The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789-1914
by: W. Scott Haine

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with sunning to spine, 325 pages, b&w illustrations. In The World of the Paris Café, W. Scott Haine investigates what the working-class café reveals about the formation of urban life in nineteenth-century France. Café 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 café 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. Clean copy.