Café de Flore

The Flore opened around 1887 and took its name from a statue of the goddess Flora that stood across the boulevard. Its first literary tenant was Guillaume Apollinaire, who from 1913 effectively ran his magazine Les Soirées de Paris from the ground floor, treating the café as an editorial office with waiter service — a working arrangement Paris would keep reinventing for a century.[1]

Blaise Cendrars belonged to that first Flore generation. Philippe Soupault remembered Guillaume Apollinaire meeting his friends at the Flore every Wednesday around six in the spring of 1917, with Cendrars among the regulars, and described leaving the café at Cendrars's side to wander through Paris. It is a firsthand account rather than a later café legend.

In the twenties the Flore was one station on the Left Bank circuit rather than its capital: a few doors from the Deux Magots, across the boulevard from Lipp, part of the triangle every expatriate walked daily. Hemingway knew it as the neighborhood knew it — a warm room with good light. Its own legend came a generation later, when Sartre and Beauvoir sat out the Occupation at its upstairs tables, writing through the winters because the Flore had a working stove and their flats did not. Sartre later claimed, with proprietary satisfaction, that the roads of existentialism ran through the café.[1]

Since then the Flore has become the most self-aware café in Paris — expensive, touristed, and unbothered. It founded its own literary prize, the Prix de Flore, in 1994, and the corner terrace under the awning remains one of the most photographed literary addresses in the world. Somewhere under the varnish is the room where Apollinaire opened the mail.[1]

James Baldwin at the Flore

James Baldwin reached Paris in November 1948. He was twenty-four and had forty dollars, and the rooms he could afford were unheated. The cafés were heated, and they did not mind how long a customer sat over one coffee. That is the plain reason so much of his early work happened at café tables rather than at a desk. The City of Paris, in its walking account of his years here, names the Flore among the rooms he used.[2][3]

The same account places his meetings with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre at these tables. The two of them had spent the Occupation writing upstairs a few years earlier, for the same reason Baldwin came: the café had heat.[2][1]

A popular account of his Paris years also has Go Tell It on the Mountain taking shape here. That one is worth holding loosely. He worked across several rooms in Saint-Germain, no first-hand source fixes the drafting to this café, and he finished the novel in a Swiss Alpine village rather than in Paris at all.[4]

The circuit around the corner

The Flore is one address on a short walk Baldwin made most days, and the neighbouring rooms carry the rest of the story:

• Les Deux Magots, a few doors along the boulevard, where Richard Wright greeted him on his first day in the city.
• Brasserie Lipp, across the street, where the two of them fell out in public in 1949 over the essay Everybody's Protest Novel.
• Le Tournon, ten minutes south, the daily headquarters of the Black American writers around Wright in the early 1950s.
• 26 rue Saint-Benoît, the address most often given as Baldwin's own in 1953, on the street the Flore's side terrace faces.