Past the anarchist flyers that paper the Rue Debergue and through the back door of local cultural centre La Parole Errante, you’ll find café-librairie Michèle Firk. Opened in spring 2012 on the site of the old Méliès studios, this leftist café and bookshop seems to belong to another era: standing at the counter before a steaming samovar, you’ll hear phrases like ‘revolutionary vanguard’, ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ or ‘counter-globalisation’. A favourite hangout for Parisian radicals, the space feels almost clandestine, a vestige of a more insurrectionary Montreuil.
The café is furnished with battered carpets as well as shelves and tables crowded with books, journals and pamphlets: anarchist, communist, feminist and historical tracts as well as revolutionary staples like Orwell, Exley and Martinet, Arabic poetry, detective novels, anarchist comic books and more. Named for Montreuil’s own anti-colonialist writer and militant turned revolutionary combatant – who died after joining the Guatemalan guerrilla movement in 1968 – Michèle Firk is one of the few radical bookshops still operating in Paris, a haven for politically minded Parisians and an important resource for scholars of revolutionary history.