The Prague Café: the Cultural into the Political

Résumé En

The Czech lands saw the first coffee house opened in Brno in 1702, and Prague had its first one in 1714 near the Bridge Tower of the Lesser Quarter. As coffee houses gain on popularity throughout the 19th century they become, more than any other eating place, a site of rencontre. And it is especially since around the turn of the century that the Prague's most famous cafés gradually become meeting places for the writers, artists and intellectuals who would win a renown like Franz Kafka, brothers Čapek, Václav Havel, to name just a few. Building on the cultural character of the café meetings the term Prague Café has during the recent years been coined to pejoratively allude to "big city intellectuals" that are publicly active and interested in politics, a concept created by the current Czech President's close collaborators to point to his opponents and critics. The paper will focus on cultural aspects of the intellectual and artistic rencontre of the best known Prague coffee houses as well as on the analysis of the politicized concept designed allegedly in order to appeal to the general public.