The Great Peace Café – Grand Café de la Paix
With a friend, I often stop by a café near where I live – the Grand Café de la Paix, the Great Peace Café –, to have a few beers. There is a story that has become part of French history from this café.
Normally, I drink three glasses, and my friend does the same; sometimes even four. French waiters never fill the glasses to the brim, allowing customers to savor their drinks slowly. And nibble on peanuts.
The impression that still lingers is not the glasses of beer but… the crispy peanuts, fragrant to the point of being intoxicating. No matter how much you want to eat, the waiter will bring it all out without charging extra. Why is that? Free here, in fact, is just a simple business trick to squeeze more money from customers!
Eating a lot of peanuts will make the guests thirsty, and when they’re thirsty, they just keep saying “Santé” – clinking glasses to toast each other…
But why did the Grand Café de la Paix go down in French history? Because it is related to a famous case: the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century. Back then, according to the records I read, at the end of each day in court, most of the people attending the trial would go to the Grand Café de la Paix. Both the opponents and supporters of Dreyfus laid down their arms and crowded into this place to… enjoy a beer. That’s why it later became known as the “Grand Café de la Paix.”
How did the Dreyfus affair begin? Convicted by a military court in 1894 for allegedly leaking documents to Germany, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish man, was exiled to Guiana, a French South American island near Brazil. After the publication of “J’accuse” – a defense of Dreyfus by the realist writer Émile Zola in June 1899, the French Court of Cassation annulled the 1894 verdict. So, Dreyfus was brought to trial again.
But why in Rennes? Because this capital city of the Brittany region is famous for being quiet, yet it is full of soldiers. Almost all year round, nothing serious happens there. “Perhaps the authorities thought that if they held the trial here in the middle of summer, the case would go unnoticed,” commented Gilles Brohan, a current heritage coordinator in Rennes.
In fact, with the Dreyfus affair, Rennes became the most scrutinized place in France at that time. For an entire month, the city became the center of attention, attracting the press not only from France but also from abroad. Many politicians, intellectuals, high-ranking officers, and figures in the artistic community are also interested in this trial.
Currently, Rennes still commemorates the aforementioned officer with a street –
