The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter bears witness to the painful process by which intellectual laborers had to submit to market forces to earn their keep. At the same time as nineteenth-century artists and writers found themselves forced to appeal to a nouveau riche bourgeoisie with more money than education, they also found themselves faced with increased competition. In the early decades of the nineteenth century in France, a more democratic educational system and rising literacy, coupled with an entrenched gerontocracy blocking career routes in administration and business, pushed increasing numbers of young men into the literary and artistic professions. In Murger’s work—as in Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education—we see the effects of this process in the typical plot of the young man arriving in Paris from the provinces, armed with paintbrush or poem but little in the way of financial support from his family. Whereas some of the great writers of the period, such as Flaubert, were from the upper middle class and enjoyed a private income that alleviated the pressures of the market, freeing them to pursue their idiosyncratic visions, others, like Murger himself, the son of a concierge, were forced to live off an art that barely offered a living.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has described how the new market system proved liberating for those artists able to exploit it, but alienating for those who failed to succeed in either flattering the bourgeoisie or imposing their talent. Some members of this latter group expressed their alienation through the philosophy of l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake, a radical notion of artistic autonomy that valorized exactly those aesthetic features (hermeticism, difficulty) least likely to prove accessible to a wide audience. We see this refusal of the market reflected in Murger’s Water Drinkers, the ascetic bunch who look down on Jacques when he consents to sculpt funerary monuments in order to pay for a tomb to his beloved Francine. Like Jacques, other alienated artists formed a new intellectual proletariat, selling their services in exchange for a meager existence. Most of Murger’s characters fall into this latter category, including Rodolphe, comically forced to write a manual for his uncle, a stove manufacturer, who locks his flighty nephew in an apartment and takes away his clothes in order to make sure that the poet will finish the work as ordered.
The middle decades of the nineteenth century were a time of intense artistic ferment in France. Big debates raged: the artistic scene was divided between Classics and Romantics, while partisans of “art for art’s sake” opposed proponents of a more socially committed or realist artistic practice. We find few echoes of these conflicts in Murger’s novel, however. Although, after overhearing the boisterous bohemians holding forth at the Café Momus, Barbemuche declares that he shares their tastes, we never learn what these tastes might be. The few glimpses Murger provides of the work produced by his characters—such as Schaunard’s “imitative symphony” for the piano, entitled “The Influence of Blue in Art,” or Marcel’s painting “The Passing of the Red Sea,” which he is willing to transform into a Napoleonic battle picture if it will gain him entrance into the Salon—verge on outright parody of Romantic tastes. A great deal of the novel’s comedy, and perhaps its pathos as well, derives from the reader’s suspicion that despite all the noble suffering for the sake of their art, Murger’s bohemians are really third rate.
Indeed, this novel is more about money than about art. The reader learns almost nothing about the aesthetic philosophy of the Romantic movement, but gains all sorts of insights into the cost of living in Paris in the 1840s, when an attic room rented for 25 francs a month and 40 sous (2 francs) bought bread, wine, cold cuts, tobacco, candles, and firewood. (Not the least interesting aspect of the novel’s financial focus is the evidence it provides of an economic gender gap: if a moderately successful play earned its male author 40 francs, a woman making artificial flowers, as Mimi does, had to work two days in order to purchase a single issue of a poetry journal in which her lover’s verse was printed. The poor remuneration of women’s work explains why the female characters in novels from the time are so dependent on men.) The plot of nearly every story centers around efforts to beg or borrow enough money to pay the rent, have dinner, buy some flowers, or consult a doctor. Whereas Murger’s characters seldom speak of their actual art or ideas, they dwell obsessively on material objects, food foremost among them. These bohemians are more moved by the sight of a dinde truffée in a caterer’s window, its pink skin affording “visions of the Périgord tubercles with which it was stuffed,” than by all the paintings on display at the Salon.
A particularly telling chapter, “Floods of Pactolus,” begins with Rodolphe receiving the princely sum of 500 francs. “I have not trafficked in my pen,” he assures a suspicious Marcel; the gold was given to him “by a generous hand” to allow him to gain an honorable position from his writing. “Sheltered from the material embarrassments of life, I shall set to work seriously,” he declares. Rodolphe’s first resolution is to renounce Bohemia. He will dress in a black frock coat like everybody else. He will husband his resources. Rodolphe and Marcel begin their existence as honest gentlemen by going out to dine at a good restaurant, for by dining well they save the added expense of supper afterward. Instead of paying to cross a toll bridge, they take a free but less direct route and are then obliged to hire a cab to get to their appointment on time. Pennywise and pound foolish, they hire a manservant to relieve them of domestic chores, but waste all day arguing with him and are unable to work. Within a week, all the money is gone. A hilarious scene of accounting ensues, and amid all sorts of ridiculous expenses, they discover that their servant has committed the unpardonable sin of paying the landlord. Their fortune squandered, the artists return to bohemian life.
This parody of bourgeois economy reflects the aristocratic pretensions of Bohemia. In their aversion to thrift, the bohemians practice a regal art de vivre that defies the frugal shopkeeper mentality that had come to define the nineteenth century. But despite their allergy to bourgeois proprieties, Murger’s bohemians are just as obsessed by money, just as materialistic, as their landlords. The opera, which was actually based on Murger’s play, ends on the pathetic note of Mimi’s death. The novel, however, strikes a different note. In the last story, written expressly for the novel, the characters renounce their bohemian ways once and for all, finally entering the “official world” of bourgeois convention. Marcel is accepted by the Salon and pays his debts by selling his pictures. Schaunard and Rodolphe likewise gain fame and fortune (one assumes by adapting their art to bourgeois tastes). In the last exchange of the novel, Rodolphe proposes returning to their old haunts, but Marcel refuses. “I no longer care for anything but what is good and comfortable,” he declares.
Are the bohemians hypocrites? Was Murger? In his first published poem, entitled “Apostasy,” Murger attacked a revolutionary who renounced the cause, but by the late 1840s the writer had moved away from radical politics. He wrote the last chapter of the novel in 1850, after the further disillusionment of the Revolution of 1848. (In an additional story, not included in the novel, entitled “His Excellency Gustave Colline,” Murger mocks the Revolution of 1848 by having the bohemians use it as a pretext for not paying their debts, and by showing Colline winning a post as ambassador for the revolutionary government on a bet.) Given his own mostly unsuccessful attempts to establish himself as an upstanding bourgeois, there is little doubt that Murger, like his characters, saw Bohemia as a stage, and one best left behind. Those who dally too long in its depths, whether through pride or poor luck, risk winding up in the Hospital or the Morgue rather than the Academy. Despite his own warnings, Murger would be one of Bohemia’s victims.
Perhaps, though, the opposition between bohemian and bourgeois is a false one. As Seigel explains, Bohemia is the place where members of the bourgeoisie work out their ambivalent relation to their own class status. Bohemians are not just financially dependent on the bourgeoisie, they are the bourgeoisie: the mysterious origins of Rodolphe’s 500 francs, along with his uncle the stove manufacturer, attest to the