Bistro Blues

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER PARIS

The last time I saw Paris

Her heart was warm and gay

I heard the laughter of her heart in

Ev'ry street cafe.

-- OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II

Will the time come when an American songwriter, seeking to capture the essence of France, pens a lyrical ode to Le Burger King or McDonald's? Will the Hemingways, the Sartres and the Picassos of the next century debate ideas while dining out on le hamburger and le Coca-Cola? The scenario is hardly farfetched. For on the street corners of Paris, and in provincial cities from Lille to Lourdes, le fast food is muscling out bistros at a dizzying rate.

Early in the century, France counted roughly 300,000 cafes for 38 million inhabitants, according to Robert Henry, head of the cafe section of the restaurateurs union. Today, he laments, the number has dropped to 62,000 for a population of 58 million. Over the past decade, bistros have gone out of business at the rate of 3,500 a year. "Each time a cafe closes, a little bit of liberty and democracy disappears," says Henry, a 71-year-old who was suckled in his parents' Val-d'Oise cafe, north of Paris. From his bistro, Le Petit Poucet, Henry sees people pouring into Le Quick, a nearby fast-food outlet. "Their food is cheaper than ours," he admits. "But we have a role in society: to listen to people, to lift their spirits, to provide a place where all social classes mix and converse."

For many French, no other institution so embodies their civilization as le zinc. Today the counter of the typical cafe-bistro is rarely made of zinc -- metal alloys and Formica are easier to clean -- but the rituals remain. The owner who shakes hands with the regulars. The blue-uniformed laborer downing his half-liter of beer. The war veteran nursing his Calvados-laced coffee. In villages, farmers gather after a day's harvest for a shot of pastis and a dice game. In cities, shopgirls pause for orange juice and a croque monsieur, the grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich that is one of the mainstays of cafe fare. "Parisian zincs are the ideal theater of the comedy of man," observes the weekly L'Express.

The great Left Bank establishments, such as Les Deux Magots and Le Flore, thrive by serving up literary nostalgia to tourists; even off the beaten track, visitors still find the city bristling with humble neighborhood cafes and their newer manifestation, the wine bar. But among the natives, the statistics of decline have prompted a cry of alarm, with newspaper articles and even a television special deploring the slow extinction of le zinc. A government poll showed that 62% of the French feel cafes are an "indispensable" part of life. A festival at the Paris Videotheque inventoried 110 films centered on cafes.

The closing of cafes reflects a revolution in the French way of life. Postwar prosperity brought refrigerators, so bistros no longer had a monopoly on cold drinks. Television now entertains people who once dropped by the local cafe to pass the time. Moreover, alcohol consumption has dropped a third in the past decade, and cheaper supermarket prices encourage people to do their tippling at home. Another sign of the times: le cocooning, the preference of a stressed-out generation to stay home to relax. "People used to come and tell us their little problems," says Pierre Domingue, owner of the Cafe de l'Arrivee on the Boulevard de l'Hopital. "But those glory days are over."

Cafes are hard put to compete with the television advertising blitzes that promote fast-food chains and with the price advantages of their mass-produced products. After Shannon Biondi, a headstrong three-year-old and a member of what some French sociologists call La Generation MacDo, saw a commercial for "McCopters," she dragged her mother to the McDonald's across from the Austerlitz train station. Until 1989, the spot was occupied by a vast cafe, the Arc-en-Ciel. But Marie Biondi, Shannon's mother, does not mourn the disappearance of the bistro. "We feel safe here," she says. "We avoid the neighborhood drunk, and the toilets are clean." Nearby, medical student Christophe Icard, 21, converses with a companion over chocolate ice cream. Cafes are "expensive and old-fashioned," he says.

Demographics is another factor. In Paris rising rents are driving the working class to the suburbs -- and long commutes discourage after-work aperitifs. As a result, many cafes have beefed up their menus and make up the lost zinc trade from office workers who no longer go home for lunch. In the country, mechanized farming has shrunk village populations, leading to the closing of the cafes that served them. Still, most towns have a place where tradition survives. In Houlgate, a small town on the Normandy coast, six men and a woman chatted around the Formica counter on a recent Saturday. "We come for the conviviality, not for the alcohol," said Sylvain Lecuyer, a 40-year- old seasonal worker. "If someone does not show up for two days, we phone to see if he is sick." Musing on the closing of several local cafes, his drinking companion, James Jamet, 70, reflected morosely, "It is France that is dying." But in the next breath, he ordered a round for everyone, and one could only drink to the fact that so much of that zinc-plated Gallic spirit yet survives.