The fourteenth of July is France’s national holiday. In English-speaking countries, this holiday is usually called Bastille Day, marking the liberation of the Bastille prison in Paris on July 14, 1789, which is commonly seen as the opening event of the French Revolution. But this is not how most French people refer to it, and a few people might find it slightly offensive. Technically, the holiday is meant to commemorate the Fête de la Fédération, the nationwide celebration held on July 14, 1790, upon the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in France—a far loftier achievement than storming a prison. The French themselves usually refer to the fourteenth of July as la fête nationale (the national celebration) or even just le quatorze juillet (the fourteenth of July).
While much of the country shuts down for the day, many cafés do stay open, which seems only fitting given that the cafés of Paris played an important role in nourishing the ideas and ideologues of the French Revolution. Sometimes the café makes a dramatic appearance in the revolutionary narrative—witness Camille Desmoulins, one of the foremost agitators of revolution, leaping upon a table at the Café du Foy to incite insurrection among the Parisians two days before the Bastille fell. But their overall influence was more subtle, as throughout the eighteenth century, cafés gradually acquired a social function that went far beyond the provision of coffee, wine, and snacks.
We have already seen, in a previous chapter, the introduction of coffee to the Parisian elites by the Ottoman ambassador. But it was an Armenian entrepreneur named Pascal who first supplied the ordinary people of Paris with the new beverage, selling coffee at his lemonade stands and setting up a temporary Turkish coffeehouse at Saint-Germain’s annual fair. In 1672, he decided to open a more permanent version near the Pont Neuf, which he called a café (the French word for coffee). It attracted meager crowds, mostly those who had lived or traveled in the Orient and were already fond of coffee. He eventually went broke, closed the coffeehouse, and sailed for London, where coffee was more popular.
But his efforts were not forgotten, and some years later, another immigrant entrepreneur named François Procope, from Sicily, tried a different tack. After working at one of Pascal’s lemonade stands, he decided to open an eponymous coffeehouse in a more propitious location in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in 1686. Soon after, the Comédie-Française, the celebrated theater company, moved across the street, providing Café Procope with a readymade theater and literary crowd that cemented its reputation and profitability. Many years later, the café was transformed into a restaurant, and it remains a popular (if perhaps slightly overrated) tourist destination today.
Cafés flourished during the Enlightenment, offering a convivial space for writers, artists, and intellectuals of all sorts to work, exchange ideas, and enjoy the vibrant Parisian zeitgeist. Voltaire fed his impressive caffeine addiction at the Café Procope, reputedly drinking several dozen cups a day of coffee mixed with chocolate. Benjamin Franklin was also a patron during his charm offensive in Paris, trying to win French support for the American revolutionary cause. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot sparred at the chessboard in the Café Maugis, although Diderot usually labored over his Encyclopédie at the Café de la Régence (the Encyclopédie eventually tried to capture the rousing atmosphere of cafés by describing them as “manufactories of mind, whether good or bad”). By the 1780s, there were hundreds of cafés in Paris. Some of the most popular, such as the Café du Foy and Café de la Régence, were tucked into the arcades of the Palais-Royal, a den of gambling, prostitution, and febrile political discourse. Originally intended as mere coffeehouses, the cafés began serving wine and a bit of food as well, as they do today.
The men who would lead France to revolution were great patrons of the cafés. Maximilien Robespierre preferred the Café de la Régence, when he wasn’t devouring oranges at Café Procope; Danton was fond of the Café Parnasse, so much so that he eventually fell in love with and married the café owner’s daughter, Antoinette-Gabrielle Charpentier. The cafés provided a space for political debate and agitation, for sharing the latest news and rumors, and for crafting plots and alliances. Their importance only increased as political turmoil grew ever more fervid.
By 1789, financial crisis and food scarcity had generated unprecedented levels of anger and resentment among the French people, particularly in the traditionally unruly environs of Paris. King Louis XVI decided to convene, for the first time since 1614, the Estates General, a meeting of representatives of the traditional three estates (the clergy, the nobility, and the common people). He hoped this would allow him to enact a number of measures to stabilize the country’s finances, but the members of the Third Estate in particular developed overoptimistic expectations about potential reforms, hoping that their concerns would finally be addressed. As in previous eras, the vast majority of French people were members of the Third Estate, but now the bourgeoisie was the financial motor of France, and they were increasingly resentful of their lack of political and social power.1 The French population was one of the most heavily and unequally taxed in Europe. The clergy and nobility were still exempted from most taxes, while the Third Estate faced a seemingly endless variety of them—not just the personal taxes levied on each family, but the salt tax, tithes to the church, customs duties, and one-off taxes to pay down the huge national debt. Tax collectors were often corrupt, and the entire system was ridiculously inefficient. Popular grievance simmered ever closer to the boiling point.
Fueled by the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers, the members of the Third Estate who attended the Estates General in May 1789 were determined to achieve fundamental change. The situation was well summed up by Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, a clergyman and influential political activist: “What is the third estate? Everything. What was it until now in the political sphere? Nothing. What does it want? To become something.”2 In June 1789, the representatives of the Third Estate declared themselves to be a National Assembly, the true voice of the nation, and vowed to write a new constitution that would govern the affairs of France.
King Louis eventually acquiesced to the creation of the Assembly, but he also positioned several thousand troops around Paris, heightening tensions in the capital. The catalyst for revolt was the king’s firing of the popular finance minister on July 11, which appeared to herald a crackdown on the Assembly and brought angry Parisians into the streets. Desmoulins’s rabble-rousing speech at the Café du Foy on July 12 helped transform the simmering unrest into actual riots, and the barricades were raised. As the mob took control of Paris, they burned down a primary target of popular anger: the barrières, or toll booths, that surrounded the city and imposed a toll on all the foods and wines that entered the capital.3 Rebellious militias also seized thousands of guns from the Hôtel des Invalides, and this may have provided the actual motivation for storming the Bastille, which was not only a symbol of royal despotism but a storage space for gunpowder. It was captured and its governor executed, his head paraded on a spike through the streets. The citizens of the capital prepared for a royal onslaught, but faced with this turmoil, the king withdrew his troops. The Marquis de Lafayette, the hero of the American Revolution now supporting the French revolutionary cause, took command of a new “Bourgeois Militia,” soon renamed the National Guard, which seized responsibility for law and order in Paris away from the royal guards. (Lafayette later gave the original key to the Bastille to George Washington, and it remains on display at Mount Vernon.)
Camille Desmoulins incites the crowd to revolution at the Café du Foy on July 12, 1789, with the legendary appeal, “Aux armes, citoyens!” (“To arms, citizens!”). A statue of Desmoulins leaping upon his café chair was raised in the spot on the centenary of the revolution but removed and melted down by the Vichy regime in 1942. From the French Revolution Digital Archive, a collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Unattributed. Camillus Desmoulins predigt Aufruhr in dem Palais Royal: den 12 Jul. 1789, produced in Germany between 1794 and 1820.
We tend to think of the French Revolution as a unitary event, but it was really a series of political uproars that extended over many years. In this earliest phase, those advocating the transformation of France into a constitutional monarchy won out, while the more radical voices clamoring for a republic were forced to wait a few more years. In August 1789, the National Assembly formally abolished all feudal rights and structures, which were seen as the underlying basis for social inequalities, and announced the Declaration of the Rights of Man, an astounding manifestation of liberal Enlightenment ideals.
The cafés continued to house political intrigue in the following years, even as some of their most ardent patrons went to the guillotine: Desmoulins and Danton were consigned to death in April 1794 by Robespierre, who followed himself a few months later. The French politician Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy noted that even as the cafés became more moderate in the postrevolutionary era, “one does not govern against the cafés. The revolution took place because they were for the revolution; Napoleon reigned because they were for glory.” Small wonder he defined them as “one of the branches of legislative power in the free nations.”4
The revolution also generated a sea change in the capital’s restaurants. With the fall of the Bastille and the ugly public mood surrounding it, many wealthy nobles decided (probably correctly) that emigration might be a safe course of action. As they fled, they left behind their household staff, including their chefs, many of whom were talented and ingenious cooks. A number of these unemployed chefs decided to open their own restaurants, in which anybody with sufficient funds could dine in style.
Restaurants had existed before the revolution, but they were a fairly new invention and suffered from competition with the various food guilds that had existed since the Middle Ages. Every type of food business had its guild, and each guild had its privileges. It was not possible, for example, to go to a single purveyor for a wide range of meat. Traiteurs served cooked meat dishes and stews, while rôtisseurs sold roasted meat, and charcutiers served cured pork products like ham, rillettes, and sausages (for raw meat, a trip to the butcher or poulterer was required). Bar owners and wine sellers could sell drinks but they were not allowed to sell food. Prior to the revolution, restaurants—from the French restaurer, “to restore”—were limited to selling restorative bouillons, which were technically distinct from the meaty stews that only traiteurs could serve. But as French cuisine developed, the medieval rules imposing a neat division of food types became more and more difficult to enforce. Already, in the decade prior to the revolution, restaurants were pushing the boundaries of the guild rules and offering full menus of elaborate dishes. Instead of the common table available at traiteurs and taverns, they offered small private tables, where individuals and small groups were served by elegant waiters.
Restaurants were still limited in number until 1791, when the Assembly voted to abolish the guilds and their sales privileges. Restaurants could now legitimately sell anything, and this led to a rapid expansion in their numbers and quality. It was a great advance for the capital’s dining scene, although not everyone immediately appreciated the restaurant concept. A contemporary writer, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, complained about the idea of a menu with fixed prices that you received upon entering: unlike the more honest traiteur, who displayed the food and price at the same time, restaurants demanded high prices without any view of the food on offer. When the plates did arrive, the meals were always very small, like a “sample of future meals to come.”5
On the plus side, the growth of restaurants enabled local specialties from various regions to be discovered by Parisians. Les Frères Provençaux, whose chefs originated from Marseille, offered a cuisine with a strong Provençal influence and is credited with popularizing tomatoes in Paris (although another legend claims that tomatoes came to Paris alongside “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem, when pro-revolutionary troops from Marseille came to Paris in 1792).
Restaurants very quickly became a landmark feature of Paris and helped define its identity. Less political than the cafés, they served all segments of society: rich and poor, manual workers and students, lawyers and artists, everyone could find a restaurant adapted to their needs. In 1801, shortly after restaurants invaded Paris, Joseph Berchoux coined the term gastronomie. Writers such as Grimod de la Reynière and Brillat-Savarin—who advised not on how you should cook but on what food you should enjoy—became popular. The cuisine of the ancien régime, like so many other elements of royalist rule, had been delegitimized by revolution, and this created space for the nation’s finest chefs and restaurateurs to steer classical French cuisine in new directions.
Most of the restaurants and cafés of the revolutionary period have disappeared from Paris. Yet if you visit a café anywhere in France on July 14, you are likely to get a sense of what made them so beloved and influential those many years ago. The sense of camaraderie, wit, and enjoyment of life’s pleasures that so infused the cafés from their earliest days has survived intact, and they are as good a place as any to celebrate the birth of modern France.