Guinguette

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Guinguette atmosphere in the picture The Breakfast of the Rowers by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Terrace of a cafe on Montmartre (La Guinguette) by Vincent van Gogh .

Guinguettes are popular taverns and eateries that have sprung up in the suburbs of Paris and other cities in France, where the French go out to eat and drink. Step by step they spread across the whole country. The tradition has lasted for almost 100 years and has recently been rediscovered.

history

The name is likely derived from Guinguet , a simple, light white wine from Île-de-France . A similar term is goguette , but this refers to a choral society.

In the 19th century, before many villages and hamlets were incorporated, commercial goods, especially alcohol, were cheaper outside the city limits than in Paris itself, as they were free of state taxes. This led to a boom of the Guinguettes in front of the city gates, which were especially crowded on Sundays and public holidays, when the Parisians were looking for diversion from everyday life and wanted to get drunk cheaply. The development of the railroad in the 1880s and the construction of the Gare de la Bastille station, with its many trains from the eastern suburbs such as Nogent-sur-Marne , favored the success of the Guinguettes.

Today the expression is still used for refreshment places close to the water, e.g. B. Open-air festivals, used throughout France.

location

Most of the Guinguettes can be found on the banks of the Seine or the Marne , and some on the outskirts of Rouen . However, proximity to the shore is not a prerequisite, as the picturesque guinguettes by Le Plessis-Robinson show, who went about their business under the chestnut trees.

Tradition - downfall and return

From the late 19th to the first half of the 20th century, Guinguettes were places of interest for painters like Renoir and van Gogh . In the inter-war period, French cinema found an attractive motif in the Guinguettes (see films). Even Georges Simenon's novel La Guinguette à deux sous plays in such a tavern.

The television behavior and the swimming ban in the rivers (lack of water hygiene and water pollution) in the 1960s heralded the decline of the popular excursion restaurants. Increasing shipping traffic and the associated risks (accidents, drowning) did the rest. This is how the Guinguettes entered into nostalgic memories, as the French writer Michel Audiard once complained.

There was a renaissance in the 1980s. Especially in the bends in the Marne, Créteil , Champigny-sur-Marne , Joinville-le-Pont , Nogent-sur-Marne, Pont-d'Ouilly and Champigny , many Guinguettes have been open regularly on weekends since 2008.

Even the Los Angeles Times now recorded the return and gradual rise of these taverns and reported about them in a column in 2011.

Movies

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry in Pierer's Universal Lexikon, Volume 7. Altenburg 1859, p. 768.
  2. ↑ Tanz in den December In: faz.net of December 17, 2017
  3. ↑ The “Dictionnaire de la langue français” from 1750 defines Guinguette as a “small cabaret in the suburbs of Paris and its surroundings, where hamdwerkers drank in summer and on Sundays and holidays. It seems to come from what was sold there: a vicious local green wine called ginguet that could be found in and around Paris. ”The 1930 “ Le Larousse du XXe siècle ” defines it as“ Cabaret in Suburbs where people drink, eat and dance on public holidays. ”( Histoire et patrimoine des guinguettes et des bords de Marne ( Memento of 7 August 2006 in the Internet Archive ))
  4. ↑ a b Henri Joannis Deberne, Danser en société , Ed .: Christine Bonneton, 3/1999, Paris, ISBN 2-86253-229-0
  5. ^ Colin Jones Paris - Biography of a City , Allen Lane 2004, ISBN 0-7139-9321-9 , p. 226.
  6. ↑ Tanz in den December in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on December 10, 2017, page 69
  7. ↑ French travel back to simpler time by Devorah Lauter; Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2011.