The 1850 bohème: the marginal crowd Marx lumped together

The 1850 bohème: the marginal crowd Marx lumped together

In 1850, Karl Marx dissected Louis Bonaparte's coup d'état and came across a social mass he described as "shapeless, diffuse and wandering." In that list, the father of communism included gypsies, incivil, ragpickers, organ grinders and impoverished bohemian writers. The mix was no accident: they all shared life on the margins of legality, informal work and artistic bohemianism. The term "bohemian," in fact, originates from a 15th-century geographical error: the French believed that the gypsies arriving from Eastern Europe came from the region of Bohemia. The label traveled from the Romani people to free and unconventional artists, and from there to Puccini's opera.

The lumpenproletariat: the crowd Marx portrayed in 1850

Marx's description in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a portrait of Parisian misery. He speaks of "ruined rascals, swindlers, pickpockets, jugglers and professional gamblers" who swarmed the cafés and the underworld. He adds "mountebanks, lazzaroni, beggars, pimps and brothel keepers." And he goes on: "porters, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders and tinkers." The last group, the most striking for a cultured reader: "bohemian writers, impoverished intellectuals and marginal romantics" who shared economic instability and contempt for conventional bourgeois society. All of them, according to Marx, formed the mass that supported Bonaparte.

The term "bohemian" comes from the gypsies. 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 (present-day Czech Republic), the French mistakenly believed that was their origin. That is why they called the gypsies "bohemians" and, by extension, artists, intellectuals and people with a free and unconventional lifestyle. The word's evolution passed through several historical milestones until reaching Puccini's opera La Bohème, which according to one contribution to the discussion makes him the best Italian opera composer, even above Verdi.

Paris, 1850: a stage of misery and splendor

Paris in 1850 was "dull, shabby and boringly depressing," according to a description circulating in the discussion. The streets reeked of horse dung, people smelled of sweat, everything was poorly lit, dirty and dangerous. "Toothless prostitutes eaten up by syphilis, wooden houses where you freeze in winter," the comment adds. The city was at once decadent and glorious, "the most European there is," according to another contribution. It is the same Paris of Victor Hugo and Balzac, the one of the wretched and the courtesans, the one that portrayed the literary bohemia.

Bohemia was not only a Parisian phenomenon. In Madrid, the nocturnal, broken, hungry and grotesque Madrid, traversed by two bohemian figures who move like shadows between violence, misery and artificial light. It is the scene that opens Valle-Inclán's Luces de bohemia (Bohemian Lights): Máximo Estrella and Don Latino de Hispalis staggering along a sandy and lonely street, broken streetlamps, everything closed shut, windows and doors. The moon over the eaves of the houses, splitting the street in two. From time to time, the sound of asphalt. An epic trot. Roman soldiers. Shadows of guards. The fritter stall. The same marginal crowd, relocated to the capital of Spain.

From ragpickers to aristocrats: bohemia as a pose

Bohemia also had its aristocratic version. The discussion mentions the Morenés, the Andrada-Vanderwilde, the Eulate, the MacMahons of Neguri, the Marquises of la Motilla from Seville. "Aristocrats feel bohemian," one contribution quips: renting the bullring to have drinks. "And I like it because nobody is a socialist." The thousand-peseta banknotes, which in 1926 were equivalent to half a year's wages for a worker, are still held by the same people today in euros. Bohemia, as a pose, always had someone to pay for it.

The economic context of 1926 helps to understand the distance. The average worker's wage was around 4 to 6 pesetas a day. A monthly office salary ranged between 125 and 200 pesetas. Holding a 1,000-peseta banknote in your hand was equivalent to half a year's full salary for an average worker. "1,000 pesetas were sent by daddy the notary or the doctor; ordinary people weren't in a position to be bohemians," one contribution summarizes. Bohemia, in its romantic version, required a patron or a wealthy father.

Bohemia today: from Montmartre to Malasaña

The bohemian scene that in Madrid we might place today in Malasaña moved in Paris from Montmartre and Pigalle (north) to the Rive Gauche and Montparnasse (south) after 1945, as sensual liberation made it less necessary for students to live near the brothels. The brothels stayed in Pigalle and the would-be writers and the petty trade in soft drugs moved to Montparnasse. Bohemia, as an urban phenomenon, mutated with the city.

The idealization of bohemia came later. "A generation or two later, bohemian life had already been idealized and romanticized by the well-to-do bourgeoisie of electric light and the railway," one contribution notes. Papa Goriot's boarding house, the antechamber of the Purgatory of mediocrity and failure, felt stifling to a reader of 1840 who was already living in a rather dreary world. Today, by contrast, bohemia is sold as a lifestyle. The very one Marx lumped into the lumpenproletariat.

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What remains of that crowd? The bohemia of 1850 was, above all, poverty with pretensions. Incivil, ragpickers and writers shared the same misery, although only the latter left works behind. The label "bohemian" was born of a geographical error and ended up designating those who did not fit into the bourgeois order. Today, when bohemia is talked about, it is worth remembering that Marx lumped it together with the pickpockets. It was not a metaphor.