Ballad of the Sad Cafes

Even more than the British pub or the American corner drugstore, the French cafe has always provided a haven within which whole lives could unfold. It is a unique national institution that combines club, office and home-away-from-home. "It is where the Frenchman entertains guests, conducts business, writes his poetry and novels," says Roger Cazes, owner of the elegant Brasserie Lipp on Paris' Boulevard Saint Germain. "It is where, if he is famous, he goes to be seen, and if he is not, he goes to watch. It is where he discusses art, literature, philosophy and politics." It is also the place that many Frenchmen are beginning to shun. The sad news about this heady forum of Gallic civilization is that all over France its numbers and influence on national life are declining.

Green Hair. Some 200 cafes go out of business every year in the Paris area alone, and the toll is equally big in the provinces; altogether, about 30,000 cafes in France have closed in the past decade. Among the victims have been not only the back-street cafes with the zinc-topped bars but also such giants as the Select, which opened on the Champs Elysees back in the 1930s, and La Rotonde in Montparnasse, once a favorite hangout of Picasso and Modigliani. Last week one of the legendary cafes of Paris, the Cafe de Madrid in the theater district, reopened as a "drugstore" remodeled in American-modern decor instead of its former Second Empire. Where Poet Charles Baudelaire once came to sip absinthe--he also dyed his hair green as part of an absinthe cult--waiters in sailor suits now scurry about carrying banana splits amid the magazine stands and cosmetics counters.

Cafe owners complain that higher wages, taxes and social security payments bite increasingly deeply into their profits. But that complaint--shared by many other entrepreneurs--is dwarfed by the fact that today's Frenchmen seem to be rediscovering their homes. In the postwar era, many of them popped in at the neighborhood cafe several times a day largely because they lived in dismal quarters or had little else to do. Now they have television to watch, a refrigerator in which they can keep white wine, ice and mixers so that they can serve themselves and their friends more easily at home. Moreover, many Frenchmen now prefer to save their cash for more and better furniture, a shiny new automobile or le weekend in the country rather than give it to the local cafe owner.

Irreversible Trend. The drifting away of the habitues has changed the cafe's whole character, and, says Antoine Barale, owner of the Bar Francois in the Riviera town of Antibes, "I'm afraid the trend is irreversible." A few of Barale's competitors have installed television, but he contends that TV usually only invites an uproar among the customers, since "some people love it and others object to it." The owners of four of Paris' biggest cafes--the Flore, the Cafe de la Paix, the Coupole and the Deux Magots--all admit that they may have to change their businesses, look to le drugstore as the profit-making venture of the future. So far Paris has five "drugstores," which are more elegant than their prototypes in the U.S. and usually combine a restaurant and an exclusive array of goods in a camp atmosphere that appeals to the ye-ye set. They draw the crowds heavily--and the cafe owners draw the conclusions. The point is that the busy Frenchman, with less time to linger, is fast attuning himself to a short-order culture.

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