Café Procope

Café Procope is a café-restaurant on the rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie in Paris's 6th arrondissement, and one of the city's oldest establishments of its kind. It became famous as a meeting place for writers, philosophers and revolutionaries in the eighteenth century.

History

The café is traditionally credited to Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, a Sicilian who also used the names Procopio Cutò and François Procope. He had earlier worked at a stall on the rue de Tournon run by an Armenian, Pascal, which sold lemonade and coffee. Procopio moved the business to the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area, where the dim interior was once described as a cavern. He refitted it with crystal chandeliers, wall mirrors and marble tables, serving coffee and sorbet to fashionable gentlemen.

The arrival of the Comédie-Française across the street in 1689 brought actors, playwrights and theatregoers. Over time the café became Paris's first major literary café, frequented by Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, d'Alembert and Benjamin Franklin. During the Revolution the Cordeliers club met there, and the Phrygian cap was first shown at its tables. Writers and republican politicians continued to gather in the nineteenth century, but the original café closed in 1872.

Culture

The Procope is a classic example of the café as a place of conversation, where debate and politics mattered as much as the drink. Its reputation rests more on this intellectual memory than on its food, and visitors often link it with the Enlightenment and the origins of public debate in Paris. Today it operates as a traditional French restaurant and keeps an eighteenth-century-style interior, refurbished in 1988–89. It remains a standard stop for those tracing the literary history of the Latin Quarter.

Trivia