Episode notes
The Café de Flore opened in the 1880s at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Benoît in Paris, during the Third Republic, though its exact opening date is lost. Its poetic name came from a sculpture of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, standing across the boulevard. Early regulars included Joris-Karl Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont, and Charles Maurras wrote Au signe de Flore on its first floor, while the Revue d'Action Française was founded there in 1899.
Between the wars the cafe drew Pablo Picasso, Georges Bataille, Robert Desnos, Léon-Paul Fargue, and Raymond Queneau, along with Zhou Enlai, the future premier of the People's Republic of China, then living in France. After World War II it rivaled Les Deux Magots next door, and Adam Gopnik argued in A Tale of Two Cafés that the Flore eventually won the prestige contest. Romanian thinkers Emil Cioran, Benjamin Fondane, and Eugène Ionesco gathered there, and James Baldwin wrote much of Go Tell It on the Mountain upstairs, fueled by coffee and cognac.
- The Art Deco interior, with red seats, mahogany, and mirrors, has barely changed since World War II.
- In autumn 1960 Yves Saint Laurent named a gray flannel Dior ensemble Café de Flore.
- Frédéric Beigbeder launched the Prix de Flore literary prize there in 1994.
- Amanda Lear filmed a music video at the cafe in 1981.
- It appears in Absolutely Fabulous and in season one, episode six of Emily in Paris.