140 YEARS
RETROSPECTIVE
AT THE CROSSROADS
OF THE ARTS
For 140 years, Les Deux Magots has stood at the crossroads of the arts. With literature and jazz in the limelight, the literary café serves as a stage for an enormous cultural theater where superb plays are performed. Enjoy your front-row seat in the pages to follow. From the silk and novelty shop it once was, home to the extravagant rustle of fashion’s first frills, to the great literary café it is today, Les Deux Magots has always trained its bellows on the hot coals of creativity.
To celebrate its 140th anniversary, the iconic café tells its story in a tribute to the unfettered minds that reinvented the world at its tables. The arts in every form join forces here. Writers, filmmakers, musicians, thinkers, painters, sculptors, architects, stylists collectively embody the life of the café.
FACE-TO-FACE
ENCOUNTERS
Prepare for some disconcerting face-to-face encounters. You will hear the musical musings of the fi rst modern poets, like Verlaine and Rimbaud, the more thunderous voices of the surrealists, the trompinette of polymath Boris Vian, of course, the velvet of Gréco, the thoughts of Sartre and Beauvoir, the ballads of the Beatles and Brassens, the manouche of Thomas Dutronc, the pen of Jérôme Garcin, the keyboard of J.J. Abrams who wrote the screenplay for Star Wars : The Force Awakens, the “Action!” of Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, all the way to the smartphone pings of the influencers as they strive for eternal glory on social media with the Deux Magots logo.
A TRAVEL
THROUGH TIME
It is indeed 2024. You traveled through time, but stayed in the same place, beneath the gaze of the two Chinese statues. Waiters no longer have to call out “Heads up !” as they hustle to the floor. Everyone knows that culture is simmering, bubbling, boiling here in the minds of those we recognize, and the minds of those we don’t–yet.
Les Deux Magots, a name that reaches from France to the far corners of the earth, has been inspiring for 140 years. And that’s not going to end today. With its feet firmly planted on its history, its soul rooted in its neighborhood, the literary café towers worldwide as a timeless bastion of creation.
Photos credits : © Bernard Lipnitzki / Roger-Viollet ; © Pierre Jahan / Roger-Viollet ; © Robert Van Der Hilst/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
« To be Parisian is not
to be born here,
but to be reborn here »
Sacha Guitry