Includes bibliographical references (pages 405-440) and index.

Part I Bohemians and Bourgeois 1 -- Part II Pubilc Worlds and Inner Lives 213 -- Part III From Bohemia to the Avant-Garde 293 -- Documentation 399 -- A Note on Histories of Bohemia 401.

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. - Publisher.