Chronicle No. 76 · History

The Café That Sat Opposite the Theatre: Paris, 1686

Procope sold a drink nobody trusted yet. What made it work was the address — and the theatre that moved in across the street three years later.

Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, a Sicilian, opened a coffee house in Paris in 1686 on the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain. Coffee at the time was expensive, foreign and widely distrusted, and most places selling it were rough.

Procope did the opposite. He fitted the room with marble tables, mirrors and chandeliers — the look of a salon rather than a stall — and sold coffee alongside the Sicilian ices his family knew how to make.

Then the address did its work. In 1689 the Comédie-Française moved in directly opposite. Procope had what every operator wants: a guaranteed audience with time to fill before the curtain and something to argue about after it. The street was eventually renamed rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie.

What came in with that audience was the eighteenth century. Voltaire was a fixture, and the house still repeats the claim that he drank forty cups a day, which is best read as advertising. Rousseau came. Diderot and d'Alembert worked on the Encyclopédie at its tables. Benjamin Franklin is said to have sat there during his years in France. Later the Revolution arrived in the persons of Danton, Marat and Robespierre.

Le Procope is still trading, now as a restaurant, and claims to be the oldest café in Paris in continuous operation.

Lesson: Procope’s real innovation was not coffee. It was a doorway. Location is the one part of a concept you cannot fix later.