Café de Flore opened in the 1880s on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain, named after a sculpture of the goddess Flora visible from its windows. For most of its first century, it was just another Paris café. Then the existentialists arrived.

Sartre, Camus and Simone de Beauvoir had originally favoured Les Deux Magots just down the street, but when that became too bourgeois for their tastes, they relocated to Flore. The singers and chanteuses followed, among them Juliette Greco, who made the Saint-Germain terraces her living room. Whether this exodus actually happened as described is debated, but the café ended up more famous, and remains so today.

Since 1994, it has awarded the Prix de Flore to promising new writers, keeping one foot in its literary past. VoiceMap's tours trace this story of shifting intellectual fashions, placing Café de Flore within the broader Saint-Germain neighbourhood that gave postwar Paris much of its creative identity.