Le Procope, Paris
Le Procope is always a great hit with my visitors. It claims to be the oldest continuously-functioning café in the world.
So when Johnny and Diane made a recent visit from Oxford, I did not hesitate to take them there. And they were certainly not disappointed, especially by Napoleon’s hat.
Le Procope was founded by Procopio dei Coltelli in 1686. It became a famous center of the literary and philosophic life of the 18th and 19th centuries. It closed definitively in 1890. It then became a Chartier bouillon -type restaurant, reopening in 1957.
Here is a bit of the history.
In 1670, an Italian from Sicily, Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, arrived in France . He may have worked as a waiter for an Armenian café owner named Pascal, who owned a café on Rue de Tournon, at the Saint-Germain fair. He set up his own business two years later and, in 1685 or 1686, set up shop on Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, opposite the Comédie-Française.
A café for artists and intellectuals, it was frequented in the 18th century by Voltaire , Diderot and d’Alembert. An active centre during the French Revolution, it remained a meeting place for writers and intellectuals (Musset, Verlaine, Anatole France), political figures ( Gametta ) and all of Paris for a long time. The café attracted authors such as Voltaire and Rousseau, who were regulars there.
The “legend” of the café says that the idea for the Encyclopedia was born there from a conversation between d’Alembert and Diderot, who wrote some of the articles there, and that Benjamin Franklin prepared “the project of an alliance between Louis XVI and the new Republic” there. He designed elements of the future Constitution of the United States there (this is probably more legend than historical truth). When Franklin died in 1790, an impromptu funeral service was held in the café in front of his portrait.
The old Procope closed for good in 1890: “The Café Procope has disappeared. It had a lot of glory, but no money ,” according to Anatole France, writing under the pseudonym Gérôme in L’Univers illustré 16 .
Renovated and expanded in 1957, it became a modern restaurant (with no connection to the original café) operating under the name of the historic café. To pay tribute to the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, the Frères Blanc group, which has owned the café since 1987, launched the Procope des Lumières prize in 2011, designed to reward the author of a political, philosophical or societal essay, written in French and published in bookstores during the current year.