Café Guerbois: the Parisian hotspot where Édouard Manet had a sword fight
If you could enter a time capsule and travel back to Paris in the 1860s, specifically to 9 Avenue de Clichy, which was called Grande Rue des Batignolles, you would come across a very ordinary-looking café called Café Guerbois.
Compared to other opulent Parisian cafés, there wasn’t really anything special that made this café stand out from the outside. In simple terms, it looked like a slightly more glamorous version of a British pub. But this café was as extraordinary as it was ordinary; after all, we know that appearances can be deceiving.
Behind the large windows, fogged by lively conversation and cigarette smoke, were Paris’ greatest artists and writers, who were cooking up their next masterpieces, huddled like penguins over tiny tables laden with chalices of liquor. Like magicians, they were bundled up in dark cloaks because of the cold and, gesticulating with their hands, debated over politics and philosophy. At the back of the saloon, in the murky shadows, others took a break from existential crises to play billiards or chat up a cocotte.
The leader of the pack, or should I say “chef de meute”, was no other than Édouard Manet, the most controversial of the Impressionists and certainly an acquired taste. He had managed to amass young artists like Sisley, Degas, Renoir and many others, who all lived a stone’s throw away from each other in the 8th arrondissement.
The area had become a melting pot for starving artists who had been kicked out by Napoleon III, who was conducting a widespread demolition of the city’s slums. At the time, this group became known as ‘L’École des Batignolles’ because of their weekly hangout spot on that exact avenue. They embodied every trope of the ‘Bohèmes’, the precise antithesis to their enemies, the ‘Bourgeois’, immiscible like oil and water.
Some were rather peculiar characters. Like the bushy French novelist Emile Zola, who had increasingly shifted over to the ‘Rive Droite’. He was an awkward man with a resting bitch face that clearly didn’t suit him well; he frequently sat by himself and judged the crowd. More often than not, his departure followed hard on his arrival. “They’re a lot of bastards; they dress as smartly as solicitors,” he once sourly described his peers.
Another chap, Paul Cezanne, known for his vibrant toppled fruit bowls that never seem to cause as much chaos as they should, can be best described as a Parisian Pete Hegseth. Upon entering the café, this scrawny man refused to shake Manet’s hand because “it’s been one week now since I’ve bathed”. A true environmentalist he was.
But between this babbling bunch of ‘école’ boys, disagreements were ever present, and that very Café Guerbois became their playground where they’d fight to the finish.
Eduard Monet once described the exhilaration of these word wars, saying, “Nothing could have been more interesting than these talks, with their perpetual clashes of opinion. You always left the cafe feeling hardened for the struggle, with a stronger will, a sharpened purpose, and a clearer head.”
Manet, as the black sheep of the group and so rather recalcitrant by default, was often the protagonist of such theatrical arguments. One evening in the winter of 1870, Café Guerbois transformed into a Madison Square Garden of sorts. The old Manet, visibly triggered by a lukewarm review that art critic Edmond Duranty had written, outright slapped the writer in the face. Then, Duranty, in Shakespearean fashion, challenged Manet to a sword fight right then and there.
It was a very formal affair, with witnesses involved. Manet brought his mate Zola, who produced a handwritten account of the duel. This was sold for £6,000 in an online Christie’s sale just three years ago. Luckily, the rivals managed to settle things promptly, and the café resumed its primary function.
