The café and the city

I don’t think I’m Ricardo Labeaume, but I loved the film Delicious. It’s the story of a cook, Pierre Manceron, who, at the dawn of the French Revolution, has just been fired by a detestable aristocrat, who has a perfect face to test the new invention of a certain doctor Guillotine. I’ll let you guess the usefulness of this…

An excellent French film with that kind of slowness that we love. The particularity of the work is that it is referred to as being the story of the creation of the first restaurant, at least in France, which would otherwise be inaccurate.

Light years away from this narrative are the Starbucks brands, according to which cafes are “spaces for meeting and socializing away from work and home, like an extension of the stoop”.

A bit of a false poet, but not totally wrong.

I have already told you about a magnificent book that I recommend to everyone, but particularly to all politicians and municipal officials: Metropolis: a story of the greatest human invention, written by Ben Wilson, a British historian.

To summarize, it is basically the history of cities and urbanity, the invention in fact of civilization, according to the author. Once again, masterful!

And what does coffee have to do with the story?

For the author, first of all, the ingredient: “Coffee flows through the veins of the city of modern times. » And then, the places, the cafés: components fueling a “social alchemy in the cities”. I had never seen him like that…

It explains the extraordinary impact of the creation of these shops, coffee houses, in Western Europe, from the city of London, and their place in the development of important institutions in this city.

The substance, coffee, was first cultivated in Ethiopia and sold from the 15th century^e century. The first coffee houses appeared around 1550 in Constantinople, where they became meeting places away from mosques and homes, and where this addiction to caffeine that we still experience today developed.

In 1651, a London merchant brought home the addictive beans and the machine to valorize them, and hit a home run by opening his first café, in 1654.

A few years later, there were 80 of these in the city and the concept was naturally exported. Peaking, for example, in Paris where, in the 1880s, 40,000 cafes served customers.

The substance created the place, and the place became an incredible node of socialization.

First of all, a democratic forum where individuals from all social classes exchanged gossip and news, rumors and truths. An essential place of knowledge, unlike the taverns of the time where the basic maintenance and decency did not allow the exchange of relevant information, which activity even worried the rulers, the cafes being for them centers of sedition and of republicanism!

And otherwise feared by others, as evidenced by this “Women’s Petition against Coffee” launched in the United Kingdom in the mid-17th century.^e century: “Excessive consumption of the latest fashionable, abominable and barbaric drink, called coffee […] emasculates our husbands and paralyzes our most beautiful males, who become as impotent as old age, as infertile as are these desert lands from which, it is said, the fatal fruit comes. »

But they were so popular that it was in one of these cafes, Jonathan’s Coffee-House, that the first stock exchange in what became the City was created.

As the United Kingdom became a world power, financial capitalism needed places where humans could negotiate contracts on site. Cafés were therefore transformed into public markets where “bank securities, public loans or shares of gigantic companies” were exchanged.

One of these cafés, called Edward Lloyd’s, brought together the maritime trade fauna, and Edward created what became the insurance giant that we know today, 335 years later: Lloyd’s of London.

As science became a public affair with the creation of the Royal Society of London, its followers did not really enjoy crowd success in public institutions, so they began to frequent cafes where they created passionate audiences. We even gave mathematics lessons at the Café de la Marine! Obviously, the artists performed in different specialized cafés, depending on the cultural expression.

For the author, the existence of cafés must be considered as one of the main components that have shaped cities, because of the “transformative effects they have had on one of the constituent elements of the modern city: the sociability”.

Moreover, even today, the opening of cafes hipster in certain not-so-popular neighborhoods of a city is a harbinger of gentrification in the making. In the 2010s, in Harlem, brokers even began to discreetly invest in cafes to artificially support the expected values ​​of the building.

If, in South Korea, the arrival of Starbucks allowed young women to escape the harshness of the family home to meet people, in Tehran, cafes are also essential for interacting while sheltering from tyranny , even if the law requires these establishments to install surveillance cameras guaranteeing “civic control” of customers…

But in 2012, the Iranian “morality police” closed 87 of these establishments on the grounds that they “did not observe Islamic values”…

Misery !

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