The giant brasserie of the Boulevard du Montparnasse, opened in December 1927 with a party the quarter never forgot — Blaise Cendrars was in the opening-night crowd.
La Coupole opened on 20 December 1927 at 102 boulevard du Montparnasse, a few doors down from the Dôme, whose former managers Ernest Fraux and René Lafon built it. It was conceived at a scale Montparnasse had not seen: a vast Art Deco dining hall on the site of a former coal yard, its rows of pillars painted by artists of the quarter, Fernand Léger among them.
The opening party became legend on its own — the crowd overwhelmed the room and the champagne reportedly ran out before the night did. Blaise Cendrars attended the opening celebration, and the room stayed in his repertoire: in his memoir L'Homme foudroyé he writes of passing the night at La Coupole and leaving at dawn.
La Coupole arrived just as the golden decade of Montparnasse was ending, and it outlived the era it was built to serve. The interior was listed as a historic monument in 1988, and the brasserie still operates at full scale on the original site — the last of the great Vavin rooms where the size of the twenties is still measurable in floor space.
Opens on 20 December with an enormous party; Blaise Cendrars is among the opening-night guests.
The Art Deco interior is listed as a historic monument.
Frequented by · 1927
Cendrars was in the crowd at La Coupole's opening celebration on 20 December 1927, and in L'Homme foudroyé he writes of passing the night at La Coupole before leaving at dawn — his own record of time spent in the room, beyond the opening itself.
Frequented by
One of the Montparnasse cafés Miller used through his Paris years — the vast Art Deco brasserie that is still trading on the boulevard.
Léger was among the artists of the quarter — 33 by the standard count — who painted the pillars of the new brasserie for its December 1927 opening.
The Dalí Foundation names the Coupole bar among the fashionable Paris places Dalí used and cited — part of the Montparnasse circuit that ran alongside his Surrealist years in the city.
Art & design movement · circa 1910–1939
The international design style of geometric pattern, rich surfaces and modern life, named after the 1925 Paris decorative arts exhibition and built into everything from Ruhlmann's cabinets to the Chrysler Building.
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The all-night café of the Vavin crossroads and the closest thing Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises has to a home address — the crowd always ends up at the Select.
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The American bar where Ernest Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald in late April 1925 — two weeks after The Great Gatsby was published.
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The noisy common room of Montparnasse and the setting of 'With Pascin at the Dôme' — the café for watching the show, not for working.
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Where Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 and grew up with her sister Hélène — in the middle of Montparnasse, the quarter she would spend most of her life within a few streets of.
Visit the placeThe sources below include histories, archival materials, scholarly research, and official records that informed this page. They document La Coupole, the people connected to it, and its place in Paris.
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Map data used to verify addresses, geographic coordinates, and the placement associated with La Coupole.
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The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
