thus he did not only serve coffee in his café but also something to eat. Thus the tradition of having a snack before the plays was established. A short time after snack appeared in cafés, small plates and cutlery took their place on the tables in cafés. Baked goods, ice cream and other kinds of drinks became available in cafés by the end of the 17th century. Wine and other alcoholic drinks were served in the 17th century since the first café was opened, but in this century, cafés were known for their coffee.
17th century cafes were open to both sexes. However, they were usually the places where the noble women hung out. With their clothes and jewels and their hairstyles, they easily fit into the picture in cafés. How did the men come into the picture? When the women were supping their drinks and enjoying the conversations, men played cards and board games. Unlike the other European cafes, where smoking and drinking were involved, French cafés were the places to share mostly a non-alcoholic drink and find company.
In 1728, forty years after Procope was established, there were already 380 cafes in Paris. The atmosphere of the cafes in the 17the century was carried to the 18th century. In fact, Le Procope’s model was the basic model for the characteristics of the 18th century cafes. The décor was still elegant with some additional decorative elements such as the tapestries, framed paintings and mirrors on the walls. The indispensable elements of the 18th century were used in the café design as well. Besides, there were comfortable and fashionable armchairs, flowering plants, exotic candles and chandeliers, which attracted every kind of person in society especially the noble class.
With the small steps in the 17th century, the cafés laid the groundwork for the huge success in the following centuries. In the eighteenth century, thought through philosophical thinking was established by the important thinkers such as Voltaire who developed scientific rationalism. As philosophy became popular, cafés turned out to be the places for the philosophers to come together and discuss their ideas. On the other hand, for some people, cafes were the places to hide, to find some peace and get their work done. Diderot completed his most famous work, the Encyclopedia, in a Parisian café, the Café de la Régence. He used the coffee-house as his office where he felt himself more efficient than anywhere else. By the mid 18th century, coffee houses were not only the places to get drinks, but also the enlightening places where intellectual conversations took place. Famous French poets and philosophers had a reputation for going to the cafes, sitting on their favorite tables, drinking dozens of cafes and staying there for hours.
Even though 17th century cafes were open to everybody, not every kind of person spent a lot of time in the cafés. However, in the 18th century cafes were visited by everyone because there were various types of cafés for every kind of person. There were even some cafés that were visited by the people who had a particular job. Actors gathered at the café Anglais, musicians at the Café Alexandre, and army officers at the Café des Armes. However, they were still open to other people as well such as flirtatious women, businessmen, abbés, country bumpkins, journalists, drinkers, and adventurers. In other words all kinds of people from any kind of rank in society gathered in cafes.
Other than being a place to spend time and get drinks, cafes were also the places to get the recent news. The government’s eye on both spoken and written form affected the circulation of information in the coffee-houses. Because of the state censorship and the lack of freedom of press, the hand-written newsletters of gossips emerged in Paris. Since they were not printed but copied, they did not need government approval. Besides, poems and songs were passed around on papers with coffee house gossip. Cafés were the best places to pass these newsletters and papers around to spread the news to the public because people mostly gathered in cafés. In addition, people were not allowed to be chatty. They had to watch their actions and words, because government spies were among the visitors of coffeehouses. If anyone talked against the state or against the king, he might have been imprisoned in the Bastille.
Despite the recognizable development of intellectuality, France was not in good shape politically and socially. The ancient regime had the power and they were not being fair, and they were not treating people in society equally. The wealthiest groups in society which were aristocracy and clergy were exempt from taxes. As a result, the taxation fell on the other 98 percent of the population, which were the rural poor population and the relatively wealthy members of the bourgeoisie. This financial crisis in France became an apparent subject in Paris, and people started to have discussions about it in cafés. Coffeehouses, as being socializing and enlightening places of the time, became the centers of revolutionary background. Right before the French Revolution in 1789, cafes were full of furious and downtrodden people not only inside but also outside who tried to encourage the audience for a revolution against the government.
Assemble of Notable, which consisted of the wealthiest members of the society, the clergy, aristocrats, and magistrate, came together to solve the financial crisis that was provoking the citizens. However, the Assembly of Notables failed to come up with a solution for the financial crisis, which caused King Louis XVI to convene the States General, an elected national assembly, for the first time in 150 years. However, it did not solve the problem either. In fact, it caused much confusion in the meeting between the assembly members. The public could not wait anymore for a change from the government and decided to make their own change. They took action on July 12th, 1789, at the Café de Foy. Young lawyer Camille Desmoulins set the French revolution in motion. A lot of people gathered right outside the gardens of the Palais Royal. The tension of the revolutionaries put the army in action soon. Desmoulins stood on a table outside the café with a pistol in his hand and shouted “To arms citizens! To arms!” His first move created huge chaos for the next couple of days. With this event, cafés lost their fame as being the places to find peace, drink cups of coffee and enjoy the conversations. They literally became places to get together to rebel against a corruption in society.
After 1791, as the revolution became more radical, middle class women started to participate in the political discussion that took place in cafés. Then, when their formal attributes of citizenship such as voting were not allowed, cafés became the places where women could get involved in political life. On the other hand, the collapse of luxury trades caused the disappearance of aristocrats right before the French revolution; bringing unemployment to Paris. As a result, women started to work as prostitutes in cafés. With the pre-revolution and revolution events, working class cafés started to host the middle and low class women.
By the end of the 18th century when the French revolution took place, cafés were all over Paris. The number of cafés increased with the increase in the roles of cafés for the public. There were approximately 1,800 cafés in Paris in 1788, which shows the huge development of the idea of cafes in French society. They did not only offer food and drink, but also discussions, opinions, meeting places, and somewhere to get together for a goal such as the French Revolution. Governmental authorities were aware of the roles that cafes had played in the emergence of the French Revolution. However, few people from the government would react to or comment about the cafés’ contribution to the political movements. They did not propose any law to deal with the problems cafés caused.
The problem was not only caused by the political movements against the government, but also alcohol consumption which was an issue for the police. Alcoholic beverages became a part of the cafés. Beer and wine became popular in cafés during the 19th century because alcoholic drinks were cheap. Economic crises at the end of the 1880s caused people to choose alcohol over food. Other than beer and wine, absinthe also got fame in the 1870s among fashionable bourgeoisie and poets and it became famous among the workers by the end of the century with which they could imitate the stylish bourgeois class. The disease called “alcoholism” was invented in 1853 by a Swedish doctor named Magnus Huss, which had a lot of victims by the end of the 19th century. The huge amount of alcohol consumption was the reason for sexual problems in the cafés, the security of the society and the poor health of the people. However, the police did not care about the morality or health. They were more interested in the security that could have been damaged by the drinkers. There were over four thousand public drunkenness cases between 1873 and 1901, which indicates the importance of the issue at the time. That is why much of the spying in the cafés was on the criminal activities.
While these social and political events were taking place, working class cafés became common in Paris after the revolution, which caused a change in the decoration and style of cafés. Working class café owners began the interior decoration of fashionable 18th century cafes using mirrors, ornamentation, and bas-relief. These cafes were a synthesis of the 18th century wine shop and the upper class café. An American proletariat, Alvan Sanborn describes the characteristics of cafés in the 19th century in his journal as:
“The furnishings are not in the best of taste; they are chiefly glitter and gaud.
Nevertheless, the room is a beautiful sight; so it is so full of the brighter as-
pects of humanity. Here are bloused and frocked laborers, with their white-
capped wives and their black-aproned children; petty tradesmen and trades-
women, and one or two uniformed soldiers. On the tables are glasses of dark-
brown coffee, light brown beer, red wine and pearly absinthe, beside cards,
dice, dominoes, checker and back-gammon boards, tally slates and newspapers.
Here are also tobacco smoke and good humor, emulation and curiosity and
labyrinth chatter, but no drunkenness or rudeness or tobacco juice or saturated
sawdust.”
He visited the French cafés at the end of the century when drunkenness started to decline with increasing medical and legal intervention. As he says, the cafes serve everybody without giving privilege to a particular class. However, they were not as elegant as they were in the seventeenth century. They still had a beautiful sight, but their function was more important in this century, which was to gather people together or to give people an alternative place where they can spend time outside of their homes.
In the 19th century, the reason for workers to spend much time in cafés was not only revolution effects but also the terrible housing situation they had. They were poor; that is why cafes were places they felt warmer and more comfortable. Besides the poor workers, cafés were visited by young bachelors too, who were in search of a stable family and social life. These bachelors had their meals, found friendship and sexual affairs in cafés with women who were either active or prostitutes. Besides, with the increase in the population in the first half of the 19th century due to immigration, the housing problem turned out to be a bigger problem. The rents went up and there were not enough apartments for renting; that is why cafes were used as homes. On the other hand, working class people were not the only people who used the cafés as their home. The members of bourgeois also used cafés as their homes when they wanted. They invited their guests to their favorite café rather than to their home.
Due to the trouble cafes caused in the 19th century in terms of drinking and prostitution issues, most of the cafes were then seen as problems that needed to be solved rather than a place to go and spend time. In 1885, the danger of the cafes for the society was reported in a U.S. government report as “These restaurants, being the resort of all unemployed men, are a danger alike to public health and morals, being the home of outcasts of society, honest workmen are thrown in contact with them.” If the cafes gained bad fame in this century, then why did the number of cafes multiply quickly and reach 30,000 in the beginning of the 20th century? Cafés had taken the place of home life. Parisians ended up living in public. In some cafes such as Café Riche, there were private rooms which were used as bedrooms. For this reason, cafes were extremely crowded in the evenings. Besides, the population of Paris increased from 600,000 to over a million in the first half of the 19the century due to immigration which caused a housing problem. For these reasons, even though cafes were seen as problems, the need for them could not have been ignored.
At the beginning of the 20th century, cafes started to function as they did in the beginning of the 18th century. The realization of the problem of alcoholism saved cafés from being just wine shops. Beside the decrease in alcohol consumption, the settling down of the society brought café’s good fame back. In addition to the increasing medical and legal intervention, with the beginning of the Belle Époque period in the late 19th century, chic and elegant cafés started to be popular again. In the 20th century, cafés were the meeting places where writers, artists and filmmakers came together to discuss the subjects of art and philosophy. The impressionist painters Monet, Renoir, and sometimes Cezanne had regular meetings in different cafés in the afternoon, and their discussions often did not end until past midnight. In the 20th century, with the increasing popularity of cafes not only among the working class but also bourgeois, cafes became the places where people went for business and pleasure again.
The last four centuries were the steps for the establishment of the modern café. In modern cafes, one can find all kinds of beverages such as wine, beer, coffee, tea and can smell costly perfumes and fumes of French tobacco, and spend hours doing nothing. Other than the luxury goods that the modern cafes offer, they provide basic necessities for people such as coffee, cigarettes, newspapers, telephones, toilets, a place to rest, a place to get away from daily problems, to get to know people or maybe sometimes to get online in the internet. With the improving technology, cafés function might develop or with the change of fashion their sight might change. However, their basic functions such as offering people a place to spend time, and their basic characteristics such as their elegance will not change. Writers still use cafés as their offices where they can eat, drink, meet friends, and do work. Cafés are the places where French people spend most of their time that is left from work. Some of them spend more time in the cafés than they spend at home. That is why, café is considered as the extension of the apartment, as its living room. The hours spent in the cafés are not considered a waste of time. Beginning with the Procopio’s achievement in the 17th century, continuing with the changes in the 18th century with the French Revolution and with the warming social and political climate in the 19th and the beginning of 20th century, the cafés take their shape as an inseparable part of the French culture.
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