Taverns in the Public Sphere in 18th-Century Paris

Abstract

The 18th-century Parisian tavern was public space that lay beyond the private spheres of home, family, or corporate identity. Taverns, like markets or roads, were without inherent order, so they required the ordering of public authority. For much of the old regime, taverns illustrate the public sphere in its subjection to public control. A second public sphere, found in the coffeehouses of Britain and the cafés of France, was a place of intellectual and social exchange that gradually challenged the royal monopoly on public issues. Yet taverns demonstrated the evolution of a third public sphere from a space monopolized by royal control to one in which the populace constituted a public with its own discursive practices and norms. In their increasingly autonomous use of taverns, the people of Paris were developing a model of behavior that extended to the political life of the city during the French Revolution.