Café de Flore
The red banquettes at Café de Flore have barely changed since the 1930s. The mahogany, the brass railings, the white-and-green china arriving at your table — all of it is essentially the same room where Sartre and de Beauvoir set up what amounted to a second office, and where James Baldwin ordered cognac and coffee on the upper floor while writing *Go Tell It on the Mountain*.
The café sits at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Benoît, named for a nearby sculpture of Flora, Roman goddess of flowers. It opened in 1885, and the sediment of a century and a half of Paris intellectual life is somehow still present in the room.
💛 What travellers fall for
Regulars tend to arrive before nine. The left-hand tables near the entrance are, by long tradition, for people who come often. Upstairs is quieter and catches more light — the floor Baldwin used. The hot chocolate is a house specialty worth ordering even in summer, and the price of a simple espresso buys you a legitimate claim on the table.
Deals in Café de Flore
Book directly at the providerHow Café de Flore came to be
Flore opened in 1885, two years after its rival Les Deux Magots, forty-four metres up the same boulevard. Its early regulars included writers Joris-Karl Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont. By the early twentieth century, Guillaume Apollinaire was on the terrace coining the word 'surrealism' in conversation with André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Paul Reverdy. Picasso, Georges Bataille, and Raymond Queneau followed.
During the 1940s and '50s, Sartre and de Beauvoir treated the first floor as their primary workplace. Camus, Hemingway, Truman Capote, and a circle of Romanian thinkers — Cioran, Ionesco, Fondane — made it their quieter alternative to the café next door. Later, Karl Lagerfeld would sit alone downstairs reading Vogue for hours. In 1994, writer Frédéric Beigbeder inaugurated the Prix de Flore, a literary prize the café still awards annually.
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Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.