The Clubs of Paris
Paris is often overlooked as one of the major worldwide centres of clubs – the focus is typically on the Anglosphere, from North American cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Toronto, to former British imperial cities like Cape Town, Hong Kong, Kolkata, London, Mumbai and Singapore. Yet Paris has over a dozen historic clubs, and a flourishing, if low-key, club culture.
The dining room of the Travellers Club of Paris. (Photo credit: Francis Hammond.)
The first recognisable English-style club in France was the Cercle de l’Union, founded in 1828, by aristocrats including Comte Jean Greffulhe, the 9th Duc de Gramont, the 2nd Duc de Mouchy, Alfred d’Orsay, and Talleyrand.
There was a curious circularity to this early French club, which consciously drew its inspiration from the English clubs. Valérie Capdeville has highlighted how the evolution of a distinctive English way of socialising in the 17th and 18th centuries itself evolved from the complex way that English mannerisms both shunned and emulated different parts of social developments in France. And Brian Cowan has argued that the English club culture was a masculine response to a French culture that was seen as feminine – and certainly, the earliest French clubs of this model were all men-only.
The Cercle de l’Union can be viewed against the backdrop of the post-1814 Bourbon restoration of the French monarchy, and its accompanying aristocratic reassertion; a state of affairs disrupted by the July revolution of 1830, and consequent migration of the monarchy to the Orléans line. This meant that within two years of the Cercle’s inauguration, several of its founder members were no longer based in Paris: Gramont went into exile with Charles X in Edinburgh and then Vienna; Orsay divided his time evenly between Paris and London; and Talleyrand was sent to London as Ambassador to the Court of St. James. This left the Cercle depleted in numbers by the 1830s.
However, a string of other fashionable aristocratic clubs evolved in the 1830s, including “La Patate” (“The Potato”), the Cercle Agricole (Agricultural Circle), the Cercle de l’Union Artistique (the Circle of the Artistic Union), and the Cercle de la rue Royale (the Royal Road Circle). These would all merge with the Cercle de l’Union, to form the present-day Nouveau Cercle de l’Union, which has been based in their own wing of the Cercle de l’Union Interalliée (see below) since 1979.
The restaurant of the Jockey-Club. (Photo credit: Twitter account of the Cercle Montherlant.)
One club from the July monarchy era which survives as an independent entity today is the Jockey-Club. This began in 1834 as a horse-breeding society on the outskirts of Paris, in Chantilly, but rapidly grew into an accompanying dining society, and then a club. Its 19th century reputation was for boorish noblemen; famously, the Paris premiere of Wagner’s Tannhäuser descended into fiasco after the Jockey Club skipped the first act for dinner, as was their habit, and were so enraged to have missed the customary ballet which gave them a chance to ogle the dancers of the opera company, they disrupted the performance with aggressive heckling, and even a stage invasion. Today, the Club maintains a more discreet presence, with a clubhouse near Marigny Square.
Paris’s two other surviving aristocratic clubs are much later additions, from the Third and Fifth Republics – the Travellers Club was founded in 1903, and from the following year onwards, has been based in the Hôtel de la Païva on the Champs-Elysées, named after the courtesan Esther “La Païva” Lachmann, who built it. More recently, the Club de la Chasse et la Nature was founded for hunters in 1966, overlooking the Gardens of the National Archives in Le Marais.
Main staircase of the Travellers Club of Paris. (Photo credit: Travellers Club.)
Aside from the burst of aristocratic associationism in the 1830s, English-style clubs were mainly adopted quite late in France – certainly later than in America, or in other European countries like Spain and Portugal. The bulk of the historic French clubs were large facilities inaugurated in the Third Republic of the late 19th or early 20th centuries.
The first of these was the Racing Club de France, founded in the Bois de Boulogne in 1882. It has since broadened out into a full-services athletic club, with two more clubhouses in the 7th and 17th arrondissements. This was followed by the Cercle National des Armées, whose origins lay in a presidential decree from Jules Grévy in 1887; though it was not fully developed until the 1920s. Like the Racing Club, it is divided across three sites, with clubhouses in the 6th , 8th and 15th arrondissements, offering hospitality to military officers. Also inspired by the Racing Club was the Polo de Paris, set up by 20 polo enthusiasts in the Parc Bagatelle by the Bois de Boulogne in 1892, where it is still based today. There is also the Standard Athletic Club, just outside of Paris in the town of Meudon – still within Íle-de-France – established in 1890.
Principal clubhouse of the Cercle National des Armées, in the 8th arrondissement. (Photo credit: Privateaser.)
One of the grander “large facility” clubs is the Automobile Club de France, founded in 1895, two years before its London equivalent, the RAC, to encourage the pioneering hobby of motor cars. Since 1898, it has occupied a vast, 15,000² metre facility on the Place de la Concorde. Acting in unison with automobile clubs worldwide, it was instrumental in organising races (such as the Monte Carlo Rally), as well as the early regulation of car racing.
Another distinctive “facility” club is the Société Sportive du Jeu de Paume, established in 1908. This is closely modelled on the earlier racquet clubs found in North American cities such as Boston, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia and St Louis; and it is found in the Chaillot district.
Rear of the Cercle de l’Union Interalliée, from the gardens; also showing the sports complex below. (Photo credit: TripAdvisor.)
But the most conspicuous of today’s historic Paris clubs was a relatively late addition: the Cercle de l'Union interalliée – literally inter-allied circle – which was founded in 1917 as a cross-allied club for English, American and French officers, on furlough from the Western Front in Paris. Based in the Hôtel Perrinet de Jars, close to the Élysée Palace, after the Great War it transitioned to serving as a wartime reunion club, with Marshal Ferdinand Foch becoming its second President. The Club has a larger membership than most other Parisian clubs – some 3,300 members – and has substantive gardens behind the main mansion, as well as a large underground sports facility beneath.
Also worthy of mention are the clubs which were set up for ex-patriate communities in Paris, the two Scandinavian clubs being most prominent. The Swedish Cercle Suédois was founded in 1891 and occupies a large suite of rooms on the Rue Rivoli overlooking the Tuileries Garden by the Louvre; while the Cercle Norvégien de Paris was created in 1926, and is now hosted by the Cercle Suédois.
The restaurant of the Cercle Suédois. (Photo credit: Restoaparis.)
The wartime occupation of Paris proved challenging to the city’s clubs. Members were first called away on war service, and in several cases went into exile. Some clubhouses were seized by the Nazis, as with the Cercle de l’Union Interalliée, whose building was made to function as a club for senior German officers in the greater Paris area. And other clubs which continued more discreetly during the Occupation were severely hit by wartime rationing. This meant that after the Liberation of 1944, many of Paris’s clubs effectively had to restart their organisation, in a way unparalleled by the much briefer occupation of Paris in 1871.
Paris saw significant regeneration and gentrification during the Mayoralty of Jacques Chirac (1977-95), and the tail-end of that era saw the first major new clubs in a generation, on the city’s outskirts. The Saint James Club is located within a 50-room château-hotel in the 16th arrondissement, and was launched in 1991. That year also saw the creation of the Paris Country Club in the western suburbs just outside the city boundaries, in the commune of Rueil-Malmaison. More recent club creations have included the novel Silencio in 2011, designed by and co-owned by film director David Lynch; and the more recent co-working oriented we are_, in 2021.
Beyond the capital, France has never had the same strong culture of provincial clubs found in India, Italy, Spain or the United States. Nevertheless, there are some examples of English-influenced clubs outside Paris. The earliest of these was in the Basque Country: the Cercle Anglais of Pau. This had its roots in an English reading room dating to 1828, before becoming an English literary society in 1856, and then a club in 1859. Further afield, however, the French were relatively late adopters of clubs, the most obvious examples being the Cercle de l'Union of Lyon in 1917, and the Union-Club Bordelais of Bordeaux in 1926. This makes a contrast to the neighbouring Francophone countries with strong club cultures – the French-speaking parts of Switzerland have clubs dating back to the 18th century, and Belgium to the early 19th century. And it contrasts even more to the literally hundreds of English-style clubs which spanned every province of Spain by the 1880s.
This all serves to underline France’s relative resistance to Anglophone forms of sociability for much of the 18th and 19th centuries – aside from an embrace among Parisian aristocrats of the 1820s and 1830s; a group who were far more likely to have interacted with their English counterparts. It was only between the 1880s and 1910s that the Parisian upper-middle classes became late adopters of clubs, as a form of sociability, and then in a way which stood out from most provincial French cities. Nevertheless, the legacy has been to leave Paris with a concentration of large and elegant city clubs, which fit into the grander architectural plan of Haussmann’s Paris.