1939- The Occupation (1939-1945)
Jean-Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir got warm at the Café

"At the Café de Flore, we have gone through the Occupation as if it was the ocean, the blemishes of the events broke on the sheating" Henri Pelletier (painter).

In 1939, Paul Boubal purchased the Café de Flore.
The big stove, in the middle of the Café, was a food for long permanencies and the writers didn't deprive themselves of benefiting from it. Simone De Beauvoir was actually one of the first to adopt it. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: "We installed ourselves completely: from 9 to 12 am, we worked, then we had lunch, and at 2pm we came back and spoke with friends we had met, until 8 pm. After having dinner, we received people with whom we had fixed an appointment. This could seem strange to you, but at this Café, we were at home". Another important detail is to mention: under the Occupation, we never met any German in the Café. Sartre invented the "existentialism". He asserted that "during 4 years, the road to the Café was for me the Road to Freedom".
At that time, the Café looked more like an English club than a Café: those lifelong friends or even those who met the day before gathered around tables and were from 10 to 12 people. Anyone could be one of them on condition that he knew how to make himself modestly or brilliantly accepted. At that time, Léon Paul Fargue and Maurice Sachs went there everyday. Simone Signoret wrote in her memoirs: "I was born in March 1941 at night on a bench of the Café de Flore".
The Occupation, at the Café, seemed free; "Prévert's band" on one side, "Sartre's family" on the other, also the "Communist group" whose "chiefs" were Marguerite Duras, Dionys Mascolo, Roger Vailland, Daquin.

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