Café de Flore in Paris

The café Flore made its appearance in 1885 exactly. It owes its name to a sculpture of the goddess of Spring; “Flore” situated on the other side of the road.

Towards 1913, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire who lived in the boulevard Saint Germain frequented it. With the poet Salmon, he transformed the ground floor into a writing room. That’s how the revue “Les Soirées de Paris” came to be. It took on its habits. To the extent of fixing its appointments at particular times just like an office. In 1917, you could see on the terrace of the Flore great discussions in the company of André Breton, founder of the surrealist movement and Aragon. The word surrealist was invented and the Dadaist group was born.

During the 1930’s, the whole of literary Paris came to the Flore : Léon-Paul Fargue, Raymond Queneau, Michel Leiris. Georges Bataille, Robert Desnos were among the most regular customers. The oldies of Montparnasse came to stay freely, including Derain, the Giacometti brothers, Zaskine and even Picasso.

The cinema world was not indifferent to this special atmosphere. Marcel Carné met there the actor Serge Reggiani. But the buy-out by Boubal du Flore in 1939 (on the left of this box) marked the age of gold of the germanopratin café. Boubal knew how to attract to the Flore an elite intellectual, with leaders, the germanopratin duo Sartre-Beauvoir who set up their “social seat”. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “We are completely settled there: from nine o’clock in the morning until midday, we work, we eat, at two o’clock we come back and chat with friends we meet until eight o’clock. After dinner, we receive people to whom we have given an appointment. That may seem strange to you, but we are at home at the Flore”. It wasn’t the least bit paradoxical to the bougnat Boubal. Like his colleague, Cazes at Lipp, he never opened a book, and he wasn’t of the left-wing.

Next to the intellectuals, the actors (Jane Fonda, Jane Seberg, Roman Polanski, Marcel Carné. Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, Losey and Belmondo) and the singers (Juliette Gréco, Boris Vian), the Flore also had a reputation for the great homosexual meeting place, which was, during the 50’s and 60’s, rather poorly viewed. Still there, the paradoxical Boubal took on a sulphuric side, even if his fury exploded the day that he discovered in the toilet of his café the graffiti “Boubal is one!” As if he assumed the idiocies of his clients and friends starting with Blondin who he went to find at the Post Office, when the latter, drunk, amused himself by baptising a chicken in the church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres whereby the priest pressed charges.

Since 1984, Moroslav Siljegovic has taken over the destiny of the Flore, who also runs the “Closerie des Lilas”.

And today, the terrace of the Flore remains one of the terraces where you have to be seen profiting from the first rays of sun at St-Germain des Pres when you are passing through Paris. With a little luck you might meet Johnny Depp, Jack Nickolson or even Lauren Bacall.