Macron’s mentor in bid to revive cafes
A mass die-off of France’s iconic cafes, from 200,000 to fewer than 40,000 in a half-century, is depriving the French of cosy watering-holes where they’ve gathered for generations.
The social-glue role of cafes as places where the French mingle, find friendship and sometimes love, squabble, mourn and celebrate, is seen as being so vital for the national wellbeing that a mentor and political ally of President Emmanuel Macron is launching a €150 million ($262m) rescue plan for 1000 of them. It is focusing on small villages off the beaten track where the shuttering of cafes is often a drama because the closures leave inhabitants with few, if any, alternative places to socialise.
For Jean-Marc Borello, who was one of Macron’s teachers when the future leader of France was a student at Paris’ prestigious Sciences Po university, saving cafes isn’t only a social mission. It’s also an effort to respond to the bubbling grievances in swathes of France that people who live away from the bright lights of Paris and other cities are being left behind, deprived of public services, fast and reliable communications and opportunities for both work and play.
This “real territorial fracture”, as Borello puts it, between hopping cities and torpid towns and villages was dramatically exposed by the socalled “gilet jaune” (“yellow vest”) protest movement that erupted last November and rocked Macron’s presidency.
Legions of demonstrators in fluorescent jackets converged on the capital from the provinces for successive weekends during the months of often-violent upheaval that could yet flare again. Their complaints over taxation, wages, retreating public services and other issues painted the Government in Paris as being chronically out of touch.
Borello, who heads a large French nonprofit with an annual turnover of €1 billion from a palette of activities in healthcare, childcare and other fields, doesn’t claim that rescuing cafes, alone, will assuage yellow vest tempers.
But reopening cafes in villages that lost them will, he argues, help combat social isolation, providing inhabitants with places to meet and kindle friendships, and “little by little restoring life to a village and connecting it to the rest of the world”. “The simple fact of doing things together sometimes rekindles hope,” he said.