The French are of perennial interest, for, among other things, their style, their cuisine and wine, and their cultural output. Culture and Customs of France is a thoroughly jam-packed narrative through the glories that France continues to offer the world. The volume is a boon for preparing country reports, a must-read for travelers, and perfect for culture studies. Chapters on the land, people, and history, religion, social customs, gender, family, and marriage, cinema and media, literature, food and fashion, architecture and art, and performing arts are current and pleasurable to read.

The cafe is not only a place to enjoy a cup of coffee, it is also a space - distinct from its urban environment - in which to reflect and take part in intellectual debate. Since the eighteenth century in Europe, intellectuals and artists have gathered in cafes to exchange ideas, inspirations and information that has driven the cultural agenda for Europe and the world. Without the cafe, would there have been a Karl Marx or a Jean-Paul Sartre? The cafe as an institutional site has been the subject of renewed interest amongst scholars in the past decade, and its role in the development of art, ideas and culture has been explored in some detail. However, few have investigated the ways in which cafes create a cultural and intellectual space which brings together multiple influences and intellectual practices and shapes the urban settings of which they are a part. This volume presents an international group of scholars who consider cafes as sites of intellectual discourse from across Europe during the long modern period. Drawing on literary theory, history, cultural studies and urban studies, the contributors explore the ways in which cafes have functioned and evolved at crucial moments in the histories of important cities and countries - notably Paris, Vienna and Italy. Choosing these sites allows readers to understand both the local particularities of each cafe while also seeing the larger cultural connections between these places. By revealing how the cafe operated as a unique cultural context within the urban setting, this volume demonstrates how space and ideas are connected. As our global society becomes more focused on creativity and mobility the intellectual cafes of past generations can also serve as inspiration for contemporary and future knowledge workers who will expand and develop this tradition of using and thinking in space.

"[Haine] invites the reader of The World of the Paris Cafe to step up to the serving counter of a nineteenth-century Parisian cafe to eavesdrop on the conversations and to observe the dynamics of this unique working-class establishment ...These cafes were far more than places to eat and drink to the great majority of working-class Parisians, who also frequented such establishments seeking shelter from authorities, exchanging and developing and sometimes enacting their ideas."-Jack B. Ridley, History: Review of New Books In The World of the Paris Cafe, W. Scott Haine investigates what the working-class cafe reveals about the formation of urban life in nineteenth-century France. Cafe society was not the product of a small elite of intellectuals and artists, he argues, but was instead the creation of a diverse and changing working population. Making unprecedented use of primary sources-from marriage contracts to police and bankruptcy records-Haine investigates the cafe in relation to work, family life, leisure, gender roles, and political activity. This rich and provocative study offers a bold reinterpretation of the social history of the working men and women of Paris. "As its subtitle indicates, this book is as much about the emergence and flowering of working-class sociability as it is about the cafes that fostered this sociability, as much about milieu as it is about lieu ...This study is both wide-ranging and well researched ...At once serious and lively."-Elizabeth Ezra, Labour History Review "Haine takes the cafe as an institution with its own history ...But Haine's greatest contribution is the impressive archival work ...The World of the Paris Cafe is a rich study to which dix-neuviemistes in their turn can raise a glass."-Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Nineteenth-Century French Studies