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Jack Blocker
History, Huron College, University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6G 1H3 Canada
(519) 438-7224, ext. 249 /Fax (519) 438-3938
 
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 17:30:48 +1000
From: "Mark Peel, H-Urban Co-Editor" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: H-NET Urban History Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: REVIEW: Tebeau on Hine,_The World of the Paris Cafe_
 
Posted by Mark Tebeau <[log in to unmask]>
 
Editor's note:  A response from the author follows.
 
 
Parisian Cafe Life
 
 Reviewed for H-Urban by Mark Tebeau, Harvard Medical School
([log in to unmask])
 
W. Scott Haine, _The World of the Paris Cafe:  Sociability among the French
Working Class, 1789 - 1914_ (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996) xii |+ 332 pp.  Tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, and
index.  $39.95 ea.
 
In_ The World of the Paris Cafe:  Sociability among the French Working
Class, 1789 - 1914_, W. Scott Haine examines how Parisian workers'
constructed cafes and cafe life according to the dynamics of family, work,
and politics.  Haine, who is the editor of the Social History of Alcohol
Review, convincingly demonstrates that cafes bridged the gap between public
and private, work and leisure, and individuals and their families.  To
Parisian workers facing the tumultuous political and economic world of
nineteenth-century France, cafes served as shelters, incubators, and stages
on which they could act.  Cafes fostered class consciousness and helped
Parisian workers to buttress themselves against the dislocating effects of
economic change.
 
Haine's research and argument are notable for their breadth.  He treats
cafe life with a wide array of source materials -- varying from police
records to court records to novels.  Haine's facility with cultural source
materials as well as quantitative records allows him to evoke a convincing
portrait of the men and women who frequented cafes, as well as a sense of
how they behaved once they had stepped up to the counters.  We learn, for
instance, from court records that most cafe goers were not just youths, or
bachelors, or debased individuals.  To the contrary, they resembled the
broader Parisian population of workers more generally, albeit skilled and
well-paid artisans predominated.
 
_The World of the Paris Cafe_ is at its best when Haine investigates and
interprets the changing rituals of cafe culture.  For instance, in Chapter
5 -- "The Social Construction of the Drinking Experience" -- Haine
describes the changing drinking patterns and preferences of Parisian
workers and considers their significance.  We learn that wine was the
staple of cafe drinking during the nineteenth century.  However, absinthe,
a more potent beverage became workers' second most preferred drink by 1900.
As this change occurred, the rituals of drinking became less connected to
collective festivity and more individualized.  By the century's end,
class-based politicization of drinking had been replaced by its
medicalization; for workers, as well as the middle-class, drunkeness had
become an individualized pathology.
 
Organized topically, _The World of the Paris Cafe_ also crosses multiple
scholarly terrains -- including gender, family, work, and politics.  For
the most part, each section underscores Haine's contention that cafes
served as a "transitional space" between the public world of early-modern
France and the essentially private worlds of the late-twentieth-century.
In the context of labor history, we learn that Parisian workers used cafes
to preserve pre-industrial connections between work and community and
(implicitly) countered economic coercion in the guise of rationalization
and mechanization.  During the nineteenth-century, Haine argues that
working-class women challenged the pieties of masculinized politics.  They
appropriated cafes as a sort of interstitial space between public and
private, that served to blur a rigid compartmentalization of proletariat
life in Paris.
 
Despite the breadth of his argument, Haine fails to explicitly connect his
narrative to the scholarly literature on consumption, which marks the books
most significant flaw.  This omission is surprising not just because
consumptive activities are so central to cafe culture but because recent
scholarship has shown that consumption has figured prominently across the
domains of politics, work, and family.  Without this explicit connection,
we are left without answers to several important questions implicitly
raised here.  For instance, how did Parisian cafe culture transform French
society more broadly?  And, by extension, what was the role of the working
class in producing French consumer culture?  Judging from _The World of the
Paris Cafe_, Parisian workers figured prominently in helping to create
twentieth-century French consumer society.  But, without a more detailed
discussion, the reader is left pondering the book's broadest significance.
 
This criticism aside, Haine has crafted a nuanced and evocative portrait of
the social life of the Parisian working-class.  Researchers and academic
tourists alike will come to see their next sojourn in a Paris cafe
differently. The World of the Paris Cafe will continue to provide
researchers into the French working-class, as well as those studying the
development of consumer culture, much to think about in the coming years.
 
__________________________
 
A respomse from Scott Haine:
 
The only point I would wish to make is that it is hard to cover all of the
ways in which the cafe intersected with social, economic, and political
life.  Consumption, however, is a decisive issue in cafe life.  It is
something I should have explored more extensively.  In particular, I wish I
had read Marc Martin's superb _Trois sicles de publicite en France_ (Paris:
Editions Odile Jacob, 1992) before I had finished my 19th century study.
It offers many important points at which cafe life played a vital role in
the history of French consumption during the nineteenth century.  However,
I will be able to incorporate, and explore, many of the great points he
makes about the role of the cafe in the 20th century in my next book, which
will cover the Parisian- area cafe during this fast waning century.  He
indicates, and I have found this too, that the cafe played a very complex
role in France's evolution into a modern consumer society.  I hope to have
this next book in print not too many years after the new millennium.
 
 
 
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