Tragedy and farce, the worst of pretension and the purest of genius, idealism and dogged amorality - for almost two centuries bohemian life has been a bundle of contradictions. Yet ever since Henry Murger’s vignettes set in Paris’s Latin Quarter appeared in a radical Parisian newspaper between 1845 and 1849, the public has been drawn to stories of artists and intellectuals on the fringes of mainstream society. Murger, an impoverished French writer, was the first genuine chronicler of Bohemia, its original embedded reporter. Murger’s writings were largely autobiographical. His stories were populated by characters closely modelled on himself and his friends – a group of convention-defying, free-spirited Parisian artists, invariably a cup of coffee away from starvation.
 
It was Murger’s 1851 book Scenes de la vie de boheme which popularised the vision of the flourishing and combat-ready Parisian counterculture, an affront to the bourgeois establishment and a mortal enemy of the philistine. A few decades later, Murger’s book would become the basis of Puccini’s La Boheme, first staged in Milan in 1896. It should come as no surprise that Puccini was taken by Scenes de la vie de boheme. Murger wrote with wit, gusto and honesty. His stories of love, sex, art and survival were joyful and tragic in equal measure. The humanity of his characters was palpable, their youth and passion infectious.
 
And so it is thanks to Murger that the original meaning of the word ‘bohemian’ has been eclipsed by its subsequent uses. Today the word ‘Bohemia’ does not immediately evoke that region of the Czech Republic renowned for its glass-making and hot springs. Instead, we imagine a group of young, unconventional artists complete with loose morals, outrageous clothing, seedy apartments and heated cafe marathons. Before Murger, the French spoke of ‘bohemians’ in reference to gypsies, who came through the Czech region to France in the 15th-Century, always remaining on the margins of French society. Bohemian gypsies were believed to be people with mysterious occupations and no fixed addresses - thieves, musicians and performers. After Murger, bohemians were usually imagined as a different species of nomads - young, irreverent and resolutely French.
 
In 1849 a writer in Parisian newspaper La Silhouette noted that Bohemia ‘was in the department of the Seine. It was bordered on the north by the cold, on the west by hunger, on the south by love, and on the east by hope.’ In the eyes of many 19th-Century observers, the French were the natural bohemians. The English could never quite qualify, for they lacked the essential bohemian qualities - melancholy, gaiety, irreverence and sentimentality. ‘It is to France, then, that we must turn for studies of this strange kingdom of poetry and lawless art, of loves and duns, of banquets and starvation’, wrote Scottish author and critic Andrew Lang in 1908.
 
Murger himself, however, thought that his fellow bohemians were not a new breed, but rather the artistic heirs of Homer and Michelangelo, Moliere and Shakespeare. ‘Today, as of old’, he wrote in 1851, ‘every man who enters on an artistic career, without any other means of livelihood than his art itself, will be forced to walk in the paths of Bohemia.’
 
In 19th-Century Paris, the bohemians’ place of choice was a cafe. There they would congregate for hours, frightening other clientele and driving waiters certifiably mad. Just like their more contemporary counterparts, 19th-Century bohemians drank, smoked, took drugs and were perilously addicted to coffee. Their behaviour and clothing were designed to outrage. A true bohemian, wrote Murger, could not take ten steps without meeting a friend, or thirty without encountering a creditor. The bohemians’ language was rife with paradox, slang and razor-sharp irony. Bohemians, men and women alike, worked hard on expanding a list of their sexual conquests. The best of them lived for art, the worst got trapped in what Murger called ‘the martyrology of the mediocre’, succumbing to their illusions, lack of talent and inaction. Poverty, hunger and disease claimed countless bohemian lives. Murger himself died at the age of thirty-eight, despite the success and affluence brought to him by Scenes de la vie de boheme.
 
For all its perils, the lure of Bohemia has been extolled by artists across the world from the beginning of the 19th-Century onwards. Once you have tasted bohemian life, wrote American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, nothing would ever seem so sweet.
 
Bohemia, o'er thy unatlassed borders
How many cross, with half-reluctant feet,
And unformed fears of dangers and disorders,
To find delights, more wholesome and more sweet
Than ever yet were known to the "elite."
 
The image of a starving artist, drunk on love, fed by art, clothed in defiance, is a colourful and enduring cultural myth. From Paris in the 1830s onwards, it has re-emerged in various nations and at various times as a powerful alternative to a life of consumption and convention.
 
In 2000, American journalist David Brooks published a book titled Bobos in Paradise. According to Brooks, ‘Bobos’ were bourgeois bohemians, descendants of yuppies, people who combined affluence and security with unconventional life-styles. Bohemianism, it seemed, has finally been swallowed up by the mainstream.
 
Yet are we really prepared to believe that there are no true bohemians left today? Here is the test. If you had enough money to buy either art supplies or a dinner, which would you choose? Most true-blood bohemians would go hungry without thinking twice, for poverty is their faithful companion, a Grand Old Dame who limps alongside them as they traverse society’s margins equipped with ambition, defiance and never-failing ingenuity. And so the lure of Bohemian life will not disappear as long as at least some of us crave a life where, in the words of Murger, there is nothing to drive us forward but courage, ‘the virtue of the young’, and nothing to hang on to but hope, ‘the wealth of the poor’.
 
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