In The World of the Paris Café , W. Scott Haine investigates what the working-class café reveals about the formation of urban life in nineteenth-century France. Café society was not the product of a small elite of intellectuals and artists, he argues, but was instead the creation of a diverse and changing working population. Making unprecedented use of primary sources―from marriage contracts to police and bankruptcy records―Haine investigates the café in relation to work, family life, leisure, gender roles, and political activity. This rich and provocative study offers a bold reinterpretation of the social history of the working men and women of Paris. In the mid-1880s, W. Scott Haine writes, more than 42,000 cafés may have been operating in the city of Paris. (In comparison, Seattle, America's stereotypical coffee capital, has only about 60.) Unlike the members of today's drink-on-the-run coffee culture, 19th-century Parisians lingered in the café, and members of the working class created a fertile and dynamic space that combined elements of the 18th-century wine shop and the upper-class café and ultimately played, according to Haine, a pivotal role in the formulation and expression of their class identity. The World of the Paris Café traces the perceptions of the café; delineates its laws and regulations; explores café etiquette, the role of the café owner, gender relations within the café, and the pivotal contribution of café sociability to the definition of familial, professional, and political relations. Haine, a faculty member at Holy Names College in California, firmly rejects the "misérabiliste" label so often attached to 19th-century Parisian workers, advocating instead for the great creativity they mustered to cope with poverty and proletarianization. He ably shows how, by bringing together the voices of thousands of customers through common rituals, reading matter, and conversations, the café fostered a true climate of opinion and made possible the growth of a proletarian public sphere. His articulately written account, based largely on Parisian judicial and civil records and newspaper accounts of café activity, balances academic rigor with an edge of humor, exploring what he terms both the "horrible and the humorous" elements of café culture. --Bertina Loeffler [Haine] invites the reader of The World of the Paris Café to step up to the serving counter of a nineteenth-century Parisian café to eavesdrop on the conversations and to observe the dynamics of this unique working-class establishment . . . These cafés were far more than places to eat and drink to the great majority of working-class Parisians, who also frequented such establishments seeking shelter from authorities, exchanging and developing and sometimes enacting their ideas. ―Jack B. Ridley, History: Review of New Books As its subtitle indicates, this book is as much about the emergence and flowering of working-class sociability as it is about the cafés that fostered this sociability, as much about milieu as it is about lieu . . . This study is both wide-ranging and well researched . . . At once serious and lively. ―Elizabeth Ezra, Labour History Review Haine takes the café as an institution with its own history . . . But Haine's greatest contribution is the impressive archival work . . . The World of the Paris Café is a rich study to which dix-neuviémistes in their turn can raise a glass. ―Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Nineteenth-Century French Studies Haine investigates a topic which is crucial in its own right and which ties together many of the central issues which historians have been debating in recent years. He uses neighborhood cafés as a privileged position from which to observe not only drinking and masculine play but also class formation, political mobilization, prostitution, job hunting, and many other activities that were important components of popular culture. He makes noteworthy contributions to many of the debates because he can bring so much new information and so many new perspectives to bear. ―Lenard Berlanstein, University of Virginia Haine investigates a topic which is crucial in its own right and which ties together many of the central issues which historians have been debating in recent years. He uses neighborhood cafés as a privileged position from which to observe not only drinking and masculine play but also class formation, political mobilization, prostitution, job hunting, and many other activities that were important components of popular culture. He makes noteworthy contributions to many of the debates because he can bring so much new information and so many new perspectives to bear. -- Lenard Berlanstein In The World of the Paris Cafe, W. Scott Haine investigates what the working-class cafe reveals about the formation of urban life in nineteenth-century France. Cafe society was not the product of a small elite of intellectuals and artists, he argues, but was instead the creation of