The Paris Café as a Europeanising Space

Abstract

In his address on ‘The Idea of Europe’, cultural critic George Steiner remarks on the power of Pierre Nora's notion of realms of memory. He then proceeds to invoke a handful of criteria of Europe. First among these is the cafe: Europe is made up of coffee houses, of cafes . These extend from Pessoa's favourite coffee houses in Lisbon to the Odessa cafes haunted by Isaac Babel's gangsters. They stretch from the Copenhagen cafes which Kierkegaard passed on his concentrated walks to the counters of Palermo. No early or defining cafes in Moscow which is already a suburb of Asia. Very few in England after a brief fashion in the eighteenth century. None in North America outside the gallican outpost of New Orleans. Draw the coffee-house map and you have one of the essential markers of the ‘idea of Europe’. Stimulating as Steiner's observation is, this argument about the idea of Europe is problematic. If he allows that the definition of Europe's frontiers is tricky and debatable, by the same token there is a suggestion that there is a settled core of Europe. It is in this sense that his reference to Nora's Les lieux de memoire is instructive, since this citation of the cafe fits into a consensual, settled and canonical idea of Europe in which internal conflict and contradiction are minimised. There is of course much in the history of the Paris cafe in this period which would not trouble this understanding of a European space: Rosemary recreation for Parisians, and to the masses of Parisian spectators who filled the city's cafes – like their co-Europeans across the continent – to watch the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. Without dismissing the significance of such phenomena in post-war European social history, perhaps the Parisian cafe can be productively examined as a site of contestation of Europe, or as a place in which events unfolded which responded to European actuality, and shaped it in turn. An analysis of the Parisian cafe at this time as a site of disruption and insurrection in relation to Europe, is not to claim that this is what most typified this venerable institution.