Paris 1850: Marx and the lumpen, bohemia and misery

Paris 1850: bohemia was lumpen and misery

In 1850, Karl Marx lumped together Roma, incivil and bohemian writers to explain Louis Bonaparte's coup d'état. The concept of the lumpenproletariat was born there: a shapeless, diffuse and wandering mass that survived on the margins of legality, informal work and artistic bohemia. The definition was no compliment. And yet, the term "bohemian" that we use today to describe the free, unconventional artist carries a geographical error from 15th-century France: the French believed that the Roma arriving from Eastern Europe came from Bohemia.

What exactly was the lumpenproletariat

Marx described that floating, disorganized mass as a conglomerate of very diverse characters: ruined pimps, swindlers, pickpockets, street magicians and professional gamblers who swarmed the cafés and underworld of Paris. Added to them were itinerant performers, destitute vagrants, beggars, procurers and brothel owners. And on the most precarious rung, trades of daily subsistence: porters, organ grinders, rag pickers rummaging through garbage, knife grinders and tinkers. At the top of that inverted pyramid were the bohemian writers, impoverished intellectuals and marginalized romantics who shared economic instability and contempt for conventional bourgeois society.

The list is meaty. Marx made no distinction between the incivil and the poet: both lived day to day, both despised bourgeois order, both could be mobilized by anyone who promised them something. Louis Bonaparte understood this and used it.

Where the word bohemian comes from

The term comes from a geographical error. In the 15th century, large groups of Romani people arrived in France from Eastern Europe. Since many had crossed or came from the region of Bohemia —today in the Czech Republic—, the French mistakenly believed that was their origin. Hence "bohemian" as a synonym for Roma, and hence, by extension, the free and unconventional artist. If they had been called Sarracena, as one participant wryly points out, the matter would have been even worse.

The etymology traveled to the opera. Puccini's La bohème, La Traviata and that "L'amour est enfant de bohème" from Carmen draw on that imagery. So did one participant's grandmother, who when they came home with a torn shirt or dirty would tell them they looked like "some Hungarians".

Madrid at the time: gallery water and a fiscal wall

Madrid in 1850 was worse off than Paris in several specific respects. There was no running water: people drank from the "viajes de agua", underground galleries of medieval origin that carried water to public fountains, and some nine hundred water carriers —many Asturians and Galicians— hauled it up to houses in jugs. The Canal de Isabel II did not bring water from the Lozoya until 1858. The city remained enclosed within Philip IV's wall, from the 17th century, which was not a defensive wall but a fiscal one: it served to collect consumption taxes on whatever entered.

One participant's description of Paris at the time does not invite romanticism: streets stinking of horse dung, people stinking of sweat, everything poorly lit, toothless prostitutes eaten up by syphilis, wooden houses where you freeze in winter and swelter in summer, fleas, bedbugs and ticks. Little charm, seen through today's eyes.

Père Goriot's boarding house and Balzac's pessimism

The literature of the time portrayed that world with precision. Balzac, who did not live to see 1850, left in Père Goriot a boarding house described as the antechamber to the Purgatory of mediocrity and failure, designed to feel suffocating to a reader of 1840. Even more dreary than its Dickens equivalents, perhaps because Dickens exudes an instinctive optimism that Balzac lacked. Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes completes the bohemian-whorish portrait.

The energy gap that separated two worlds

Mass energy availability multiplied advances. In an Emilia Pardo Bazán novel from 1906 elevators, automobiles and the telephone already appear, but most Spaniards in 1940 had never used any of that. Oil changed everything. Before, there were islands of pogre amid much misery. In rural Spain in 1950 running water was scarce and any village of 2,000 inhabitants had three telephones: the Civil Guard's, the priest's and the bar's. In the United States, in 1914, rural areas were already more motorized than Spanish farmland, with the Ford Model T and the Chevrolet 490. In Spain they had to wait until the seventies, with the SEAT 127, the Ford Fiesta and the Renault 5: more than fifty years behind.

From the Paris of the apaches to the Montparnasse of 1945

The bohemian scene shifted. In Madrid, today we would place it in Malasaña. In Paris it moved from Montmartre and Pigalle, in the north, to the Rive Gauche and Montparnasse, closer to the Sorbonne, from 1945 onward, as the sensual liberation made it less necessary for students to live near the brothels. The brothels stayed in Pigalle; the writers and the low-level drug trade moved to Montparnasse. Earlier, at the start of the 20th century, the Parisian street gangs were already antiestéticarsome: a music-hall song warned "If you go to Paris, papa, watch out for the apaches".

Is anything left of that bohemia? The author of this piece spent nearly two months in Paris in the winter of '90 and found neither painters in Montmartre nor musicians in the metro. He saw more bohemia on the Ramblas or on Madrid's Calle Montera. The fauna of 1850 was something else: lumpen, yes, but with a literary density you can't find today even if you pay for it.