Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930 / Edition 1

by Jerrold Seigel

Overview

Exotic and yet familiar, rife with passion, immorality, hunger, and freedom, Bohemia was an object of both worry and fascination to workaday Parisians in the nineteenth century. No mere revolt against middle-class society, the Bohemia Seigel discovers was richer and more complex, the stage on which modern bourgeois acted out the conflicts of their social identities, testing the liberation promised by post-revolutionary society against the barriers set up to contain it. Turning life into art, Bohemia became a space where many innovative and original figures--some famous, some obscure--found a home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801860638
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	09/30/1999
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.08(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jerrold Seigel is William J. Kenan Professor in the Department of History at New York University. He is also the author of The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp and Marx's Fate.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	vi
	List of Illustrations	ix
Part I	Bohemians and Bourgeois	1
Chapter 1	The Boundaries of Bohemia	3
Chapter 2	A Country Explored: Murger	31
Chapter 3	Politics, Fantasy, Identity: Bohemia in the Revolution of 1848	59
Chapter 4	The Poet as Dandy and Bohemian: Baudelaire	97
Chapter 5	The Other Bohemia and Its Uses	125
Chapter 6	Friends and Enemies	150
Chapter 7	"A Fatal Scent of Liberty": Bohemia and the Commune of 1871	181
Part II	Pubilc Worlds and Inner Lives	213
Chapter 8	Publicity and Fantasy: The World of the Cabarets	215
Chapter 9	Compulsion and Disorganization	242
Chapter 10	Cults of the Self	269
Part III	From Bohemia to the Avant-Garde	293
Chapter 11	Temperament, Narcissism, and Provocation	295
Chapter 12	Art and Life in Montmartre	336
Chapter 13	Dissolving the Boundaries	366
	Documentation	399
	A Note on Histories of Bohemia	401
	Notes	405
	Index	441

Editorial Reviews

It deserves to be read . . . for the skill with which it explores an ever-interesting tract of cultural history.
--John Gross, New York Times

The central attraction of this study lies in its imaginative grasp of these remarkable denizens (both declared and undeclared) of bohemia. Mr. Seigel has written a cultural history that respects the complex entanglements found in both life and art, and that is no mean feat.
--Arnold Weinstein, New York Times Book Review

The research that went into Bohemian Paris turns up some treasures--the very stuff of history . . . This highly readable book probes further than any other I know into the reciprocating movements that connect and distinguish bohemia and bourgeois.
--Roger Shattuck, New York Review of Books

This is an enormously useful approach to a complex phenomenon . . . It also brings together a dazzling assortment of individuals, from such well-known figures as Baudelaire, Courbet, Zola, Manet, Verlaine, and Rimbaud to such relatively obscure figures as the writer Henry Murger and the cabaret owner Emile Goudeau.
--Jay Tolson, Nation

From the Publisher

This is an enormously useful approach to a complex phenomenon . . . It also brings together a dazzling assortment of individuals, from such well-known figures as Baudelaire, Courbet, Zola, Manet, Verlaine, and Rimbaud to such relatively obscure figures as the writer Henry Murger and the cabaret owner Emile Goudeau.

Nation - Jay Tolson

It deserves to be read . . . for the skill with which it explores an ever-interesting tract of cultural history.

New York Times - John Gross

The central attraction of this study lies in its imaginative grasp of these remarkable denizens (both declared and undeclared) of bohemia. Mr. Seigel has written a cultural history that respects the complex entanglements found in both life and art, and that is no mean feat.

New York Times Book Review - Arnold Weinstein

The research that went into Bohemian Paris turns up some treasures—the very stuff of history . . . This highly readable book probes further than any other I know into the reciprocating movements that connect and distinguish bohemia and bourgeois.

New York Review of Books - Roger Shattuck

It deserves to be read... for the skill with which it explores an ever-interesting tract of cultural history.

— John Gross

New York Times

This is an enormously useful approach to a complex phenomenon... It also brings together a dazzling assortment of individuals, from such well-known figures as Baudelaire, Courbet, Zola, Manet, Verlaine, and Rimbaud to such relatively obscure figures as the writer Henry Murger and the cabaret owner Emile Goudeau.

— Jay Tolson

Nation

The research that went into Bohemian Paris turns up some treasures—the very stuff of history... This highly readable book probes further than any other I know into the reciprocating movements that connect and distinguish bohemia and bourgeois.

— Roger Shattuck

New York Review of Books

The central attraction of this study lies in its imaginative grasp of these remarkable denizens (both declared and undeclared) of bohemia. Mr. Seigel has written a cultural history that respects the complex entanglements found in both life and art, and that is no mean feat.

— Arnold Weinstein

New York Times Book Review