|
Article Excerpt
The 18th-century Parisian tavern was public space that lay beyond the private spheres of home, family, or corporate identity. Taverns, like markets or roads, were without inherent order, so they required the ordering of public authority. For much of the old regime, taverns illustrate the public sphere in its subjection to public control. A second public sphere, found in the coffeehouses of Britain and the cafes of France, was a place of intellectual and social exchange that gradually challenged the royal monopoly on public issues. Yet taverns demonstrated the evolution of a third public sphere from a space monopolized by royal control to one in which the populace constituted a public with its own discursive practices and norms. In their increasingly autonomous use of taverns, the people of Paris were developing a model of behavior that extended to the political life of the city during the French Revolution.
**********
This is a paper about taverns and public spaces. I want to emphasize the plurals in that statement, for in the hundred years before the French Revolution, public drinking places took on many different forms and became different kinds of public spaces. (1) The public drinking place, once merely a wine shop on every corner, suddenly multiplied its forms, functions, and offerings in the late 17th century. New kinds of drink, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, became available and, somewhat more slowly, were assimilated as commodities. The introduction of imported coffee, tea, and cocoa coincided in the second half of the 17th century with a growing demand for distilled alcohol, principally in the form of brandy and eau-de-vie. With a range of new drinks came a range of new shops to sell them and a growing differentiation among the customers who drank in them. Coffee, and the cafes in which it was drunk, is the most famous example of this new trend, but certainly not the only one. The introduction of coffee in the middle of the 17th century led to the successful foundation of the cafe as a drinking place late in the century. (2) These new establishments were awkwardly integrated into an equally new guild, that of limonadiers, that also enjoyed the privilege of selling a range of spirits and exotic wines. Spirits were a more familiar decoction than coffee, but until the 17th century had been sold by apothecaries and consumed mostly as a medicine. (3) Thus the new guild of limonadiers at the end of the century was commercializing several fundamentally new kinds of drink and creating new establishments in which to meet and drink. At roughly the same time, wine merchants were setting up new taverns in the outskirts of Paris, beyond the reach of the city's sales tax, to sell wine at a discount. These guinguettes, as they were known, were also selling the dance floor and larger crowds that were possible with the extra space available outside the city. New forms of drinking establishments were proliferating in the 18th century, then, some based on new drinks, others on new locations, transforming the role of the public place in urban society.
The significance of these new establishments lay partly in their being different from the traditional tavern or cabaret. Taverns in Paris had long ago become an integral part of the life of the city's inhabitants, offering wine to take out but, far more important, space in which to consume it. Utilitarian in decor, providing little more than tables and chairs in one or two rooms, they served the whole range of the population but were principally neighborhood centers. Although they could be rowdy and disreputable, abundant evidence in the archives of the Parisian police paints a rather different picture. The fights and altercations in taverns, which came to the police's attention on a regular basis, were chiefly the result of shopkeepers and artisans contesting and assessing each other's honor and reputation. (4) Despite belonging to the level of society that worked with its hands and lived in a simple and sometimes precarious manner, these artisans vigorously defended their reputations for having sound credit, producing honest work, and being sober husbands. Their complaints and testimony to the police also depicted their frequent recourse to taverns for...
|
