Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930

This is a more comprehensive and scholarly work than I had expected. I used chapters of it in my avant-garde / Bohemia class, and was pleased at the depth the author went into. It was a nice overview/review - appropriate for college students to get a historical sense of the periods covered; but also a rich and engaging read for the expert. I appreciated the historical detail and textual analysis alike.

Very good book. It was fun, inspirational and interesting perspective. Lot's of different information. Learned a lot about the era!

This is unquestionably a very, very well researched book. The writing is also strong, if not terribly stylish. The reason for docking the book stars is threefold:1. The book has a maddeningly repetitive rhythm. Each chapter focuses on a particular exemplar of Bohemia and analyzes his life and work. Each chapter draws the same conclusions about the conflicts between the individual and society, between artistic and financial advancement. After a while the stories all began to blur. And the trope of a single man (sometimes two) exemplifying Bohemia at a certain point in time is not terribly convincing.2. I am fairly familiar with Parisian and French history, but this book assumes a great deal of knowledge that I didn't have. It was very hard to contextualize much of the book because the larger history was never laid out. This is clearly not the aim of the book - it traces a particular phenomenon, not a city or a country. But still, I could have benefited enormously from some sketches of the political and social situations in Paris over the course of the period treated here.3. Even if women were only models and lovers in Bohemian Paris, even if those female artists and personalities that lived were overshadowed by their male peers, this book is glaringly uninterested in treating women in depth. Given the structure mentioned above (each chapter about a male figure) it is perhaps inevitable that women are not written about with anywhere near the complexity or interest as the men. Which is a shame, because it leaves out so much of the world of Bohemia.The scholarship is impressive given its limits. But these limits are not insignificant.

I first came across this book several years ago when writing about Jacques Offenbach. At that time, I much enjoyed both the author's erudition and his dead-on social analysis. Seigel demonstrates how, in mid-nineteenth century Paris, the eager purchase by the bourgeois of "revolutionary" works of art (literature, paintings, drama, music, etc.) deadened the intended meaning of those works, and, by making their creators wealthy, changed the artists' own feelings about their society. Seigel sees this cooption as an intrinsic function of capitalism, and its own best defense against violent revolution. The parallels for our society seem clear to the reader (Seigel does not discuss them) - just as Henri Murger, author of "La Vie de Boheme", grew rich enough to buy a country estate (and then killed himself) so John Lennon took the money from "Revolution" and bought New York real estate. Mick Jagger is today one of the largest and wealthiest landowners in Britain - and one could extend this list indefinitely.Over the years, I thought of Seigel's analysis on occasion - for instance, when reading plaintive complaints about the "misuse" of rock in TV commercials. But I didn't bother to pick up the book again until reading a new book with "bohemian" and "bourgeois" together - Brooks' "Bobos in Paradise" - which does not cite this book. Hmm. It's very true that Brooks may simply be a keen observer - after all, our intellectual culture is a direct descendant of that discussed by Seigel. So let's leave it at that - and suggest that anyone seriously interested in "Bobos" would do very well indeed to read this volume.

I needed facts for a group of artists who were painting for an exhibiton with a turn of the century Paris theme.This book was well written, entertaining, and contained some little known details for these well known and well read artists. The Exhibition was planned to highlight "Le Chat Noir", the caberet where many artists gathered just before the turn of the century, and the book gives life to the Caberet scene in Paris, as well as the total Bohemian scene there in that time frame.This book was so good in many other ways, that every one of the artists decided to read the whole book. I highly recommend it.

The cover of this book is so telling about the contents that I searched for the poster to hang it in my voice studio. The time and place of early Cabaret is very intriguing to me and this book gave the details of the social canvas behind the whimsy of the art form. This is one of the most wonderful ways to read history. It IS NOT DRY. It springs up your imagination. songbird@avavictoria.com

Great history of Bohemian Paris. Pictured by a true 'aficionado' of that lost World.

Un trabajo excelente sobre la bohemia parisina. Altamente recomendable.