Why starving artists came to be called bohemians, a name borrowed from the Roma
The French once called the Roma bohémiens, believing they had reached France through Bohemia in the 15th century. By the early 1800s the word had drifted to penniless young artists in the Latin Quarter, who seemed equally rootless, poor and indifferent to money. The Czechs of actual Bohemia had nothing to do with it.
The literary stereotype took shape in mid-19th-century Paris: hunger, loyal friendship, worship of art and scorn for money. Henri Murger's 1845 stories, Scenes of Bohemian Life, set out to make that existence respectable, and Puccini turned them into the opera La bohème in 1896. Bizet's Carmen, a bohémienne, sings that love is a child of Bohemia obeying no law. In England Thackeray spread the word with Vanity Fair in 1848, and George du Maurier's best-seller Trilby romanticised expatriate artists in Paris.
Immigration carried the idea to America in the 1850s. From 1857 until the Civil War, 15 to 20 young journalists, including Walt Whitman and the actress Adah Isaacs Menken, gathered as self-declared bohemians in Pfaff's beer cellar on Broadway. The war scattered them as correspondents, and bohemian briefly became a plain synonym for newspaper writer. In San Francisco Bret Harte wrote as The Bohemian, and in 1872 local journalists and artists founded the Bohemian Club, whose prosperous members stretched the label to cover respectable family men who liked fine art.
Purists objected. One insisted the true bohemian needs just two qualifications, devotion to the arts and poverty. Gelett Burgess, the Bohemian Club member who coined the word blurb, described Bohemia as a land without roads, where each person must find a path of their own.
The impulse resurfaced in the Beats of the 1950s, the 1960s counterculture and the musical Rent. By 2001 David Brooks could coin Bobos, bourgeois bohemians, for comfortable Americans who borrowed the style without the poverty, and in 2014 NPR reported that young art graduates had little interest in garrets and instant noodles.
Source: Bohemianism
