Paris cafés functioned as practical and social necessities during wartime

Evidence

Cafés such as the Flore continued to be a focus for Parisian life. For a start, they were the best places to keep warm, certainly better than the sparse, cheap hotels in which many lived without heating or proper cooking facilities. Even after the war, the American writer James Baldwin would observe in the 1950s, ‘The moment I began living in French hotels I understood the necessity of French cafés.’ They also became places to talk, to conspire a little, to keep one’s mind alive. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 477

Categorization

• CANDY: James Baldwin’s line about French hotels and cafés is a light, tweetable observation on architecture-driven behavior.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to café-as-infrastructure theme — the practical necessity angle fits ‘Grafting & Growth’ in spirit, though the link is thematic rather than direct.
• XREF: connects to: Small symbolic defiances sustained French morale under Occupation — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 469

Broader Connections

• Small symbolic defiances sustained French morale under Occupation #complicates (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 469