The café below the Senate that served as the unofficial headquarters of Black American writers in postwar Paris, with Richard Wright at the center and James Baldwin among the regulars.
Baldwin reached Paris in November 1948, at twenty-four, with essays and reviews behind him and no book; the Tournon circle assembled during exactly the years he was becoming a name. What he did here is less minutely recorded than what Richard Wright did, because the room's chroniclers — the novelist William Gardner Smith among them — sat at Wright's table. His documented tie is plainer: the city's listing of the café among his favorites, and friendships that ran through the room, above all with Beauford Delaney, his mentor since his New York teens.
The complication was the king. "Everybody's Protest Novel" had appeared in 1949 and the essays that followed kept the wound open, so Baldwin's seat at the Tournon was never quite inside Wright's court and never quite outside it. He wrote about that uneasy position for the rest of his life, most directly in the essays he published after Wright's death.
The café's literary history did not begin with the Americans. Joseph Roth, the Austrian novelist of the vanished Habsburg empire, had lived in exile at the Hôtel Foyot across the street; when the Foyot was condemned and demolished, he moved into the Hôtel de la Poste at number 18 in 1938 and made the café below his writing room. At his table he produced articles and polemics for the émigré press, argued with a circle of Austrian monarchists about the old world, and drew from the café's conversations the material of his last fiction, The Legend of the Holy Drinker among it.
Roth died in Paris in May 1939, months before the war he had spent six years predicting. The plaque on the façade remembers him.
The circle's worst hour is remembered as the Gibson Affair. In the late 1950s a dispute between the writer Richard Gibson and Ollie Harrington — it began over a sublet apartment — escalated into something stranger: a letter on the Algerian war published over Harrington's name that he had not written, accusations of informing in every direction, and a fog of Cold War suspicion that settled over the tables. Who had done what for whom, and whether any of it involved the intelligence services, has been argued about ever since.
Richard Wright, by then convinced the community was watched, put the poisoned atmosphere into a novel set largely at the Tournon, Island of Hallucination. It has never been published. The affair scattered the circle it described; Wright died in 1960, and the café's great decade ended with him.
The room the writers knew was the ground floor of a modest hotel, not a landmark. The walls carried hand-painted views of the Luxembourg gardens that William Gardner Smith called "hideous" and nobody painted over; visitors decades later found the same murals, moleskin banquettes and zinc-topped bar still in place. It was cheaper than the famous cafés to the north, which was part of the point — a coffee bought a seat for the afternoon.
The arguments were about America, politics, and each other's pages, and by Smith's account the loudest sound in the room was laughter at Harrington's stories. The café's reach ran past literature: a photograph the waiters liked to show visitors caught Duke Ellington and Beauford Delaney together at one of the tables.
The Tournon still trades at the original address, a two-minute walk from the Luxembourg gardens and about ten minutes from the Odéon métro.
Last verified: August 2026.
Joseph Roth, exiled from Austria, moves into the Hôtel de la Poste above the café after the demolition of the Hôtel Foyot opposite, and writes at its tables.
Roth dies in Paris in May.
Richard Wright makes the café his headquarters; the circle of Black American expatriate writers and artists forms around him.
The newly founded Paris Review's editors adopt the café as a gathering spot.
The Gibson Affair — a quarrel over a sublet entangled with Algerian-war politics and Cold War suspicion — breaks up the expatriate circle.
Closes for a renovation that drags on with no posted reopening date.
Reopened as a café-restaurant; whether the postwar murals survived the new interior is unclear.
Frequented by
The City of Paris names Le Tournon among Baldwin's favorite cafés. The room was also the daily headquarters of the Black American writers around Richard Wright in the early 1950s, which made it complicated ground for Baldwin after their public break.
Frequented by · 1950
Wright held court at the café below the Senate nearly every day in the early 1950s, and the circle of Black American expatriate writers and artists — Chester Himes, Ollie Harrington, Beauford Delaney among them — formed around his table.
Sylvia Beach's original bookshop and lending library — Ernest Hemingway's home away from home, and where James Joyce's Ulysses was first published. The shop closed in 1941; the current Shakespeare and Company is a successor at a different address.
Visit the place
Richard Wright's Paris address for eleven years — the apartment where he wrote the books of his exile, marked since 1992 by a marble plaque.
Visit the place
Adrienne Monnier's bookshop and lending library — the French half of the rue de l'Odéon, where Ulysses was read aloud to Paris before it was a book.
Visit the place
Where Shakespeare and Company began: the tiny shop Sylvia Beach opened on 19 November 1919, two years before the move to the rue de l'Odéon.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
