Paris bohemian life in 1850: the underworld Marx lumped together

Parisian bohemia in 1850: the underworld Marx lumped into the lumpenproletariat

In 1852, Karl Marx published The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and, in explaining how a coup d'état had ended the republic, ran into a classification problem. The future Napoleon III had relied neither on the bourgeoisie nor on the industrial proletariat: he had recruited his base from a shapeless mass surviving on the margins. Marx called it the lumpenproletariat and, in defining it, lumped together incivil, beggars, ragpickers, organ grinders, mountebanks, brothel keepers and impoverished bohemian writers. Read today, the list is an unintentional portrait of the seediest side of nineteenth-century Paris.

The word "bohemian" has carried an original misunderstanding ever since. In the fifteenth century, Romani groups arrived in France, and the French, seeing that many came from the region of Bohemia, called them bohémiens. The term came to describe a wandering, free lifestyle, and from there it jumped to the artists who scorned bourgeois convention. A geographical error from six centuries ago still gives its name to the crowd that populated the cafés and the underworld.

Who made up the lumpenproletariat according to Marx

Marx's description was not a picturesque inventory: it was a political diagnosis. That heterogeneous group, without class consciousness and without a steady wage, depended on charity, the informal economy or patronage. That, Marx argued, made it prone to selling its loyalty to the first bidder. Louis Bonaparte understood this and bought its support with discretionary resources. The result was an authoritarian regime that presented itself as the defender of the people against the elites.

The inventory included ruined pimps, swindlers, pickpockets, conjurers and professional gamblers who swarmed through the cafés. Also mountebanks, beggars, procurers and brothel keepers, who formed the network of the informal economy. And precarious trades of daily subsistence: porters, organ grinders, ragpickers who rummaged through garbage, knife grinders and tinkerers. On the same rung were the bohemian writers and marginalized romantics who shared economic instability and contempt for conventional bourgeois society.

Balzac's Paris: shabby bohemia and depressing boarding houses

The literature of the time bore witness to that world. Honoré de Balzac, who did not live to see 1850, portrayed the Restoration in novels such as Lost Illusions and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. His Père Goriot boarding house is the literary version of shabby bohemia: cold rooms, dubious food and neighbors who pretend to be more than they are. The Paris he described was not one of illuminated boulevards, but of wooden houses, worn clothing and toothless prostitutes.

The comparison with the present was made by someone who toured the city in the winter of 1990 and found no trace of the mythologized bohemia: no painters in Montmartre, no musicians in the metro. In his experience, Barcelona's Ramblas or Madrid's Montera street offered more bohemia than Paris. The geography of the bohemian scene, moreover, shifted over time: from Montmartre and Pigalle, in the north, to the Rive Gauche and Montparnasse, in the south, as sensual liberation made it unnecessary for students to live near brothels.

The French language and underworld slang

The discussion drifted toward French spelling, a system that seems designed by an enemy of common sense. Combinations like "eau", "au" and "o" produce the same sound; "ou" is pronounced "u"; "ui" sounds like "ua". It is a language made to train the mouth, not for logic. The anecdote fits the topic: Parisian bohemia was also a linguistic territory, with its own codes and its own slang for survival.

The early twentieth-century song warning about Parisian "apaches" recalled the street gangs that were already antiestéticared back then. The fauna of the margins did not disappear with the Second Empire: it changed name and neighborhood.

From the 1850 lumpen to today's debate on poverty

The conversation jumped from history to the present. Someone proposed projecting Marx's list onto the modern lumpen: street vendors, delivery riders, pickpockets, people who string together one sick leave after another. The comparison is debatable, but it raises an uncomfortable question: if the lumpen of 1850 was a mass without class consciousness, what is today an economy of precarious services with millions of workers without a steady wage?

Another thread argued that the term "reaccionariopobre" (a Spanish coinage for the poor person who attacks their own class) describes someone who attacks their own class while defending the interests of the richest. The discussion descended into mutual accusations and personal insults. There was no consensus. The bohemia of 1850, what a crowd, still serves as a mirror for the class tensions of the twenty-first century.

What remains of that Paris of ragpickers and starving writers? The word remains, geographical misunderstanding included, along with the realization that the margins have always been a political mine for whoever knows how to buy them.