The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789-1914 (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 114) Paperback - 2008

"[Haine] invites the reader of The World of the Paris Caf to step up to the serving counter of a nineteenth-century Parisian caf to eavesdrop on the conversations and to observe the dynamics of this unique working-class establishment . . . These cafs 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 In The World of the Paris Caf, W. Scott Haine investigates what the working-class caf reveals about the formation of urban life in nineteenth-century France. Caf 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 caf 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. "As its subtitle indicates, this book is as much about the emergence and flowering of working-class sociability as it is about the cafs 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 caf as an institution with its own history . . . But Haine's greatest contribution is the impressive archival work . . . The World of the Paris Caf is a rich study to which dix-neuvimistes in their turn can raise a glass."-Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Nineteenth-Century French Studies