The Cult of Café de Flore: Why Intellectuals Still Fight Over a Table

I became obsessed with Café de Flore before I ever set foot in it.  The idea of a café functioning as an office, a salon, a second home for an entire generation of thinkers felt both impossibly romantic and deeply practical. So when I finally walked past it one afternoon in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I stepped in and decided to write one of my blogs about it. 

Thus, here we are. 

There is a corner table on the first floor of Café de Flore where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir used to sit. They didn’t just visit occasionally—they lived there. Sartre once wrote, “We are completely settled there; from nine o’clock in the morning until midday, we work, we eat, and at two o’clock we come back and chat with friends until eight o’clock. After dinner, we see people who have an appointment. That may seem strange to you, but we are at home.”

That table still exists. You can sit there if you want, provided you’re willing to pay €5 for an espresso and wait in line behind a dozen tourists with iPhones. The question I couldn’t stop asking myself was: why does anyone still care?

A Brief History of Intellectual Real Estate

Café de Flore opened in the 1880s in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, named after a sculpture of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, that once stood across Boulevard Saint-Germain. For its first few decades, it was just a café. Nice enough. Nothing special. Then came the 1920s and 1930s, and suddenly the Left Bank became the place to be if you were young, broke, and had opinions about art.

Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term “surrealism” on the terrace. Pablo Picasso was a regular. During the Occupation, when heating was scarce, Sartre and de Beauvoir claimed the heated first floor and turned it into their office. Sartre would crawl under tables before discussions to collect abandoned cigarette butts for tobacco—pipe tobacco, he discovered, was expensive. Then he’d sit back down and write Being and Nothingness through a curtain of smoke.

Albert Camus frequented the café too, though he made a point of sitting as far from Sartre as physically possible—they despised each other. James Baldwin wrote much of Go Tell It on the Mountain on the second floor while drinking cognac and coffee. Karl Lagerfeld would sit alone for hours reading Vogue.

The Eternal Rivalry

Just 44 meters away sits Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore’s sworn rival since the early 20th century. The two cafés have been locked in a silent competition for over a century, each claiming to be the true intellectual heart of Paris. Deux Magots attracted Hemingway, Joyce, and the Surrealists. Flore became the existentialist headquarters.

Here’s the strange part: by the 1990s, despite Deux Magots being more closely associated with Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus in popular memory, Café de Flore had somehow become the more fashionable spot. American writer Adam Gopnik famously wrote an essay titled “A Tale of Two Cafes” trying to figure out why. His conclusion? It’s mysterious. Flore just felt cooler. And in Paris, perception is everything.

What It Costs to Sit Where Sartre Sat

Let’s talk about the present. A coffee at Café de Flore will cost you around €5. A croque monsieur: €12–14. The famous hot chocolate (which, to be fair, is genuinely exceptional): €9.50. A glass of wine: €8–15. If you sit down for a light meal and drinks, budget €30–40 per person. Expensive? Absolutely. Worth it? That depends entirely on what you think you’re paying for.

The food is good but not great. The coffee is solid but not exceptional. The service is professional but not warm. What you’re really buying is access to the myth. You’re renting a piece of literary history for however long you want to sit there. And the café knows it.

Does It Still Matter?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Café de Flore is mostly a tourist destination now. The Art Deco interior—red banquettes, mahogany, mirrors—has barely changed since the 1930s, which is part of the appeal. But the intellectual energy? That’s harder to find. The café is open from 7:30 AM to 1 AM, and if you go during peak hours, you’ll be surrounded by people taking photos of their espresso cups, not writing manifestos.

And yet. If you go early—say, 8 AM on a weekday—you’ll still see Parisians sitting alone with a book and a coffee, unbothered by the history around them. The café still hosts the Prix de Flore, a literary prize founded in 1994 that awards promising young authors. The winner receives €6,100 and a year’s worth of Pouilly-Fumé to drink at the café. It’s not Sartre, but it’s something.

One detail the café has kept from its intellectual heyday: no music. The management believes Café de Flore should remain a place of exchange, not ambiance. In a city where every café pumps in Spotify playlists, this is quietly radical.

After all my research, I went back. I ordered the hot chocolate (worth it) and sat at a table near the window. I brought a book but didn’t read it. I just watched people walk by on Boulevard Saint-Germain and thought about Sartre crawling under tables for tobacco, about de Beauvoir writing The Second Sex in her corner, about Baldwin drinking cognac upstairs at 2 PM.

Why do people still care about Café de Flore? Maybe because it represents something we want to believe about Paris—that ideas matter, that conversation is sacred, that a café can be more than just a place to drink coffee. Or maybe it’s simpler: we care because they cared. Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Baldwin—they treated this café like it mattered, and so it did.