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Bo h e M i a n
In Europe, the term bohemian began as an ethnic
designation and evolved into a general epithet
meaning gypsy or beggar. During the middle
decades of the nineteenth century in Paris, the
term was adopted as a way to describe the growing
class of disaffected young artists and intellectuals
populating the garrets and cafés of the
burgeoning metropolis. This usage retained some
of the pejorative connotations left over from earlier
applications, with many condemning these
new bohemians as a morally dubious and parasitic
bunch, though the mantle was soon adopted
by many adherents as a point of pride. Since then
the term has proven both durable and portable
and is used to refer to the spaces and lifestyles of
artists, intellectuals, and aesthetes in a host of
European and North American cities. Bohemian,
then, describes both a distinctive set of cultural
affectations and also the distinctive urban districts
in which adherents congregate. As both a historical
phenomenon and in its present-day incarnations,
bohemia has become an important topic in
urban studies.
The Parisian Prototype
While cities throughout history have played a role
as incubators of cultural innovation, in the nineteenth
century new ideas about the nature of the
artist and his or her relation to the city began to be
Bohemian
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elaborated. This was particularly true in Paris, a
city that Walter Benjamin calls “the capital of the
nineteenth century” and a central site of the cultural
innovations that would constitute European
modernism. Drawing on the freshly minted example
of the Romantic poets, artists began to be
thought of not as skilled crafts people, integrated
into the social system, but as exalted and often
tortured geniuses, liable to be alienated from a
society unable to grasp the contents of their sensitive
souls. What Parisians such as the poet Charles
Baudelaire and the painter Édouard Manet added
to the Romantic paradigm was a distinctively
urban vision, both in terms of the works of art they
produced and the lifestyles that they adopted.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Paris was flooded
with adherents to this design for urban living. This
overabundance of intellectual and creative fervor in
Paris can be attributed to the general tumult of the
period—the spatial revolution spurring the spectacular
growth of the great city and the political
and economic upheavals transforming the nature of
social class relations. Bohemians blurred the boundaries
in an emergent society, evincing the commitment
to cultural distinction of the fading aristocracy,
the individualism of the ascendant bourgeoisie, and
the hedonism and licentiousness of the urban demimonde.
Perhaps because so many were frustrated
applicants to the professions, overeducated and
undernourished within the new urban economy,
bohemians became known for their fierce antipathy
toward the bourgeoisie (which in this case refers to
both the entrepreneurial and the professional class
in Paris) and ethics of instrumental labor.
In Un Prince de la Bohème (A Prince of
Bohemia), Honore de Balzac used the term to refer
to “the vagrant students of the Latin Quarter,”
describing bohemia as a way-station through
which talented youth pass on the way to more
legitimate and remunerative occupational pursuits.
The notion of bohemia as the “El Dorado of
youth” has remained durable since then, although
subsequent observers have tended to reject its
depiction as merely a rite of passage preceding
bourgeois respectability. In the latter 1840s, Henri
Murger, himself an exemplary practitioner of the
lifestyle, produced a collection of vignettes concerning
a cenacle of Latin Quarter artists that
would be collected as Scènes de la Vie de Bohème
(Scenes from the Bohemian Life, 1848). His
accounts were extremely popular, resulting in a