Can a person get a glass of wine around here?

What's happening to the French cafe?
The historian W. Scott Haine has discussed the French cafe in almost inestimable social terms. As he has argued, the cafe referenced (and lauded) not private accomplishment but public community and sociability, and fostered the creation of “micro-societies” which contemporaries called “café friendships.” Men of differing social and economic stations milled about together, engaged in discussion and serving as (sometimes unsuspecting) pedagogues for one another in interactions that were “an ever shifting and intricate mosaic . . . of social relations . . . that was simultaneously intimate and anonymous.” The cafe was an almost indispensible part of the political and social shifts from an aristocratic society to a broad meritocracy. The cafe is, as de Balzac wrote, the parliament of the people but it is apparently slipping into the past. As a social and cultural institution it survived both the Nazis and Coca-Cola, apparently now a smoking ban is the current wrinkle to be ironed out, but that is hardly it according to the NYTs piece - “The way of life has changed. The French are no longer eating and drinking like the French. They are eating and drinking like the Anglo-Saxons.” (I beg license for the meager changes I made in the quotation before). It comes to it, a question of what the French from the 1930s to the 1980s would call Americanization and afterwards, recognizing that the US was as apt to fall before it as any other nation, simply globalization. Walter Benjamin noted that Paris was the capital of the 19th century but must we leave it all behind. It is not just deals that were made "behind the zinc" as it were, it is life.