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This article aims to study the functioning and the actors of a participative cafe located in a struggling rurban territory through a sociohistorical approach, participant observation, interviews, and the consultation of archives.It poses the question about the possibility of the long-term establishment of an alternative organization to the public and commercial sectors that would be able to collaborate with them and give them a new dynamic in order to make society differently.We observe that it is possible to make this type of place work under certain conditions, despite powerful individualist, neoliberalist, urbanist, and globalist currents. However, this model is limited and weakened by various communicational, economic, social, temporal, interpersonal, and ideological issues.