Coffeehouses and the Rise of the Public Sphere

Coffee arrived in Western Europe in the 1600s, and with it a new kind of meeting place. England's first coffeehouse opened in Oxford around 1650, and London soon had hundreds. For the price of a cup, customers of varied backgrounds could read newspapers, hear the latest news and argue about politics, earning coffeehouses the nickname 'penny universities'. In Paris, the Café Procope, founded in 1686, became a haunt of writers.

In 1675 King Charles II issued a proclamation to suppress coffeehouses as centers of seditious talk, but public outcry forced him to back down within days. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas later argued that such spaces created a 'public sphere' in which private people reasoned together about public matters, forming public opinion that governments had to reckon with. Critics note that this sphere largely excluded women and the poor, but coffeehouses still show how new spaces helped create a politically engaged public.