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The World of the Paris Cafe: Sociability Among the French Working Class, 1789-1914. - book reviews
Journal of Social History, Winter, 1997 by Steven M. Beaudoin
"I go to the cafe to create my relationships," the defiant murder suspect Sebastien Billoir avowed during an 1876 pretrial investigation. (p. 166) According to W. Scott Haine, however, workers did much more than meet and make friends in nineteenth-century Parisian cafes. Using sources as varied as novels, newspapers, court dossiers, and marriage and bankruptcy records, Haine paints a portrait of cafes as integral venues of working-class existence. In the process, he also serves up a noteworthy contribution to our understanding of cafe sociability and its role in the development and manifestation of class consciousness among Parisian workers.
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Because these establishments occupied such a central place in working-class life, Haine examines a wide range of topics, from gender relations to publicans to politics. Consequently, his work reads like a book of essays, with individual chapters devoted to single subjects spanning the entire century: i.e. "Publicans: From Shopkeepers to Social Entrepreneurs," and "Work and the Cafe: Strategies of Sociability." Nevertheless, in his conclusion Haine does an admirable job of tying together as many strands as possible in his depiction of cafes as shelters, incubators, and stages. As shelters, cafes offered workers a space where they could negotiate the drastic dislocations that accompanied revolution, migration, and industrialization. Workers compensated for political repression, poor housing, and diminished control over work by using cafes as meeting rooms, supplemental housing, and sites for fraternization during work hours. As meeting sites, cafes served as incubators of working-class mobilization, offering venues where workers could devise tactics for coping with employers, the police, and the vagaries of everyday life. Finally, cafes also represented a principal stage where workers acted out these tactics, from open rebellion during the Commune to the practiced insults that card habitues hurled at ever-watchful police agents. In essence, then, cafe sociability offered an outlet for a growing proletarian public sphere, particularly as authorities clamped down on more traditional sites of independent working-class culture like the street and workshop.
By comprising this essential "third place," Haine argues, cafes and cafe sociability must figure into any interpretation of Paris' large and varied proletariat. The city's numerous watering holes offered "an informal institution that bridged the distance between public and private life, leisure and work, [and] the individual and the family." (p. 236) As a result, cafe sociability occupied a central position in the development of a working-class culture that moved and shifted with the transformations workers experienced in all facets of life. This culture, according to Haine, offers a striking example of what Alain Cottereau labeled the "small-scale informal collective practices" that characterized the French working class during the nineteenth century. Cafe sociability provided the acculturating arena that contributed to periodic moments of revolutionary activity despite little formal organization. In short, "working-class cafe culture ... maintain[ed] its potential for turning small-scale resistance into revolution." (p. 226)
Haine is at his most fascinating when he describes the cafe etiquette that permitted these establishments to perform their many functions. Using court testimony and pretrial examinations to discern what habitues and publicans considered proper behavior in cafes, he argues that cafe sociability rested firmly on the accepted values of intimacy, tolerance, and fraternity. Intimacy, for example, allowed patrons a sense of "privacy in public," (p. 33) and permitted the rise of a "complementarity of family and cafe life." (p. 45) Couples could even argue in cafes with the assurance that others would not get involved unless the dispute became violent. This reluctance to interrupt reflected the tolerance inherent in cafe sociability: "the principle that each person or group should be as tolerant as possible of the shoves, slights, and other minor irritations that were an inevitable part of interacting within an enclosed space." (p. 178) For Haine, this tolerance, and the fraternity it inspired, formed the "necessary building blocks for any public sphere and for the emergence of a class consciousness," that defies easy categorization as either revolutionary or reformist. (p. 237)
The book is not without its weaknesses, however. For example, Haine offers us a tantalizingly brief discussion of cafe sociability as a synthesis of Foucaultian social control and Habermasian public sphere, albeit proletarian. Unfortunately, this discussion occupies only the last few pages of the conclusion and an appendix on historiography and methodology. Haine would have made a much stronger contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century France with a more detailed consideration of these issues. The book's organization, particularly the absence of an introduction, contributes to this problem. The closest thing to an overarching argument the reader finds in the preface is the vague claim that cafe sociability offers "a privileged space within which to view" workers' many identities. Haine then provides a chapter by chapter synopsis, but he develops more comprehensive arguments only in the conclusion. A thorough introduction that included at least the beginnings of a more detailed theoretical discussion to be carried through the rest of the book would have been a great improvement.
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