A London cafe in 1798, by William Holland • © WIKIMEDIACOMMONS London saw cafes flourish from 1652. That year, the first of them was founded by Pasqua Rosee, the Armenian servant of a British merchant, who became a fan of this drink during a trip to the eastern Mediterranean. The establishment met with immediate success in the Puritan England of Oliver Cromwell, who then led the only Republic ever established in the country. Because, unlike wine and beer, coffee was associated with sobriety, a value dear to the Puritans. Its stimulating virtues favored long working days and lucidity, thus making writers and merchants happy. “1penny universities” In 1660, the year of the monarchical restoration, London already had 63 cafes, where all sorts of issues, including politics, were discussed. A devotee of Charles II, Sir William Coventry, recalls that it was in the cafes that the king's supporters met under Cromwell and that "the friends [of the latter] had enjoyed freedom of expression there. superior to that which they would have dared exercise anywhere else". However, aware of the fact that the coffee houses were spaces for discussion and criticism of government action, the sovereign wanted to ban them in 1675. This attempt triggered such a wave of indignation that the government was forced to cede ground:cafes whose owners would pay 500 pounds and take an oath of allegiance would be given an additional six months. But these instructions were unanimously ignored, and no café closed. If the prohibition had irritated the population so much, it was because these establishments had become part of the daily life of the liberal and bourgeois New England, at the head of a prosperous commercial empire. They were the meeting place for businessmen, and important economic institutions were born there, such as the insurance company Lloyd's, founded in the establishment of the same name. Other cafes attracted poets and writers, while scientists from the Royal Society continued their debates there. Everyone could therefore attend or even participate in these discussions for the price of a cup of coffee, which earned the coffee houses the nickname “1penny universities”. Furnished with long wooden tables on which the owners placed candles, pipes and newspapers, London cafes were ideal for holding collective debates. This vocation was reinforced by the democratic attendance of these establishments, where "the knight, the craftsman, the lord and the rascal" rubbed shoulders, as the poet Samuel Butler observed. The political parties rushed into the movement, so much so that the Whigs (liberals) and the tories (conservatives) soon divulged their positions from the cafes. Meetings of philosophers in Paris In the Paris of the mid-18 th century, cafés were also meeting places for intellectuals and had become refuges for enlightened thinkers. Thus, it was at the Café de la Régence that Diderot compiled his Encyclopédie , while Procope counted him, along with d’Alembert and Rousseau, among his clients. The cafes nevertheless took on a less combative dimension than in London, in particular because the press and public opinion in France were subject to fierce censorship. The information circulating was accompanied by abundant rumours, of which the police took note:"Jean-Louis Le Clerc declared in the Procope café that there had never been a worse king, that the court and the ministers were pushing the sovereign to to commit infamous acts which his people condemned in the highest degree”, one could read for example in a report of 1749. In July 1789, the confrontation between the deputies of the Estates General and the Crown suddenly raised the temperature in the cafes. Speakers there railed against the government, and some cafes were so packed that the public fought in front of them to be able to hear the harangues. The tension exploded on July 12, when deputy Camille Desmoulins climbed onto a table at the Café de Foy and shouted to the crowd:“To arms! Two days later the people took the Bastille. Coffee had entered the landscape of European political culture. An attack on the peace of the Kingdom On December 29, 1675, King Charles II of England issued a proclamation banning cafes and setting out the reasons why the Crown considered these establishments deleterious:"They have produced very harmful and dangerous effects […], for in these establishments […] false, malicious and scandalous information is plotted and disseminated, aimed at defaming the government of His Majesty and altering the peace and tranquility of the kingdom”. This is why “His Majesty considers it just and necessary to close and suppress these cafes. »
