What’s a bohemian? In one sense, Bohemia is a very real place—a Czech region smackdab in the middle of Europe. There existed a common misconception that Roma travelers originated from this area. They were dubbed bohémiens in French, just as the English word “gypsies” stemmed from the misassumption that the Roma came from Egypt. “Bohemian” eventually expanded into a catch-all for anyone who, like the Roma, lived on the fringes of society: vagrants, criminals, prostitutes, and other denizens of the shady demimonde.
In the early 19th century, however, “bohemian” came to be associated with a specific subgroup of outsiders. The title of Puccini’s 1896 opera—a shortened version of the French phrase la vie de bohème—refers to the unconventional lifestyles of poor young artists residing in Paris. They were flamboyant figures, most of them male, and many of them students. They grew their hair long and dressed in dandyish attire, or else in the shabbiest of outfits (where we get our fashion of “boho-chic”). They engaged in eccentric behaviors, throwing wild parties where they took hashish and drank punch from skulls.
Most importantly, they subjected themselves to abysmal poverty in order to devote themselves fully to their art. But this freedom could come at a terrible cost, as Puccini’s opera warns us.
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The forerunners of beatniks, hippies, and hipsters, bohemians emerged at one of the first points in modern history when such a countercultural movement was possible. In 1830, the Second French Revolution installed a new monarchy with a liberal-minded king who was well-disposed to the growing class of bourgeois professionals. In La bohème, Rodolfo bows sarcastically to the portrait of Louis Philippe on a coin, mocking the middle-class mores this “Citizen King” represented.
Granted, the bourgeoisie has always encompassed a wide range of backgrounds and incomes. (Although “bougie” signifies “ostentatiously wealthy” today, the vast majority of contemporary Americans are technically bourgeois.) But for the disillusioned youth of 1830s and ’40s France, “bourgeois” was less a social class than a shorthand for a set of objectionable values: economic stability, domestic comfort, and old-fashioned aesthetic tastes. Bohemians were intrepid individualists who sought to escape the expectations of bourgeois orthodoxy, expressing their non-conformity in their unusual habits and creative endeavors.
Without a regular salary, however, bohemians were forced to live in squalor. They occupied cheap apartment houses in the Latin Quarter, the university district surrounding the Sorbonne. Artists could only afford dirty attic rooms known as a “garrets.” These were on the least desirable floors, accessed by several flights of stairs. They were blusteringly chilly, the winter wind ripping through uninsulated eaves. With little to spare for fuel, bohemians often resorted to burning their furniture—just as Marcello threatens to set fire to a chair in Act I of Puccini’s opera.
When they weren’t cooped up in these freezing, dingy domiciles, bohemians frequented Paris’s iconic cafés. These were spaces for artists and intellectuals to exchange ideas, often speaking in their own specialized slang. Cafés were treated as ersatz studios where bohemians read, wrote, sketched, and painted. To save money, one member of a cohort would buy a cup of coffee and camp out at a table shared by several friends, none of whom intended to order anything.
One of the most popular of these venues was the Café Momus in the Latin Quarter, the setting of Act II in Puccini’s opera. Named after the Greek god of satire, the Momus was a regular haunt of Henry Murger, the author whose works served as the inspiration for La bohème.
In the 1840s, Murger published a series of semi-fictionalized stories detailing his first-hand experiences as an authentic bohemian. The characters (hereafter referred to by the Italian versions of their names given to them in the opera) were based on the author’s friends and lovers. The tales were adapted into a wildly popular musical play in 1849 and, two years later, compiled into a collected volume titled Scènes de la vie de bohème.
Murger’s preface to this anthology provided a kind of bohemian field guide, laying out a taxonomy of the different “subspecies.” First, there were the “unknown bohemians,” who made up the majority. These were hopelessly mediocre talents who would never gain recognition. Indeed, the only artist of any lasting fame to emerge from early 19th-century bohemia was the poet Charles Baudelaire. The rest faded into obscurity.
Then there were the “amateur bohemians”—poseurs from well-to-do families who were simply slumming for their own amusement. As soon as the going got tough, they got real jobs and retreated into bourgeois respectability. We still see them today in the guise of trust-fund hipsters.
“Real bohemia,” Murger’s third category, comprised the lucky few who not only had artistic potential, but also the dedication needed to achieve anything. For them, bohemia was not an end in itself, but a necessary stop on the way to success—a proving grounds and test of perseverance. In Murger’s stories, Marcello enters his Red Sea canvas (which he’s busy painting as the curtain rises in Puccini’s opera) several years in a row at a competition held at the Louvre. The classically minded judges reject its wild Romanticism—the dominant style among bohemian artists at the time. Eventually, Marcello sells it to a greengrocer as a shop sign.
It demanded this kind of resourcefulness to survive. Many unknown bohemians remained stubborn idealists, refusing all commercial work in the name of High Art. They died pointless martyrdoms, succumbing to illness and even starvation. Real bohemians, on the other hand, were scrappy pragmatists, supporting themselves with side gigs. Rodolfo, for instance, edits a lady’s hat magazine called The Beaver, mentioned in Act I of La bohème. Murger’s original stories typically revolve around the characters’ elaborate schemes to raise a few francs—usually with the aim of wooing some mademoiselle.
The women associated with bohemia—almost none of whom were artists—fell into their own category: the grisettes. Christened for their cheap grey dresses, grisettes were provincial girls who moved to Paris to seek labor in factories. Or else, they performed piecework trades like Mimì, who makes artificial flowers in addition to her employment as a seamstress.
In the popular imagination, the grisettes represented sexual liberation—unlike prudish bourgeois daughters, they were open to liaisons with artists and aristocrats alike. In reality, their situations were probably fairly bleak. Grisettes depended on the support of men to supplement their meager wages, which were sent back home to their families.
Some women, like Musetta, lived entirely off the largesse of suitors. Dubbed lorettes, they weren’t quite courtesans, but engaged in multiple simultaneous relationships. Their promiscuity—glorified in Musetta’s waltz number “Quando me’n vo’” in La bohème—was simply a means of getting by. If not some gentleman’s bed, then a hospital bed awaited them.
Indeed, Mimì’s death to tuberculosis, a bacterial infection of the lungs, was all too common among bohemians. Murger recalled a funeral for one of his friends. Ever short on cash, the author was unable to tip the gravedigger. “No matter,” the digger replied, “next time will do!”
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“Times are not always gay in bohemia,” observed Murger, who called it “a charming and a terrible life.” At the same time, he marveled at bohemians’ endless adaptability and invention, remarking that “their daily existence is a work of genius.” They were the first to merge life and art. Their very existence—their eccentric clothes and mannerisms, their lively café conversations, their fantastical parties, their passionate love affairs—was treated like a grand opus.
No doubt this was a coping method to deal with the wretchedness of their struggles. In Puccini’s opera, the characters are constantly aestheticizing the banal world around them, playing make-believe and waxing rhapsodic about the most mundane objects and occurrences. “O beautiful age of deceits and utopias!” sings Marcello, “One believes, hopes, and all seems beautiful.”
This bohemian tendency to merge life and art is conveyed in HGO’s production of La bohème by Tony-winning director John Caird. The set, designed by David Farley, is constructed almost entirely of painted canvases—as if to say that the rooftops and restaurants of Paris are created by the characters themselves. We see the sooty city as these desperate bohemians would wish to see it, not as it truly is.
But in the end, Rodolfo discovers too late that no amount of poeticizing can preserve Mimì from the inevitable consequences of bohemian life. His odes to her pale skin and frigid hands merely disguise the symptoms of consumption.
In the original stories, Mimì is coquettish and even cruel, closer in temperament to Musetta. And while Rodolfo feels her death deeply, his mourning is short-lived—we get the sense that he'll find another grisette and forget her. Puccini and his librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, took a turn from Murger’s cynical vision. In their Italianized take on the tale, Rodolfo and Mimì’s love lives on forever, immortalized in the sweeping score. Hearing Rodolfo’s cries of “Mimì!” in the final scene, it’s impossible to imagine that he’ll ever be able to move on.
Perhaps these revisions betray a bohemian-style impulse on the part of Puccini and his collaborators to mask the uncomfortable historical reality—to romanticize what were, in actuality, the transactional relationships typical between bohemians. Yet the enduring popularity of La bohème speaks to the importance of the opera’s slightly rose-tinted depiction. We continue to be inspired by its evocations of true love—by its ability to rekindle the purest and profoundest feelings of youthful ardor in our hearts. “The sublimest poem,” as Rodolfo puts it, “is the one which teaches us to love!”
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Further reading:
Malcolm Easton, Artists and Writers in Paris: The Bohemian Idea, 1803-1867
Joanna Richardson, The Bohemians: La vie de Bohème in Paris, 1830-1914
Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930