Paris's Latin Quarter: An Intellectual History with a Professor

The history of Paris is the history of ideas. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson came to the Latin Quarter's first coffee shop, Le Procope, to drink a strange new elixir, meet French revolutionaries, and imagine a new form of government. Two centuries after the guillotine was invented, Americans Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein arrived with wisdom from Asia in search of a chaotically simple idea: "make it new." Just a few years later, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre began questioning the very nature of existence on the sun-drenched terrace of the Café de Flore. This lecture combines history, literature, and intellectual history, and will discuss the story about the people and the ideas that define one of the world's most important neighborhoods.