The Café Waiter: Working-class hero? Towering Figure of Haughty Frenchness?

Café waiters are omnipresent in French life and in French culture as a sort of regiment – serried ranks of men in their black-and-white uniform with tremendous esprit de corps. But who are they really, Muriel asks, and how did they become such stock figures of Frenchness, and even objects of study f...