Parisians may protest — I don’t care — but Rome has better coffee.
The downside (or upside, depending on your temperament) of Italian cafés? They’re noisy, and you really can’t sit there for hours. With a laptop? God forbid. You’ll be banished.
In an Italian café, Hemingway wouldn’t have written a single page. A chapter? Fuhgeddaboudit.
But here at Café de Flore, where I’m now nursing my espresso, he finished several. Other intellectual heavyweights haunted these same marble tables: Albert Camus, Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille (if you haven’t read him, think eroticism and death, and you’ll catch the flavor). Sartre hung out here too, despite the whole “Hell is other people” thing.
Their ghosts, along with Pablo — Picasso, obviously — probably still hover over the baristas. Maybe that’s why this espresso costs half a kidney. Or maybe it’s just Paris. Either way, Café de Flore is one of the city’s oldest coffeehouses, open since the 1880s. Its name nods to Flora, the Roman goddess whose stone likeness greets you just outside.
Speaking of outside: it’s roguishly hot. July in Paris. I don’t know what I was thinking…
Actually, I do. I was thinking: revolution.
This month marks the storming of the Bastille, sure. But also the independence of the U.S., Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia… The world seems to ignite in July.
Voilà! July, revolution… and…
Coffee.
It may seem like an odd association, but coffeehouses across Europe and the Americas were once radical spaces. “Hotbeds of mad agitation,” as contemporaries called them, where plans were whispered, philosophies refined, and monarchies — quite literally — overthrown.
The storming of the Bastille? The call to arms began at Café de Foy.
“Un autre café crème, s'il vous plaît.”
The waiter gave me a nod and a smile of acknowledgment, as if whatever I was brooding about needed more fuel to reach a conclusion.
First coffee. Then the Bastille.
This wasn’t just a Parisian thing. Even before the Bastille, coffeehouses were seen as incubators of rebellion.
Apparently, King Charles II tried to ban all London coffeehouses in 1675. His ban lasted… eleven days. The public outcry was too strong.
Coffee prevailed.
Rebellion percolated.
Almost a century later, across the Atlantic, in Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern — nicknamed the “Headquarters of the Revolution” — the Sons of Liberty plotted their next act over hot brews and a bit of rum punch.
After the Boston Tea Party, coffee practically became America’s patriotic drink. Tea was for tyrants — coffee for liberty.
While waiting for my espresso with hot milk, I felt like I wouldn’t mind having some punch too — for courage — and then asking the posh couple frozen by the glow of their little rectangles sitting next to me:
“Do we need to brew another revolution?”
I bet they’d look at me like I’d lost it.
But honestly?
We tend to think of revolutions as Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People — barricades, rifles, red flags. But there are also quiet ones — behind the eyes.
Some pre- and post-caffeinated philosophers have argued that those may be more enduring: the revolutions we execute through our daily choices and through what we support with our time, attention, and energy.
Can the old coffeehouse spirit be revived? Can it beat the complacency of curated screens?
I glance at the couple again, then at the few other folks around me.
Rum, please.
Definitely rum.
From page to thread — a story you can wear
