Bohemian Paris

Download or read book Bohemian Paris written by Jerrold Seigel and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1999-09-30 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exotic and yet familiar, rife with passion, immorality, hunger, and freedom, Bohemia was an object of both worry and fascination to workaday Parisians in the nineteenth century. No mere revolt against middle-class society, the Bohemia Seigel discovers was richer and more complex, the stage on which modern bourgeois acted out the conflicts of their social identities, testing the liberation promised by post-revolutionary society against the barriers set up to contain it. Turning life into art, Bohemia became a space where many innovative and original figures—some famous, some obscure—found a home.