and the lure of the Parisian Café
By L. John Harris
This article explores a world—café culture—that was cancelled in 2020 with the arrival of Covid-19. The bad news! On the other hand, didn’t we all become better flâneurs and flâneuses when forced to observe the world from an exaggerated social distance, to stroll alone in a world essentially devoid of others? The gradual return of café culture post-pandemic will bring with it a greater appreciation of the magical marriage between aesthetic observation and sociability, and the power of the café to make that happen. The good news!
It might seem counterintuitive, the idea of a flâneur’s guide to Paris cafés. After all, the café is a place to sit, sometimes for hours, sipping a cup of coffee, eating a simple meal, reading a paper, sketching or writing in a journal, meeting with friends for conversation over a glass of wine, flirting with a date, or just observing the passing crowd from the café terrace, bathed in a marvelous shared privacy. On the other hand, historical flânerie, which dates back to the 16th and 17th centuries, is done by foot, and alone, wandering aimlessly and anonymously about the city’s crowded streets. The great French poet, Charles Baudelaire referred to flânerie as “botanizing on the asphalt.”
What binds the activity of the strolling flâneur and the passivity of the café sitter is observation, and the fuel that feeds them both: caffeine and other liquid stimulants. Walter Benjamin, the early 20th century German critic and champion of the flâneur’s role in defining modernisme, described the streets and arcades of Paris circa 1840 as an interior dwelling for the flâneur “who is as much at home among the façades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls.” Benjamin concludes that, for the flâneur, “the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.” Simply put, the observant café goer is the working flâneur on a coffee break.
Cafés are the intermediate space between public exposure and exploration and the privacy of the home or workplace. But even flâneurs have to go home or back to work. The café is a way station for aesthetic gestation and fermentation, the third space between work and home where observation and inspiration begin the transition to the finished work of art (“a capitalist commodity” in Benjamin’s Marxist interpretation) completed in privacy.
So what are would-be flâneurs and flâneuses to do when the historical conditions that created the synergy between flânerie and the café have vanished? We can fuel the secret hope that café historian W. Scott Haine speaks of by studying in situ the Parisian cafés that have a claim to that history. There are historically significant, still active, cafés in Paris like Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore, Le Select, Café de la Paix, Le Procope and La Coupole. By reading about cafés, especially in a café with a petit noir at hand, you are beginning the process of making it your own.
If you prefer (or just out of curiosity) you can join the young postmoderns, the millennial and postmillennial workers and bloggers, in one of the growing number of Internet-friendly coworking cafés springing up all over Paris, offering trendier beverages and foodstuffs in contemporary settings. No one will mind—as long as you pay by the hour! Focused on their computer screens and cell phones while cyberflâneuring, these start-uppers won’t even know you are there reading an actual book about the actual glories of the Paris café’s actual past. Triste à dire. (Sad to say.)
Likewise, one can study, and emulate, as I have tried to do during my month-long sejours in Paris, the 19th century flâneur and the art of flânerie (from the verb, flâner, to stroll.). Strolling, however, is just the outward physical action of the true flâneur. It was his convoluted consciousness that made the flâneur what he really is: a detached, aestheticized observer—or anesthetized, if too much absinthe is consumed along the way.
The Benjaminian flâneur is not the Parisian boulevardier, dandy, libertine, decadent, rake, or bohemian—all types which derived from, and in reaction to, even protest against, growing middle-class power, materialism and conformity following the French and Industrial revolutions. The flâneur’s characteristics may overlap with these types but he has his own distinctive qualities. “Anonymity to the point of invisibility was, in fact, the distinguishing mark of the flâneur as a formulaic character of popular culture,” says cultural historian Mary Gluck in her fascinating book, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in 19th century Paris.
The qualities of the flâneur are not achieved overnight, if they can ever be today. But if the historical flâneur is missing from the physical streets of Paris, he’s increasingly present in spirit, as a metaphor for the kind of unrushed, intellectually rich and creative life we long for. And we can channel the spirit if we try. Paris showers its special magic on those who submit most fully to its siren call. That’s the mission of today’s flâneur and his contemporary partner, the flâneuse.
Beware: The portrait I’m painting of the flâneur is not the co-opted version found in contemporary commercial advertising and travel literature—A romanticized image of the flâneur (male and female) is used today to sell products, usually expensive ones. Ads abound featuring the flâneur (the Hermès brand); rake (The Rake, a gentlemen’s curated fashion magazine published in London); and bohemian (boho chic). The fact that the much-coveted thousand-dollar plus Louis Vuitton purse called the Lorette bag sports the lorette moniker, applied in the 19th century to low-level courtesans, many of whom lived near the Paris church Notre Dame de Lorette in the 9th, makes my point perfectly. It’s not surprising that the Lorette bag’s online marketing copy –“It’s Louis Vuitton, it’s girly and it’s Marvelous”– says nothing about the darker origins of the term. Neither did the LV customer service rep I asked on the phone about the handbag’s name.
Yes, the authentic flâneur “shops,” but not for things.
The Artist-Flâneur
The flâneur is a seer, not a sightseer. I think of him—women were not yet free to flâner in the 19th century because, among other factors, they were thought unable to achieve the emotional detachment necessary for flânerie—as an “inside outsider.” Being alone in Paris for months at a time, I have certainly felt the anonymity that the flâneur cultivates, no matter the friendships that I developed in Paris. Petit à petit (little by little) I was becoming un vrai (a true) flâneur, or so it felt. I am not the bohemian or decadent of my 20s and 30s, nor am I the rake or dandy of my 40s, 50s, and 60s. The flâneur seems to fit me now, in my early 70s.
Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin’s ultimate flâneur, flirted with the dandy type throughout his life, but Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” was, in the end, a more powerful attraction. In Poe’s story, the narrator follows another man he has noticed from his café seat and observes him in the context of the swirling action of London’s streets. Poe’s narrator is the prototype of the detective, the private eye sussing out the city’s secrets and hidden crimes.
Baudelaire, as reflected in his great collection of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal, provides the somewhat subversive/paranoid tint that colors Benjamin’s view of the flâneur as the transgressive modern (avant-garde) artist—the artist-flâneur. From Baudelaire’s poem “Artist Unknown”
No illustrious tombstones ornament
the lonely churchyard where I often go
to hear my heart, a muffled drum, parade
incognito
I am definitely incognito in Paris. But compared to Baudelaire, you can describe me as an artist-flâneur lite.
The Café as Dreaming Space
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Paris café was an important contributor to the democratization of France and a provocative model for cafés all over Europe. More than any other institution, the café invited people of all social strata (and eventually of all races and genders, though exceptions exist, even today) to express their most radical and private thoughts in a public space. It had replaced the royal court and high society salon as the place to argue aesthetic, philosophical and political ideas, no matter how scandalous. And there was relatively little risk of arrest or challenge by government agents. The café was a caffeinated “cabal,” as one 19th-century observer noted.
For me, the café is primarily a dreaming space. Before we can think freely, speak freely, and create freely, we must dream freely. Perhaps “daydreaming” is a better term. Reverie is perhaps an even better word for the kind of mental activity that precedes creative expression. In The Poetics of Space, the great French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard presents an extraordinary and challenging examination of this pre-creative dream state, triggered by, and colored by, the various rooms of the home. The café is, of course, a symbolic extension of the home, a place of “intimate solitude” says author W. Scott Haine, my go-to authority on the history and function of Parisian cafés.
I think it’s the dreaming function of the café that can connect café-goers today to their inner flâneur. It’s maybe too late to experience cafés in the same way that Voltaire and Verlaine, Baudelaire and de Beauvoir, and Monet and Modigliani did, but it’s never too late to dream.
Caffeinated Balzac
Perhaps no other Frenchman has expressed the power of coffee to stimulate creativity more than Honoré de Balzac, a keen observer of flânerie, if not a flâneur himself. According to legend, Balzac would fuel his eighteen-hour writing binges at home by downing up to fifty cups of filter-dripped coffee. He drank his coffee from demitasse cups, it must be noted, the equivalent of about ten or twelve of our modern cups per day. Any gastronomic pleasure derived from coffee as a beverage would seem to have been of secondary importance to Balzac, if important at all. In his hilariously bombastic essay about his addiction, titled “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee,” the extract is portrayed as a powerful magical elixir, not a pleasant and bracing beverage.
As Brillat-Savarin has correctly observed, coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles: it accelerates the digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects.
True enough, though the magic is better understood today from a physiological point of view– that is, caffeine’s ability to release pleasurable endorphins and stimulating adrenalin. After multiple readings of the essay, what is notable to me is that not once does Balzac mention anything to do with the taste of coffee or any pleasure in it. Which is all the more curious given that Balzac references the 19th-century author of The Physiology of Taste, his older contemporary, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the witty gastronome who more or less invented modern culinary sensibility with the immortal words, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”
In Balzac’s case, using Brillat-Savarin’s formula, the answer is: “a caffeine-addicted, coffee-eating glutton.” Yes, Balzac ate ground coffee in order to magnify the stimulating effect in the face of the caffeine tolerance he had developed.
When Balzac ventured out into the world to purchase his coffee, he was selective. According to Graham Robb, the author of Balzac: A Biography:
Balzac’s special blend of coffee required a visit to several Parisian grocers and half a day’s shopping. The local variety was insipid: “No great inspirations to be had with this coffee,” he complained.
The decades leading up to the Belle Epoque (1871-1914) were those in which Paris was solidifying its position as the cultural and artistic capital of Europe. The 20 years of Balzac’s most prolific production—from about 1830 to 1850, just before his death from complications of caffeine poisoning according to Balzac’s doctor—witnessed the beginnings of an artistic avant-garde aligned with what would later evolve into modernisme and Modern Art. Much of the new art (theory, practice and product) would be developed and promoted in the cafés of Montparnasse, Montmartre, the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Pres.
Flâneurs, too, evolved during this period. From strolling loafers and wealthy boulevardiers during the first part of the 19th century, flâneurs emerged often, along with mass-circulation newspapers, as working journalists. Balzac was no doubt the greatest of these. However, living and working in the Marais, on the Right Bank, until later in life, Balzac was more the homebody (casanier) than the daily café habitue. Although connecting socially and professionally to many of the great artists and writers of his time (Rodin, Hugo, Baudelaire, Delacroix, Gautier), he inhabited a domestic world somewhat cut off from the society he meticulously chronicled. George Sainsbury, an early Balzac authority, wrote, in an introduction to an English translation (1901) of The Human Comedy:
(Balzac) does not figure, frequently or eminently, in any of the genuine gossip of the time as a haunter of literary circles, and it is very nearly certain that the assiduity with which some of his heroes attend salons and clubs had no counterpart in his own life. In the first place, he was too busy, in the second he would not have been at home there…He felt it his business not to frequent society but to create it.
Balzac may have had little time or funds for Paris’ thriving café and salon society but he was sufficiently exposed to it to write in exquisite detail—much of it from his imagination, according to Sainsbury—about the social types that inhabited these worlds. This was the birth of literary realism in the 19th century, with Balzac as its founding, coffee-addicted genius.
Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him [the flâneur] to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself, or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.
—Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (1863)
L. John Harris is a Berkeley-based artist, writer, and filmmaker. This article was adapted from Café French: A Flâneur’s Guide to the Language, Lore & Food of the Paris Café (2019), published just as cafés everywhere were shuttered due to the pandemic. Harris’ new book, My Little Plague Journal, a memoir of his life without cafés but not without humor, will be available in May 2022.
