The World of the Paris Café
Subtitle: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789-1914 (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science)
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: January 1, 1996
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 368
ISBN-13: 9780801851049
Subjects: Cultural studies; Social History; Social classes; 20th century; c 1700 to c 1800; c 1800 to c 1900; History - General History; France - History; Social aspects; History: World; France; Anthropology - Cultural; Europe - France; History / Europe / General; Bars (Drinking establishments); 19th century; History; Paris; Social interaction
First sentence: The nineteenth-century cafes of Paris were much more than places to get drink and food.
Description: In The World of the Paris Cafe, W. Scott Haine investigates what the working-class cafe reveals about the formation of urban life in nineteenth-century France. Cafe society was not the product of a small elite of intellectuals and artists, he argues, but was instead the creation of a diverse and changing working population.

Making unprecedented use of primary sources - from marriage contracts to police and bankruptcy records - Haine investigates the cafe in relation to work, family life, leisure, gender roles, and political activity. This rich and provocative study offers a bold reinterpretation of the social history of the working men and women of Paris.