Lisa Pasold hosted a fantastic webinar, "The Early Days of the Paris Café". Click here to watch it (61 min. + Q&A)
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READINGSL'Assommoir by Emile Zola, along with selections from The Belly of Paris (part of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series)
From the 17th century to today, cafés have been an irreplaceable feature of life in the capital. Some of the earliest Parisian café patrons were traders at the great St-Germain fairs, and foreigners who frequented the Turkish-style coffeehouses around the St-Michel bridge. With the opening of cafés like the Procope, near the Comédie-Française in the 1680s, the café became fashionable—a place to see and be seen for the minor aristocracy and later the flâneur and dandy. Paris, said historian Jules Michelet, was “one vast café.”
Cafés were also places to debate and exchange ideas. Michelet and some modern scholars see coffee drinking and the rise of the café as fueling the Enlightenment, the French revolution, and the spread of scientific, artistic and philosophical ideas in France and Europe. Voltaire, Robespierre, Beauvoir, Baldwin and many other writers and artists have been associated with cafés. These “third spaces” were no less important to those unknown to history, or to us today. Cafés have been escapes from cold and poverty, de facto offices, places to meet friends and lovers, or refuges where one can simply sit and observe. When we go to them, for whatever reason, we are taking part in the comédie humaine.
Our trip will feature custom walking tours with novelist and storyteller Lisa Pasold, museum visits, a cooking class, and time to enjoy Paris’s many distinctive cafés. We’ll study these thinking/drinking spaces through the works of the prolific writers Honoré de Balzac and Emile Zola—the first a consumer of prodigious quantities of coffee, the second obsessed with food and the way it is bought, sold and eaten.
Join other bons vivants for a relaxed yet stimulating exploration of Paris’s café culture and history.
What’s included: Accommodation based on double occupancy; most meals; Paris Métro tickets; Cooking class with dinner; wine and cheese tasting; Paris Métro tickets; all activities and entrance fees to sites visited with the group; four guided walks with Lisa Pasold; three literary discussions with Suzanne Bodner; all taxes and gratuities for local guides, hotel, and group meals; hosted by Suzanne Bodner
Suzanne Bodner has created and led tours to France, England, Italy, Canada and the US for more than 10 years. Her first career was as a teacher of ESL to francophones at institutions in France and Canada.
Lisa Pasold is a Canadian writer who divides her time between Paris and
New Orleans. She is currently the host of Discovery’s travel show,
“Paris Next Stop.” She has published a novel and three books of poetry.