Origins of the Parisian Café: Le Café Procope, Where History and Ideas Collide
Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 5:58PM Tweet 
In the waning years of the 16th century, German physician and botanist, Leonard Rauwolf, returned from a long journey to the East with a strange little seed from which could be brewed a delicious hot beverage, black as ink, that made the head “curiously animated”.
He called his treasure coffee Arabica due to its already widespread use throughout the Arab world.
From the Middle East, the bean traveled to Turkey and Northern Africa from whence it ventured to Venice, then a vibrant mercantile crossroads and Europe’s leading port.
Initially, the pleasurable brew was reserved only for Italy’s very wealthy. But once Pope Clement VIII gave coffee his blessing, thereby sanctioning its use amongst Christians the world over, consumption of the beverage became commonplace, and the first coffeehouses outside the Ottoman Empire began to appear, in Venice in 1645.
Coffee Arabica made to France, to the court of King Louis XIV, in the 1650’s. But it wasn’t until the 1669-70 visit of the Ambassador to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV, who came bearing gifts of the finest quality beans, that coffee drinking became all the rage in Paris.
In 1686, the savvy Italian immigrant, Procopio Cutò, opened the doors of one of Paris’ first coffeehouses: Le Café Procope. Then, it was a place for fashionable men of means to meet and sip coffee and other hot beverages from porcelain cups served by waiters dressed in Turkish garb.
Three years later, however, in 1689, the Comédie Française raised its curtain for the first time at its original location just across the street from the Café Procope. From that point, the Procope became the theatre’s ad hoc nexus, where patrons gathered before, during and after performances of Moliere, Racine, Corneille and other famous French playwrights. Now the coffee house of the French intelligentsia and literati, the Procope continued to attract notables in the world of arts, politics, and literature for the next 200 years.
In the early 18th century, the Procope became home to the French Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and others. It was without question the birthplace of the world’s first catalog of all human knowledge, the Encyclopédie.
Following in the footsteps of Les Lumières, the most radical spokesmen of the French Revolution, such men as Camille Desmoulins, George Danton, Maximillien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat, adopted the Procope as their favorite watering hole. Indeed it can be said that the very Revolution that would eventually rock the entire world was sparked right there, at the Café Procope.
Time Traveler Tours recommends Le Café Procope as the place for a thematic lunch in their interactive StoryApp itinerary to the French Revolution: Beware Mme la Guillotine, A Revolutionary Tour of Paris.
Learn more about this unique approach to educational tourism at this website. Put Paris in the palm of your hand with Time Traveler Tours mobile iTineraries. Discover history with those who made it!
Le Procope
13, rue de l’Ancienne Comédie
Paris, 6ème
01-4046-7900
Images:
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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