1The title at the head of this essay may seem to go against something I wrote in a book now more than twenty years old, namely that “bohemia cannot be charted, graphed, and counted, because it was never wholly an objective condition1” But it fits well with something else I noted there, namely that locating bohemia on a map was a favorite activity of many who spoke about it in the days when both the name and what it described were new. For bohemia’s friends it was bounded by such things as work and courage, necessity and gaiety, for its enemies, by laziness, self-indulgence, impudence and shame. The kind of map such terms projected was not geographical, but cultural, social, and I think importantly, political and moral. Putting bohemia inside such a space was a way of recognizing what was surely one of its most essential features, namely that it was both real and symbolic.

2Bohemia was and is the name for a certain kind of life, the actual existence of individuals and groups who live and act in certain ways. But its historical importance rests no less on its representative function, its ability to point toward something significant, not just about the forms of life to which the label has been applied, but also about the wider society and culture in which it came to prominence. The single interpretive principle that seems to me most enlightening in considering the whole phenomenon of bohemianism is one announced by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who wrote in his famous essay on the Balinese cockfight that “societies, like lives contain their own interpretations. We have only to learn how to gain access to them2.” Taking inspiration from Geertz, I think we need to recognize that bohemia’s large place in modern cultural history derives at least partly from its function as a self-generated symbol of modern life, and in particular of what we might call bourgeois life, the form of life that many people in the nineteenth century and since have identified with modernity itself. In many ways that form of life is still ours, and with it the bohemianism it spawns. Bourgeois life famously generates internal movements of opposition and criticism that call attention to its inner conflicts and inconsistencies, but many of these have turned out to be reconcilable with it, permanent features of bourgeois existence rather than alternatives to it, often to the dismay of those who give voice to them.

3With that preface, I want now to offer you one possible map of bohemia (Figure 1). It is rough and speculative, and perhaps better called a diagram than a map, but this seems to me appropriate for a phenomenon that was always slippery, and in which reality and fantasy were often difficult to disentangle. It consists, as you see, of a group of boxes, each one representing some category of people, and of a circle drawing parts of each into a single territory. The boxes indicate components of bohemia, the circle the way that it took in portions, but never the whole, of each component part. There may well be other boxes that ought to be included, and although I have tried to suggest something of the relative importance of each box by making some larger and others and others smaller, I make no claim that these proportions are in any way precise. Perhaps some should be enlarged and others reduced ; what counts is the general topography.

4Let me pause just long enough over the categories to call your attention to them. The ones I’ve made the largest are artists and writers on the one side and young people generally on the other ; their associations with bohemia were highlighted by early observers, George Sand, Balzac, Félix Pyat, and Murger. Among those who emphasized the place of eccentrics and visionaries was Champfleury, Murger’s one-time roommate and the chief model for Marcel in his stories. Champfleury’s examples included vegetarians, hallucinators, circle-squarers, and those who conversed with great dead men, but he brought the category of political radicals into the picture too in the person of Jean Journet, the colorful and excitable Fourierist apostle. Journet was not the only rebel against authority in Champfleury’s and Murger’s circle, and radical but unorganized politics became still more central to bohemia after 1850, in the life and writings of Jules Vallès. A number of figures in the Commune of 1871 had evident bohemian connections before the uprising and much commentary afterward insisted on them. The category of itinerants was deeply tied up with bohemia from the start, since the word bohème in French, as everyone must know, meant a gypsy. It was extended in the Middle Ages to other migrants and street people, ranging from musicians and acrobats to some who seemed more often shady or dangerous. It was the unsettled, ambiguous position of such people that writers had in view when they began to refer to artists and pseudo-artists as what Félix Pyat in 1834 called “the bohemians of today.” One thing the two groups were said to have in common was that both had to invest great ingenuity in just getting by, leading Murger to declare about his bohemians that “their everyday existence is a work of genius”. Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, described by more than one mid-century observer as the arch-bohemian, applied the same judgment to those who lived by way of ingenious and inventive strategies of a different kind, profiting from the scraps and leavings of city life, such as a woman who turned thrown-away lemon peels into liqueur, using a formula left behind by her chemist husband, or a man who killed stray cats and sold them to restaurants that would stew them up as rabbit. Privat called these ways of getting by métiers inconnus ; the ones he described were all from far down the social scale, but others found counterparts to them in what some called existences problématiques higher up, quite well off people whose means of support was similarly mysterious or invisible. Henri de Rochefort and others referred to these as la grande bohème, an upper-class bohemia. Among those whose association with bohemia owed something to their non-standard sexual identities were Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, and some denizens of Montmartre before and after World War I. Failures and those whose youthful rebellions led them to be rejected by their families, a more serious matter in the nineteenth century than it has become since, were cited not just by bohemia’s enemies, such as the Concourt brothers and Edouard Drumont, but also by Murger, Champfleury, and Jules Vallès. There were women as well as men in every group, but the restrictions placed on young women’s lives, at least in those parts of society where parents were able to impose norms of respectability on their children, long curtailed both their numbers and the degree to which they could reflect on and develop bohemian identities. The noticeable weakening of these restrictions at the end of the century, and especially after World War I, created deep worries and controversies, as in the scandal created by Victor Margueritte’s novel of 1922, La garçonne, the history of a young woman who sought the same kind of independence and sexual freedom as did many young men3.

5Bohemia, then, drew, and in many ways still draws, from all these categories, never wholly encompassing any. That this was so is the reason why we must recognize that bohemianism was never only some one thing, but many things. There were and are not only different bohemias but competing bohemias, often asserting their status as the “true bohemia”, a term that appears many times in memoirs, stories, and essays. “We are bohemia”, Rodolphe says in Murger’s play, “La bohème c’est nous”, but Champfleury labeled his eccentrics as “bohèmes veritables” and Vallès insisted that the harder, more radical and disillusioned bohemia he inhabited was true where Murger’s was false, just as a young writer in an obscure journal of the 1860s proclaimed that the popular understanding of bohemia as pleasure-seeking and indulgent failed to encompass what genuinely marked it, namely hard and determined work. To all these diverse claims we need to reply that there was no “true bohemia”, first because each was true in its way, and secondly because the phrase itself is what the philosopher Charles Stevenson once called a “persuasive definition”, an attempt to appropriate a broad category for some particular purpose. What we need to ask at this point is what it was in all these categories that allowed each of them to partake in some way of the identity of bohemian, what “family resemblance” – to adopt Wittgenstein’s term – they all bore.

6The answer I want to propose to this question will not wholly distinguish inhabitants of bohemia from some others who had no association with it. But I think this is a virtue rather than a defect, because it points to what it was about bohemia that made it so available as an interpretive symbol for the society within which it achieved renown and notoriety. What the members of all these component groups had in common was that something about their way of life detached them from people considered to be more ordinary and more socially integrated, and that because of this, all of them were in some way thrown back on themselves. Champfleury said about his eccentrics that they lived in a different mental universe from others, and that this separation made them appear and act differently too. The same description can apply, mutatis mutandis, to all the other groups, either in the way they conceived and presented themselves, or in the view that others had of them. Its applicability to artists in particular grew more direct and emphatic as romantic aesthetic theory and practice sought ever-new ways to liberate creative activities from inherited rules and directives, and from traditional patronage relations. Doing so was defended both as a way to bring forth styles appropriate to contemporary life, as Victor Hugo demanded in his prefaces of the 1820s, and as necessary to allow individual talents to blossom and develop in their own ways. One locus classicus of this attitude was Alfred de Vigny’s famous preface to his drama Chatterton, which mounted a plea on behalf of all those whose identity as poets stemmed not from achievement, but from something in their inner natures that filled them with “endless reveries” and “infinite imaginings”, making them unfit for ordinary life. Vigny urged his readers to recognize such people’s right to the title of poet, and to society’s support, even if they might never produce work that others would value. As he put it : “Who gives us the right to snuff out the acorn by saying that it won’t be an oak ?” Taken as a whole, views such as Hugo’s and Vigny’s assigned not just aesthetic significance to what made artists singular people, but broader cultural and social import too. With the single exception of non-standard sexual identities, for which such claims could not be lodged until much later, writers who associated each of the other categories with bohemia found a similar social significance in the distinctiveness of the individuals who made it up. All, certainly including the failures, revealed the increasing degree to which modern society threw individuals back on themselves, generating demands that society in turn accept its responsibility for them. The connection between such images of people located at the margins of society can hardly be missed. That the move away from typical Old Regime social institutions and practices meant that society depended more on the talents and initiatives of individuals, even to the point of losing any collective identity, had been recognized since the eighteenth century. The approval liberal economists gave to freeing up individuals from traditional ties and attachments was matched by the horror expressed for instance by many critics of Turgot’s attempt to dissolve maîtrises et jurandes in 1776, who proclaimed it would reduce society to a heap of disconnected and gnawing individuals4. The revolutionary slogan of careers open to talent and the abolition of the system of estates and corporate identities introduced a turn to individualism that was both deplored and defended at the time and that has been highlighted by many writers since ; by the 1820s it was coming under attack not just from conservatives but also from early socialists such as the Saint-Simonians. Art and culture constituted an eminent field for the flourishing of such individuality and the success it might promise ; there were no better models of the influence and renown that individual talent and effort could achieve than Balzac and Hugo.

7It may be objected at this point that artists were all the same not individualists in the manner of the bourgeois from whom they sometimes insistently distinguished themselves, because the values on behalf of which they did their work were social and interpersonal, involving sympathy and mutual concern mixed with an affirmation of communal experience and a an explicit rejection of crass egotism ; this was true in various ways, of Hugo and Balzac, as well as Vigny, Gericault, Delacroix and Courbet. Bohemia too often put mutuality and shared sympathy, rather than mere individuality, at the center of its implicit schema of values. Today one might refer to at least some of the groups in my diagram as “communities”, and although I think that the word has been debased by the careless way it has been used over the past generation or so, it fits some of these groups pretty well. Bohemia itself has often had a determinedly communal side, evident in many descriptions of it, by Gautier or Nerval, by Murger, Nadar, or the later chroniclers of Montmartre. The importance of bohemian circles as support groups for their members is evident in many nineteenth-century accounts, and it persists to the present, as the play Rent which only recently closed in New York, testifies.

8This communal side of bohemia must be given its full weight, but we need to guard against what is often assumed to be a corollary of doing so, namely that this dimension of bohemia cleanly separates it from the bourgeois life around it. The claim that it does has often been advanced of course, rooted partly in the language of students and ateliers, partly in socialist theory, both of which insistently contrast their communal and humanitarian perspectives with what they proclaim to be the crass and unrestrained individualism of the bourgeoisie. And to be sure it is easy to cite examples of bourgeois who were willing to cut their ties with others in pursuit of ambition or profit. But a general equation of bourgeois values and practices with such individualism simply cannot stand up to scrutiny, certainly not in the France that first gave birth to bohemia. To make clear why it cannot, I need to devote some attention to the French bourgeoisie, often and properly recognized as the counterplayer of bohemia, but not always for the right reasons.

9First of all, France before the 1860s, and in many ways until the 1880s, still retained the basic forms and features of the Old Regime economy. Despite the title of a once famous book, no conquering bourgeois had come forth to transform production and exchange either before the Revolution or in the half-century that followed it. Before the coming of an extensive railroad network under the Second Empire, France lacked the basic precondition of industrial growth that England already possessed in the mid-eighteenth century, an integrated national market. France was partly a country of manufacture to be sure, but on the traditional model that located such work chiefly in the countryside and left regional economies largely independent of each other5. In economic terms the French bourgeoisie before the railroad age was little different from its eighteenth-century ancestor, which Pierre Goubert described as a pillar of the Old Regime and with few exceptions quite at home inside it6. Partly for these reasons the old story that attributes the fall of the monarchy to the efforts or needs of a rising bourgeoisie has by now been abandoned by most historians. My own view is that the Bourbon state collapsed under the weight of its inner contradictions, the mix of privileges and exemptions it had been concocting for centuries in order to survive, and that eventually rendered it unable to finance its own ambitions at home and abroad. The feelings and actions of supposedly rising bourgeois had little to do with it.

10This does not mean that the Revolution did not effect an important change in French social relations, and especially in the lives of bourgeois ; it did. But that change, as Adeline Daumard notes in her still unsurpassed study of the Parisian bourgeoisie before 1848, was fundamentally a political one, the collapse of the old Regime system of privilege in which many bourgeois had participated. It was the loss of the old pole of attraction this system constituted that altered the bourgeois world, far more than economic transformation. Now bourgeois had only their own efforts and independent achievements to support their ambitions ; they were, to use the phrase I employed before, thrown back on themselves7. It is hard to argue that anything like a modern bourgeoisie exercised political power before the 1870s. What was called the bourgeois monarchy, established after the uprising of July, 1830, was a narrow regime whose chief supporters, as André-Jean Tudesq and others have shown, are best described not as bourgeois but as grands notables, a category that included many more old noble landowners than manufacturers. It was chiefly dissatisfied bourgeois, often very solid and respectable but who paid too little tax to qualify them to vote or hold office, who animated the reform movements that eventually led to the regime’s collapse in 1848, aided by an economic crisis that followed lines familiar from many previous ones.

11I emphasize these things because they help to understand certain features of the bourgeoisie that are more directly relevant to bohemia’s relations with it. During the Old Regime, pressures to free up individual initiative and improve the economy by abolishing guilds and other beneficiaries of privilege had come much more from reforming bureaucrats than from bourgeois outside the government, some of whom were among the opponents of Turgot’s abolition of guilds in 1776. Like these ancestors, nineteenth-century bourgeois exhibited a loyalty to communal and associational values no less marked than their interest in individual ones. In France as elsewhere in Europe, the decline of Old Regime forms of community, guilds, corporations, estates, was accompanied by the rise of a new form of sociability that was characteristically bourgeois, namely the voluntary association, formed by people who came together to pursue both individual and social improvement. The membership of such groups was chiefly bourgeois, although their principles of organization were egalitarian. Formed in cities, they dedicated themselves to education, enlightenment, and the spread of knowledge that would be useful to their members and their towns. They were not antiindividual, but they saw individual betterment as part of social improvement. Many called themselves “emulation societies”, pointing to a mode of competition that was valued for its ability to inspire and stimulate others rather than as a kind of struggle with only one victor8. In a certain way bohemian groups such as Murger’s “Water Drinkers”, about whom I will speak in a few moments, were emulation societies.

12Indeed, the very notion of association that inspired socialist thinkers including Marx had clear bourgeois roots. That this is the case emerges even from accounts that seek to deny it, for instance William Sewell’s in most ways fine study Work and Revolution in France. Sewell portrays bourgeois values and attitudes as essentially individualistic, arguing that only working-class groups preserved the more social and communal orientation characteristic of Old Regime institutions. But he gives little attention to the actual bourgeois supposed to embody these values, and at a crucial moment he is forced to admit that association as an explicit notion became part of working-class vocabulary chiefly under the influence of the bourgeois Saint-Simonians9. Although the basic principles of this movement came from the highly original and eccentric nobleman who gave his name to it, it was his bourgeois followers, Saint-Amand Bazard, who attended the Ecole Polytechnique, and Prosper Enfantin, the son of a banker, who developed the idea of association in their lectures and writings. They surely felt that contemporary society was too individualistic, full of antagonisms, and they blamed bourgeois in part for this ; but it was bourgeois made selfish by the spirit of the Old Regime they indicted. They looked to the development of industry and to the heroic visionaries who would lead it to counter these defects and to nurture sociability and cooperation. Their views had important things in common with a later bourgeois social theorist, Émile Durkheim, who saw modern society and the individualism it fostered not as weakening sociability but as providing the grounds for a new and more powerful form of it, if only society could become conscious of its real nature.

13Against this portrait of a bourgeoisie more diverse, more traditional, and more ambivalent than some common images suggest, let me now return to bohemia as its counterplayer. The best prism through which to focus on this relationship is, I think, the career, writings, and influence of Henri Murger. In important ways it was Murger who put bohemia on the map, who established it in the public consciousness and provided a guide to its nature and significance, both for some who were themselves bohemians and for a great many others who were not. Murger’s account was the touchstone for speaking about bohemia for those who sympathized with him, such as Émile Goudeau, the founder of Montmartre cabarets, for internal critics such as Jules Vallès, and for outright enemies of bohemia such as the Goncourt brothers. Some past historians have looked more negatively on him, as a mere popularizer or an agent of romanticization who pulled the teeth from what otherwise could have been a threatening reality. Such views are understandable given Murger’s rather slight status as a literary figure, and the weakness of his political and in some cases personal commitments. But I think they sorely miss his real significance, the part he played in bohemia’s history perhaps less through insight than through certain spontaneous features of his personality10.

14Murger’s map was not quite the same as the diagram I have provided today, but that is understandable, since it was drawn from inside bohemia, whereas mine comes from outside. I think all the same it highlighted similar features from this different point of view. Murger’s map was implicit in his stories and tales, and made more explicit in the preface he wrote when they were collected as Scènes de la vie de bohème in 1851. Before looking directly at it we need to say a word about Murger himself, since for him, as Champfleury noted, to write about bohemia was to write about himself : his stories were always slices of his life. That word is ambivalence. Murger was deeply conflicted about bohemia, as much aware of its dangers and delusions as of its often fleeting pleasures. He repeatedly proclaimed his resolution to leave it behind and enter into a more regular kind of existence, but he never summoned up the ability to do so. One reason was that he never found it possible to write consistently about anything else. As he often avowed, he was a writer with a limited imagination ; bohemia provided him with material he could employ because living inside it constituted what he called a perpetual inebriation : “Each day brought a new elegy, a terrible drama, a grotesque comedy.” Rodolphe’s relations with Mimi, modeled on Murger’s with Marie Fonblanc, illustrate what this involved. Despite what has sometimes been claimed, their love was no idyll of youth and poetry, but a tense and conflicted encounter between an aspiring and anxious writer in need of stimulation, and a woman portrayed as incapable of loyalty, whose simultaneous physical excitability and emotional coldness sent the couple up-and-down like a yo-yo, rendering any genuine intimacy impossible. Rodolphe several times resolved to break the affair off, but he was no more able to do so than Murger was to abandon bohemia itself, because as he put it in his book, leaving Mimi would have meant an “end to those agitations and those fevers of youth” without which his imagination remained limp and powerless. It was something close to this that one of his biographers had in mind when he said that Murger was constantly drawn back into bohemia as if by “a nostalgia for disorder”.

15This ambivalence was one important element in what I think we should call the moral architecture of Murger’s tales. Despite his initial description of bohemian life as the form of existence through which young artists without independent resources must pass, issues about artistic creativity have very little to do with this structure ; indeed they hardly appear in his writings. Instead this moral architecture derives from a series of social and ethical polarities. All were in some way related to the one I have already noted, which opposed bohemia as a path into ordinary life with bohemia as a permanent condition. Among them was a simultaneous disdain and fascination for money and what it can buy. Murger’s characters declare their contempt for money and those who pursue it, but some of his most amusing scenes revolve around their obsession with getting and spending it. When Marcel appears jingling a batch of coins (the proceeds from selling the only picture on which he has worked for months as a shop sign for a grocer), they elicit a chorus of fascination : “Good-day gentlemen !” “What a beautiful voice !” “How pretty… one would think they were bits of the sun.” Items of luxury provoke similar outcries : admiring a turkey stuffed with truffles in a charcuterie window (lovingly described by Murger), Marcel exclaims : “I have seen impious people eat some without kneeling before it.” Faced with such scenes as these, some contemporary readers accused Murger of hypocrisy. But so simple a response veils important things, not just about Murger himself, but also about the different groups he recognized as making up the bohemian world he chronicled.

16Flanking the category of artists on their way to recognition were two other kinds of bohemians. On the one side were those he called the stoics and martyrs of la bohème ignorée, the unknown bohemia. Some of these were not artists at all, but simply permanent rebels against ordinary existence, refusing to make any peace with it. others were artists, some genuine and serious, but so determined to reject any compromise with society at large that they refused to take the steps or make the connections that might have led to the future they desired. Among bohemians of this stamp were people like those with whom Murger briefly came together in the society called the Water Drinkers in 1841-42, a kind of mutual support group devoted to resisting temptations, especially the temptation to gain income by doing hack work. Their concern was to preserve their purity, both artistic and moral. Murger probably exaggerated the degree to which their idealism mired them in impracticality, but the appreciative terms in which he depicted their morality probably reflected the actual behavior and attitudes of some of the models, notably Joseph Desbrosses, a young sculptor referred to as “le Christ”, whose death from turberculosis in 1844 deeply affected Murger. In the book Murger devoted to the group, one of them told how their families’disowned them, horrified by what they saw as the immorality and self-indulgence of artists. In fact, however, “our existence is solid, calm, morally regulated. our practices are those of a religious community, abstinence included”.

17Opposite these determined stoics stood the group Murger called the amateur bohemians. Like the bohème ignorée some were apprentice painters or writers and some not, but both came from families well-off enough to support them in some degree, so that for them entering bohemia was a choice rather than a necessity. Among them were Alexandre Schanne, the son of a toy manufacturer whom Murger portrayed as Schaunard, and Charles Barbara, an aspiring but well-connected young writer with means enough to support himself, the Barbemuche of the tales. Whereas the Water-Drinkers, like Murger himself, came from the lower reaches of the bourgeoisie or the upper tier of artisans, these amateurs had more solid and comfortable backgrounds. They chose bohemia partly out of a sense of solidarity with other young people, and partly in order to declare at least a temporary independence from their families, and from their beckoning bourgeois destinies. For them la bohème served as what Erik Erikson would later call a moratorium, a time of experimentation and deferral. Pleasure and self-indulgence were part of this moratorium, including the sexual experimentation made possible for bourgeois provincials in Paris by the presence of young working-class women such as the models for Mimi and Musette, to whom middle-class men could offer favors and support.

18One reason that the bohemia pictured in Murger’s tales combined puritanical and hedonistic values was that the differing social origins of its members were a source of contrasting moral orientations. There are good reasons for lower middle-class young people in search of an independent career to live frugally, since if they fall into debt they have few resources for getting out of it. Abstention is a logical and prudent strategy for them, because giving in to the material temptations of a great capital threatens the future they imagine for themselves. By contrast people at the same age from more comfortable bourgeois backgrounds can expect more support from their families. They are likely to have known material comforts and enjoyments in their childhood, so that to renounce them for a time may still leave them with a sense of entitlement to them. Rather than a sign of hypocrisy, the simultaneous rejection and fascination for money and what it can obtain reflects the presence in Murger’s bohemia of two distinct moral attitudes, with connections to different regions of bourgeois life.

19I do not want to push this sociological equivalence too far, even if it corresponds pretty well to the case of Murger’s characters, since not all individuals fit the model it provides. But we need to recognize that frugality and indulgence are both elements of bourgeois life more generally, a life that often proclaimed and proclaims its dependence on work and saving on the one hand, and its aspiration to abundance and satisfaction on the other. Put in other terms this is the essential bourgeois polarity between production and consumption. The two are deeply connected and intertwined, each requiring the other, as both history and economic theory make clear. To be sure, they can come into conflict with each other, and specific individuals or groups may sometimes pursue one in ways that downplay the other. But it is equally typical for bourgeois to be drawn at once to both, creating in them an ambivalence that they may either try to repress or to confront. Murger, who had something in him of both the stoic Water-Drinker and the hedonistic amateur, was one who felt this ambivalence deeply, and who confronted it, consciously or not, in his tales.

20Let me try to sum up and clarify what I am calling the moral structure of Murger’s bohemia by restating the three chief polarities around which it was organized, and elaborating a bit on them. The first was the uncertainty about whether bohemia was a route into some more regular kind of life or an alternative to it, a temporary passage or an independent and for some inescapable form of existence. Murger lived out this dilemma in his own history and it finds many expressions in his writing. The same can be said about other and in some ways quite different kinds of bohemians, about whom I have no time to speak, but one was surely Jules Vallès11. The second opposition is that between abstemiousness and indulgence, embodied in the difference between the “stoic” bohemians and the amateurs. This contrast partook of the larger bourgeois duality of production and consumption, and in doing so it embodied the alternative and sometimes contradictory promises of bourgeois life. But it also points to two conflicting critiques of that same life. The first rejected being bourgeois for its rigidity, its harsh discipline, its failure to provide its members, especially but not only its young ones, with the satisfactions they feel they need. The second critique however castigated and often feared bourgeois existence because the temptations raised by those very satisfactions threatened to weaken and corrupt people, especially those who needed to retain their strength and harbor their resources in order to make the slogan of careers open to talents apply to them. If I had time I would try to show how this duality remained as an animating difference within French radical politics, visible for instance at the time of the Commune of 1871, when some figures espoused a puritanical and Jacobin kind of organization that demanded a rigid discipline, while others sought an anarchistic freedom that opened the way to satisfactions denied by ordinary life12.

21The third polarity set individual liberation against social obligation. Here too we have an alternative whose terms are sometimes sharply opposed and sometimes dialectically connected. Like bourgeois society, bohemia was seen as individualistic and self-indulgent by its critics, from Barbey d’Aurevilly to the Goncourts to the anti-Semite Edouard Drumont, and it would be easy to cite examples of egoistic behavior within it. But Murger is only one among the chroniclers who saw it instead as a world where people sought to fulfill their individual destinies through strategies of mutual support. That such strategies might fail, leaving people isolated and threatened with permanent separation from society, is shown by Murger’s attention to the possibility that young bohemians might be disowned by their families and left permanently to their own limited devices.

22Putting bohemia on the map, then, means recognizing both its intimate connections to bourgeois life and the distance its denizens sometimes felt or took from it. Some were drawn to bohemia or fell into it because something about their way of being excluded them from the ordinary world around them, and this is true of some of the groups in my diagram. Even they could be seen as deeply connected to that world, however, as when Privat d’Anglemont described the inventors of métiers inconnus as hard-working innovators much like the bourgeois they seemed not to resemble. For others however bohemia was less destiny than choice, often although not always temporary. For them it provided a space within which to live or act out the ambivalence they felt toward the bourgeois world around them, an attempt to come to terms at once with its promise and its contradictions. Murger belonged to both groups, just as he embodied in some way all three of the polarities I have tried to describe. His centrality in the history of bohemia, his role as its exemplary mapper, rests on these features of his life and work.