Bohemians by David Weir

Author:David Weir [Weir, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780197538319
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Estimates vary as to how many fighters loyal to the Commune were slaughtered in the aftermath of its collapse: the low-end estimate is six thousand dead, the high end thirty thousand, but historians today think ten thousand might be nearer the mark. Not all of those who died (whatever the number), either by defending the Commune or by summary execution afterward, were anarchists. But many were—enough, at any rate, to make the Commune legendary in the annals of anarchism. Montmartre got its name when early Christians called the hill “Mons Martyrum” to memorialize those who had sacrificed their lives for the faith, so the name fit with a new generation of political martyrs who had sacrificed their lives for the Commune.

That history played a role in the spread of anarchism into the bohemian bars and cafés of Montmartre in the 1880s and 1890s. In the late 1880s, several cafés and cabarets opened in some of the old windmills that dotted the top of the Butte. Miners, farmers, and other workers congregated in these converted windmills, drawn to the inexpensive food and cheap wine (the latter exempt from the excise tax café owners had to pay elsewhere in Paris). Among these establishments were the Moulin de la Galette, the Cabaret des Assassins, the Lapin Agile, and the Chat Noir, which also published a magazine with the same name. The Chat Noir is reputed to have had as its motto a saying attributed to the poet Charles Cros: “Wine is a red liquid, except in the morning, when it is white.” Such acclaimed poets as Paul Verlaine drank absinthe and read their work in the cabaret, whose walls were decorated with paintings and sketches by the many artists drawn to Montmartre.

Another celebrated establishment was the Concert Lisbonne in lower Montmartre, run by Maxime Lisbonne, who had been arrested for serving as a colonel in the Communard forces (he was released from prison in 1880). His Communard background aroused government suspicion that the café was a “centre anarchiste,” as a police report of April 30, 1894, explains:

The Concert Lisbonne has always been a socialist-anarchist center. And Lisbonne, while being prudent, preciously tries to conserve his Communard title. His political past is very much in his present fortune, and it is not rare to hear a spectator say: he has been in the Commune, he has been a colonel, he has been deported, etc. The same political past assures him a politico-literary clientele. … He is entirely devoted to the literary anarchists, and he receives them privately in his secretarial office … .

The report also numbers students, painters, and sculptors among Lisbonne’s clientele; the café, in short, was precisely the kind of place that allowed Bohemia to flourish in Montmartre, which provided a cultural infrastructure based on the fortuitous combination of urban geography, radical politics, and avant-garde aesthetics.

This tripartite pattern emerged as a kind of template for bohemian culture, with late nineteenth-century Montmartre as the paradigm of that pattern. Indeed, Montmartre continued to nurture the development of modern art, at least until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

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