Scott and others: maybe this is the moment to retell my little apercu in a Paris bookstore about 10 years ago. It was a technical bookstore with a strong architectural section, and I came across a book on "leisure apparatus" (I think the title was indeed something like "Appareils de loisirs") in France. It was a fascinating book with a very wide reach -- architectural and schematic drawings for everything from canoes to movie theatres. But there was no design for a cafe. Too mundane and thus invisible to be seen as something designed for leisure? Or is time in the cafe defined as something other than leisure?... One other little comment on the "consumption" discussion, without having yet read Scott's book. One could read much of the sociological literature on U.S. taverns without realizing that the main item of consumption is psychoactive. There's hardly anything in Sherri Cavan's wonderful Liquor License (1967), for instance, that would indicate that the main beverage is not lemonade. Robin >>> "j.s. blocker" <[log in to unmask]> 04/16/98 02:09pm >>> ******************************************* 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. Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact [log in to unmask]