In this work, the author investigates what the working-class cafe reveals about the formation of urban life in 19th-century France. Cafe society was not the product of a small elite of intellectuals and artists, he argues, but was instead the creation of a diverse and changing working population. Making use of primary sources from marriage contracts to police and bankruptcy records, Haine investigates the cafe in relation to work, family life, leisure, gender roles and political activity. His account offers a reinterpretation of the social history of the working men and women of Paris.