The Historic Cafés of Paris: The Institutions That Shaped the City of Lights

Parisian coffee culture is not limited to roasted beans, a soft pastry, or a table overlooking a spectacular architectural façade. For centuries (and to a considerable extent even today), the Parisian café was a pattern of urban life: a meeting place, a forum for discussion, an informal office, a public salon, and sometimes a literary and political microcosm. In contrast to the private home—which was more closed and classy—the café created an in-between space: intimate yet public, everyday yet shrouded in luxury, open to all but identified with those who knew how to turn sitting there into a painting, metaphorical or real.

The power of the Parisian café stems from the combination of three intertwined elements: location, rhythm, and visibility. It is usually located on a central urban axis—an avenue, square, or transit stop, near a theater, newspaper office, university, or publishing house; it allows for extended stays for a relatively modest fee; and, most importantly, it makes the person sitting there part of the city's spectacle. In Paris, sitting in a café is not a respite from the hustle and bustle of the street, but a redefinition of the street, by more elegant means.

A piece of history

Although coffee had already reached Paris in the mid-seventeenth century, it was not until 1672 that a real attempt was made to open a café there, by Pasqua Rosa. The attempt did not immediately spark an urban revolution; this came only a few years later, with the appearance of the famous and scandalous Café Procope (or Le Procope). Later interruptions and transformations in its activity prevent it from claiming full continuity, but it is difficult to overstate its importance as a cornerstone in the formation of the modern Parisian café.

And indeed, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, due to the success of The Pilot, the news spread throughout the city. During the Enlightenment, philosophers, encyclopedists, and revolutionaries sat in the cafes; in the nineteenth century, writers, journalists, painters, and art critics joined them; in the early twentieth century, the cafes became centers of the avant-garde, modernism, and bohemia; and after World War II, they became an inseparable part of the mythology of Existentialism, the Left Bank and Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

In each period, the language changed, but the structure remained the same: a small table, coffee, newspaper, notebook, cigarette, and a feeling that the great ideas of the period were not born only in academia or parliament, but also between glasses, waiters, and side conversations. Contrary to the heavy-headed image that might be created, it is important to emphasize the social aspect: the Parisian café was not a 'workroom'; it was a social stage. The writer who wrote there, the philosopher who debated there, the painter who waited for a meeting with a patron or an editor—all participated in a showcase space where culture was created for the eyes of others.

Geography is no less important than the big names: Saint-Germain-des-Prés is associated with philosophers, editors, poets, and the Left Bank; Montparnasse Associated with artists, immigrants, modernists and international bohemia; the Opera district and the Grands Boulevards evoke a nineteenth-century press, theatre, high society and literary elite; while the historic cafés of the Palais-Royal and its surroundings recall the Paris of the Enlightenment, chess, polemics and revolution.

Each region has created a different type of café: intellectual, artistic, political, journalistic, aristocratic or bohemian. Many of these cafés operate today in a dialectical space that is taking shape before our eyes, in a constant tension between past and present. Some have closed and become a memory, an inscription or an episodic anecdote; others are still active, but also function as cultural pilgrimage sites. You will find tourists, cameras, high prices, and sometimes, some would argue, a degree of artificiality. Nevertheless, their power has not disappeared and to this day they serve as a focal point of 'pilgrimage' for lovers of culture, history or simply curious tourists.

And having come this far, it's natural to start the list of cafes we'll feature in this article at Le Procope; not necessarily because it's one of the oldest and most famous names in the history of Parisian coffee, but because it embodies the moment when the café ceased to be a culinary novelty and became a true urban institution: a center where Paris (and, in its wake, the entire world) thinks out loud.

The Procope

13 Rue de l Ancienne Comédie, 75006 Paris – Le Procope official website

Le Procope, located on Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, is considered the oldest café in Paris – it opened in 1686 and has been associated with generations of thinkers, from Voltaire and Rousseau to the French Revolutionaries. Today it operates primarily as a historic brasserie-restaurant, but still maintains a unique museum atmosphere.

For the full article on Le Procope – history, opening hours and what to order »

Flore's coffee

172 Boulevard Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris – Café de Flore official website

Café de Flore, on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Benoît, is one of the addresses most identified with twentieth-century literary Paris – from Joachim Apollinaire and the Surrealists to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who made it the unofficial center of existentialism.

For the full article on Café de Flore – history, opening hours and what to order »

Les Deux Magots

6 Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 75006 Paris – Link to the cafe's website

Les Deux Magots stands on the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, opposite the old church that gave the district its name, and is an independent point of weight in the mythology of the Left Bank. The Prix des Deux Magots, founded there in 1933, alongside names like Apollinaire, Hemingway and Simone de Beauvoir, have made it a veritable literary institution.

For the full article on Les Deux Magots – history, opening hours and what to order »

The Closerie des Lilas

171 Boulevard du Montparnasse, 75006 Paris – The website of La Closerie de Lila

La Closerie des Lilas is located at the end of Boulevard du Montparnasse, on the edge of the 6th arrondissement and the bohemian Montparnasse. The place is primarily associated with Ernest Hemingway, but also with Voltaire, Baudelaire, Apollinaire and Picasso before him.

For the full article on La Closerie des Lilas – history, opening hours and what to order »

Last sip

Here, then, the path begins: from Voltaire's Procope and the Enlightenment ideals, through Sartre's Flore, de Beauvoir's, and Saint-Germain's, to a long line of cafes where Paris learned to transform conversation, writing, and urban sojourn into an art in itself. The walk through Paris' cafes is a movement between more and less famous addresses, between places that are still active and those that remain only in memory, in a way that allows one to draw a cultural map of a city where even a cup of coffee can carry with it an entire history.