Café Scientifique was first organised by Duncan Dallas in Leeds in 1998, but is based on the Café Philosophique movement which the philosopher Marc Sautet (1947-1998) started in France in 1992.
It started at a time in the UK where COPUS, the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science[REF](organised by the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science), thought that the public did not understand science and needed to be better educated and lectured to.