"[Haine] invites the reader of The World of the Paris Café to step up to the serving counter of a nineteenth-century Parisian café to eavesdrop on the conversations and to observe the dynamics of this unique working-class establishment . . . These cafés were far more than places to eat and drink to the great majority of working-class Parisians, who also frequented such establishments seeking shelter from authorities, exchanging and developing and sometimes enacting their ideas."-Jack B. Ridley, History: Review of New Books

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.

"As its subtitle indicates, this book is as much about the emergence and flowering of working-class sociability as it is about the cafés that fostered this sociability, as much about milieu as it is about lieu . . . This study is both wide-ranging and well researched . . . At once serious and lively."-Elizabeth Ezra, Labour History Review

"Haine takes the café as an institution with its own history . . . But Haine's greatest contribution is the impressive archival work . . . The World of the Paris Café is a rich study to which dix-neuviémistes in their turn can raise a glass."-Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Nineteenth-Century French Studies