How the French Learned to Love Coffee

Join Montclair University professor Julie Landweber in examining the adoption of coffee into French culture and diet in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A beverage initially mistrusted by the French (for its bitterness, health risks, and associations with the Ottoman Empire) attracted a burgeoning culture of consumers interested in exotic novelties, gave its name to the new space of the café, and by 1789 had become a beloved domestic beverage in France. Not content with transforming their own attitude toward coffee, through their colonies and mercantile actions the French also enabled the spread of coffee-drinking across the Atlantic and around the world in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Admission: Free Presented By: Passaic County Board of Chosen Freeholders Reservations are required. Seating is limited.