The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789-1914 (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science)

In the mid-1880s, W. Scott Haine writes, more than 42,000 cafés may have been operating in the city of Paris. (In comparison, Seattle, America's stereotypical coffee capital, has only about 60.) Unlike the members of today's drink-on-the-run coffee culture, 19th-century Parisians lingered in the café, and members of the working class created a fertile and dynamic space that combined elements of the 18th-century wine shop and the upper-class café and ultimately played, according to Haine, a pivotal role in the formulation and expression of their class identity.

The World of the Paris Café traces the perceptions of the café; delineates its laws and regulations; explores café etiquette, the role of the café owner, gender relations within the café, and the pivotal contribution of café sociability to the definition of familial, professional, and political relations. Haine, a faculty member at Holy Names College in California, firmly rejects the "misérabiliste" label so often attached to 19th-century Parisian workers, advocating instead for the great creativity they mustered to cope with poverty and proletarianization. He ably shows how, by bringing together the voices of thousands of customers through common rituals, reading matter, and conversations, the café fostered a true climate of opinion and made possible the growth of a proletarian public sphere. His articulately written account, based largely on Parisian judicial and civil records and newspaper accounts of café activity, balances academic rigor with an edge of humor, exploring what he terms both the "horrible and the humorous" elements of café culture. --Bertina Loeffler