Le Café Procope Today

Today Le Café Procope is more than restaurant: it is also a museum of 18th century French history. Conveniently located in the heart of the 6th arrondisement, it is well worth a visit on your next trip to Paris.

With a lunch “Menu Formule” starting at 24€, beverage included, and a team of sufficiently English-speaking waiters, the Procope makes for a stress-free, pleasant, and highly atmospheric stop for the Anglophone guest in Paris. Kids are welcome and the staff has no trouble with patrons wandering the restaurant to seek out its many treasures. In fact they encourage it.

So don’t be shy! While waiting for your meal or once fortified, go on a hunt for these revolutionary artifacts and see what else you can uncover besides:

 

Look for

Marat’s Bell

in the Salon (dining room)

that bears his name.

Once you’ve found it…

Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793) was a revolutionary journalist and propagandist who printed his paper, l’Ami du peuple (Friend of the People), from a shop just across the back alley from the Procope. When he was not soaking in the bath, where he often languished due to a debilitating skin disease, Marat was most likely found here, at the Café Procope. But his presses never stopped humming. To inform him when the type had been set and the press was ready to run, Marat’s workers would ring this bell, attached by a rope strung over the alley from his press to the Café.

Look for the desk of

Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire.

Hint:

you’ll find it on the way to Les Commodités. 

Once you’ve found it…

Voltaire (1694-1778) was a famous French Enlightenment philosopher. He wrote against the monarchy as a student and was forced to leave France or go to prison. He fled to England where he discovered a new form of government called a Constitutional Monarchy. There, he experienced the meaning of such citizen rights as: freedom of religion; freedom from censorship; and the right to a fair trial. Volatire returned to France a spokesman for these ideals. He often came to the Café Procope to write as well as to discuss Enlightenment ideas with other philosophers. He always used the same red marble-top desk. One day Voltaire was arguing with the radical revolutionary, Hébert, who kicked at the desk with the heel of his shoe. Their argument must have been quite heated as the blow broke off a piece of the marble at the front. Do you see the broken piece? Can you find the desk of another Enlightenment philosopher just here?

Look in the Procope’s

Salon Cour de Rohan

for a replica of the most important

French 18^th century document.

Hint: It’s bigger than you might think.

Once you’ve found it…

La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen is one of history’s first official charters to define basic human rights and civil liberties. Its 17 articles laid out a new vision for government in which the protection of individual human rights supplanted the authority of the king. Many of the reforms favored by the Enlightenment philosophers appeared in the Declaration, such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press, no taxation without representation, and the elimination of excessive punishments and arbitrary administration. La Déclaration was adopted by the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789, and became the preamble to the 1791 French Constitution.

Look for the chapeau (hat) of

Napoleon Bonaparte.

If you need help, ask the host or hostess:

“Où se trouve le chapeau de Napoléon?”

 

Once you’ve found it…

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) became the first Emperor of France after the French Revolution. Legend has it that when still a young man and soldier, he stopped into the Café Procope one afternoon and while waiting for his order, he removed his hat. Suddenly, he rushed out, no one remembers why, asking that the management hold onto his hat until he got back. He never came back and they still have the hat.

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:

By Sarah Towle, 2011, with permission from Le Café Procope.

Origins of the Parisian Café: Le Café Procope, Where History and Ideas Collide

In the waning years of the 16^th 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 18^th 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.