Paris Cafés: To Be or Not to Be?

The celebrated Parisian café finds itself up against non-smoking laws, stricter alcohol checks, reeling rents and a recession- but the party’s far from over.

Funny—I’m writing this article about Paris cafés while sitting in a Paris café. That’s good, when you think about it, because it’s one indication that Paris cafés are alive and well—pretty fine news considering that statistics tell us the number of cafés in France fell from 200,000 in 1960 to a little over 41,000 in 2009.

Looking at those figures, you might be tempted to think that le café, perhaps the most typical of all French institutions, is on its way out. But figures don’t tell the whole story.

I am an inveterate café-goer. I usually choose my cafés by how much sunlight the sidewalk terrace gets at any given time of the day, which means, I kid you not, that I have a favorite morning café and a middle of the afternoon café and an early evening café. I can’t even begin to imagine France without this noble institution that Balzac dubbed “the parliament of the people”.

It’s true that French cafés are up against a series of challenges that can’t be ignored: an anti-smoking law enforced since January 2008 is keeping smokers away; conversely, there are now complaints from neighbors unhappy with the noise of smokers taking a cigarette break out in front, and littering the sidewalk with butts (which is why you’ll now observe outdoor ashtrays in some locations). There are also stricter drunk driving laws now, and, in Paris at least, skyrocketing rents in some neighborhoods. But the picture in Paris is mixed, nonetheless. Some cafés have indeed shut their doors, while others aren’t complaining.

Fruit juice and flat screens

One man who’s convinced that the French café must never die, at least not on his watch, is Bernard Quartier, the ebullient 58-year-old head of the National Café Federation. For Quartier, who has owned eleven cafés over the years, both in Paris and in the provinces, and will soon open his twelfth, the café is “the image of France”, one of the last bastions of conviviality, a place where people find human warmth.

And things to do. “The café has always been a place where there are events,” he notes. “The first TVs were set up in cafés, people drank their first Cokes in cafés, in villages they had their dances in cafés. I think that cafés will once again become the kind of place where people come to be together.”

To that end, Quartier’s association has drawn up a list of 50 propositions to “re-dynamize” cafés all over France. Cafés in Paris, he notes, have resisted the economic decline better than cafés in the provinces mainly because café owners in Paris have been more willing to bring in new ideas. “Success,” he says, “will come to those who are inventive.” He gives as an example one of his favorite cafés, where business plummeted after the anti-smoking law came into effect in January 2008. The owner changed his menu entirely, offering tea and cakes in the afternoon, and “business shot right back up,” says Quartier, who sees the law as an opportunity to attract a different clientele—”the children, old people, and pregnant women who wouldn’t enter the premises before because of the smoke”. In order to project a healthier image, this year, for the second year in a row, the federation is backing a juice day, on  which participating cafés will vaunt the virtues of fruit drinks.

Fruit juice? Well, yes, says Quartier. And that’s just the beginning. “Cafés have to move with the times, attract a varied clientele, offer music or events.” He confirmed that the appearance of more and more flat-screen televisions in cafés, mostly to offer televised soccer and rugby matches, is part of that move but “we recommend turning them off when there’s no particular event going on. People go to a café to exchange their ideas, not to see images of wars or hear depressing news.” (I’ll second that—when one of my neighborhood cafés invested in a TV set left on all day long, it lost at least one customer—me).

One positive thing that’s happened, he says, is that the new people who are starting cafés are really interested in the job, and in finding different angles to attract customers. Says Quartier: “They’re attracted to the profession, and not in it by default which was sometimes the case before.”

Sunday morning philosophy

Only the French could combine Sunday morning coffee with philosophy, n’est-ce pas? Almost 17 years ago, Marc Sautet, a French professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, started giving Sunday morning talks at the Café des Phares at the Bastille, which rapidly became known as the first “Bistrot Philo“. Although Sautet died in 1998, the tradition remains and every Sunday morning from 11 am to 1 pm, those who might wonder why we’re on this earth and what it’s all about come together over croissants and coffee to listen to, and discuss fine philosophical points with, the prof du jour. The philosophers philosophize against the backdrop of waiters running back and forth to serve the non-philosophical crowd seated in front. The petite, dynamic 44-year-old manager, Nadhia Godefroy, says this works because people are used to the formula and like it. She says the café made one “disastrous” attempt at a reading and dropped the idea, since “you can’t expect people to keep quiet”. And, she adds: “You have to know what you can and can’t do, what works and what doesn’t in the space available. We never forget that we are first and foremost a café-brasserie.”

Smoking–No Smoking

For some café owners, the anti-smoking law is one big downer. “People come to a café to smoke a cigarette, laugh and have fun, to leave their worries at home. But when a group of friends are at a table and one leaves to go smoke outside, it breaks up the atmosphere,” says Christine Bouillaud, manager at the Old Navy, a tiny 105-year-old café in Saint Germain des Prés, which has counted Fidel Castro and Serge Gainsbourg among its roster of famous clients.

Across town in the hip east of Paris, the story is different. Nadhia Godefroy got her clients used to the non-smoking idea by asking them, starting two months before the law took effect, to extinguish their cigarettes between 11:30 am and 2:30 pm, while customers were eating lunch. They did, and the result was twofold: a greater acceptance of the law—the inveterate smokers fled to the outdoor terrace—and “a lot of new clients who had formerly shunned the smoke-filled room”. At Le Select, the elegant 1920s café whose regulars once included Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Cocteau, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and the scandalous Kiki de Montparnasse, manager Francis Mazière notes that while the café still attracts writers and artists, “since they can no longer smoke, their evening forays are down to once a week rather than several times”. That’s the downside. The upside, he says, is that “the anti-smoking law hasn’t affected business during the day, where on the contrary people are happy to be in a non-smoking environment”.

Then and now

In the good old days, immortalized by Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the café was more often than not a drab smoky den where workers would stand at the zinc for a shot of calvados in their coffee or a glass of white wine before heading off to their house painting or construction or street-sweeping jobs. “Now,” says a café owner in eastern Paris, “workers are more likely to drink a cup of coffee.”

In the years after World War II, many Parisians, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, frequented cafés for the same reason penniless students did, because they were warmer than freezing, unheated apartments. In Saint Germain des Prés, the café scene was lively, with students going back and forth between the numerous spots, including the now legendary Les Deux Magots and the Café Flore. “After the war the café was not just a place to meet friends or drink, but one of the few places you could get warm,” says Parisienne Hélène Veret, who remembers that for young students “the Flore was too expensive and too intellectual, so a lot of us went across the street to the Royal Saint Germain”—in the building that now houses the Giorgio Armani boutique. She also recalls that in the small provincial town of Saintes, in Charente-Maritime, where she grew up, young girls didn’t go to cafés alone. The first time she and her friends went to a café, she says, “We felt so proud. We got all dressed up in white gloves and felt rather sinful. But we quickly got used to it and went once a week after that.”

Today, of course, most apartments are heated, and the price of a petit noir has gone up. As one young French student says, “We often meet at someone’s apartment. It’s not as much fun but a lot cheaper.”

In the end, both owners and clients will tell you that cafés aren’t about the coffee (which, frankly, can be terrible) but about the people. When asked why they like cafés, almost everyone says “conviviality”.

As the young student above summed it up: “You don’t go for the coffee, which you can make at home if you have a machine. You go for the people you know, the people you don’t know but who you’re used to seeing there, the new people you meet, and the owner you shake hands with.”

What you’re drinking—wine, coffee or fruit juice—is less important than whom you see and with whom you talk. Christine Bouillaud of the Old Navy, where you can kick up your heels and dance on two Thursday nights a month at the soirées frou-frou, smiles as she declares that, “At least half of our clients come just to chat. The Social Security should reimburse us for all the good we do for humanity. We’re psychologists for many of our customers. Since we know everyone, we keep packages for people, we check up on the old people. People come here for the soul of the person, not just to have a drink.”

Nadhia Godefroy of Les Phares says she and her staff know the names of a good 90 percent of their habitués. “Look at those two,” she says, pointing to two older ladies sitting on the terrace engaged in an animated conversation. “One takes the train from far away to come to a once-a-week meeting with her friend. They wouldn’t miss it for anything in the world.” She glances at the drawings that five-year-old and six-year-old children from a local school have given to the café for an exhibit. After Christmas, Godefroy and the staff invited the teacher and the entire class of 28 children who sat in a big circle drinking fruit juice, awed by the sight of their artwork on the walls of the neighborhood café. “They were very proud, and brought their mothers to see their work,” she said, adding she has plans for future events with the little ones, who will perhaps return as faithful grownup customers.

Truth be told, if I have such a passion for French cafés, and remain a faithful customer of Le Select, one reason may be that it was there, on a hot July evening many years ago, that I first made the acquaintance of the Frenchman I later married.

 

Originally published in the April 2009 issue of France Today; updated in January 2011