Bohemia

Bohemia - the state of mind and way of life began in about 1830, the year of literary and political revolution and continued until 1914, the year in which the 19th century really ended. For men of genius and distinction like Gautier, Baudelaire, and Verlaine, Bohemia was a golden but transient experience. It was a time and place where misfits spent their lives outside society, choosing penury, squalor and freedom over prosperity and convention. "The Spirit of Bohemia" focuses on what we consider to be the true Bohemia - Paris of the 1800's - the original Bohemian period. London of the late 1800's will also be covered, as well as several contemporary periods including post-World War II, Beat and Psychedelic movements. -- http://www.bohemiabooks.com.au/eblinks/spirboho/

The first usage of the term "Bohemian" (meaning, literally, "Gypsy") to refer to the disaffected and impoverished young artists and students of Paris has been traced to a popular French journalist and dramatist, Felix Pyat, who wrote a series of essays about "kids today" in a publication called Nouveau Tableau de Paris au XIX Siecle in 1834. He described this personality type as "alien and bizarre ... outside the law, beyond the reaches of society ... they are the Bohemians of today."

The term did not catch on in a huge way, though, until 1845 when a writer named Henry Murger, himself a bohemian (and the model for his own character Rodolphe), began producing a series of stories about himself and his friends for a small Paris newspaper called Le Corsaire-Satan. These stories were later collected in book form and staged as a play, Scenes de la vie de Boheme, which was a tremendous hit and an almost unbelievably definitive influence on French society. Today this play is mainly known as the source of the Puccini opera 'La Boheme', but the opera was not introduced until 1896, when the Bohemian youth movement had already been old news for decades. -- http://www.litkicks.com/BeatPages/page.jsp?what=LaBoheme

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