Café de Flore & Les Deux Magots: Sartre, Beauvoir and the Stove
Why is it significant?
Stop on the corner and look at the two cafés side by side: Les Deux Magots, with its green awning facing the church, and the Café de Flore, with its white awnings and red-and-white chairs. Across the boulevard, a third institution, Brasserie Lipp, completes the triangle.
Key Facts
| Place | Café de Flore & Les Deux Magots: Sartre, Beauvoir and the Stove |
|---|---|
| Address | 172 Boulevard Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.85410, 2.33260 |
| Part of Walk | Ink, Coffee and Revolution: A Literary Walk Through Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop on the corner and look at the two cafés side by side: Les Deux Magots, with its green awning facing the church, and the Café de Flore, with its white awnings and red-and-white chairs. Across the boulevard, a third institution, Brasserie Lipp, completes the triangle.
Inside Les Deux Magots, high on a pillar, sit two carved Chinese figures, the magots. They are older than the café: they belonged to a shop selling silk and novelties that stood here in the nineteenth century, and the café, opened in 1885, kept the name. The Flore opened a couple of years later and took its name from a statue of the goddess Flora. Lipp was founded in 1880 by an Alsatian, Léonard Lipp, who served beer and sauerkraut to homesick fellow refugees after the war of 1870.
During the German occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir came to the Flore every day, morning to night. Their rooms were freezing, coal was scarce, and the Flore had a stove. So they sat upstairs at separate tables, writing for hours. Being and Nothingness and Beauvoir's early novels took shape partly over cups of ersatz coffee in this room.
After the liberation, journalists discovered existentialism, and suddenly tourists came to stare at the philosophers. Sartre complained and retreated. The rival café created its own literary prize in 1933, the Prix des Deux Magots, first awarded to Raymond Queneau. And legend says that at Les Deux Magots, in 1936, Picasso first noticed the photographer Dora Maar, playing a dangerous game with a knife between her gloved fingers.
Lipp has a darker story. On the twenty-ninth of October 1965, the Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka was arrested on the pavement outside it by French police officers and handed over. He was never seen again. The case is still not fully solved. The little square in front of you is named Place Sartre-Beauvoir. Now walk west along the boulevard to Rue des Saints-Pères and follow it north, all the way to the river.