France: Ballad of the Sad Cafes

Even more than the British pub or the American corner drugstore, the French café has always provided a haven within which whole lives could unfold. It is a unique national institution that combines club, office and home-away-from-home. "It is where the Frenchman entertains guests, conducts business, writes his poetry and novels," says Roger Cazes, owner of the elegant Brasserie Lipp on Paris' Boulevard Saint Germain. "It is where, if he is famous, he goes to be seen, and if he is not, he goes to watch. It is where he discusses art, literature, philosophy and politics." It is also the place that many Frenchmen are beginning to shun. The sad news about this heady forum of Gallic civilization is that all over France its numbers and influence on national life are declining.

Green Hair. Some 200 cafés go out of business every year in the Paris area alone, and the toll is equally big in the provinces; altogether, about 30,000 cafés in France have closed in the past decade. Among the victims have been not only the back-street cafés with the zinc-topped bars but also such giants as the Select, which opened on the Champs Elysées back in the 1930s, and La Rotonde in Montparnasse, once a favorite hangout of Picasso and Modigliani. Last week one of the legendary cafés of Paris, the Café de Madrid in the theater district, reopened as a "drugstore" remodeled in American-modern décor instead of its former Second Empire. Where Poet Charles Baudelaire once came to sip absinthe—he also dyed his hair green as part of an absinthe cult—waiters in sailor suits now scurry about carrying banana splits amid the magazine stands and cosmetics counters.

Café owners complain that higher wages, taxes and social security payments bite increasingly deeply into their profits. But that complaint—shared by many other entrepreneurs—is dwarfed by the fact that today's Frenchmen seem to be rediscovering their homes. In the postwar era, many of them popped in at the neighborhood café several times a day largely because they lived in dismal quarters or had little else to do. Now they have television to watch, a refrigerator in which they can keep white wine, ice and mixers so that they can serve themselves and their friends more easily at home. Moreover, many Frenchmen now prefer to save their cash for more and better furniture, a shiny new automobile or le weekend in the country rather than give it to the local café owner.