Smokin Moose
Fallen Cannabis Warrior & Ex Moderator
In the mid-19th century, French writers including Baudelaire and Dumas met regularly to use cannabis. In this extract from his new book, Jonathon Green describes the Club des Hachichins
In 1798 Napoleon invaded Egypt, the first step on his campaign to establish a French kingdom there and, in time, to drive on to India. He was expelled in 1801. Before then, however, his troops had made a new discovery - hashish - possession and consumption of which was soon banned. But the ban had no real effect, and when the troops came home, they brought cannabis with them. The upshot was its gradual popularisation in Europe, particularly in France.
Regular imports of hashish, the dried leaf form of cannabis, followed and it could soon be bought at any pharmacy. It was not suprising that the medical establishment, particularly Dr Jacques-Joseph Moreau (1804-84), began to take an interest in its properties. In 1840, Moreau swallowed some cannabis, with the intention of reporting on its intoxicating effects. He experienced a mixture of euphoria, hallucination and incoherence, and an extremely rapid flow of ideas. He realised that experimenting on oneself with a drug whose nature was to distort sensations and impressions was not enough. He needed guinea pigs.
In 1844 Moreau met the French philosopher, writer and journalist Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), a man at the heart of Romanticism - the current intellectual movement - and whose manifestos were among its primary underpinnings, epitomised by the slogan "art for art's sake". Gautier was impressed by Moreau's theories, especially perhaps his description of cannabis as "an intellectual intoxication", preferable to the "ignoble heavy drunkenness" of alcohol.
Gautier brought with him a number of leading Parisian littérateurs: Alexandre Dumas, Gérard de Nerval, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Eugène Delacroix and many others. The group, calling themselves the Club des Hachichins (Hashish Club), would gather regularly between 1844 and 1849 at the suitably gothic Pimodan House, also known as the Hôtel Lauzun.
Here, ritualistically garbed in Arab clothing, they drank strong coffee, liberally laced with hashish, which Moreau called dawamesk, in the Arabic manner. It looked, reported the members, like a greenish preserve, its ingredients a mixture of hashish, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, pistachio, sugar, orange juice, butter and cantharides. Some of them would write of their "stoned" experiences, although not all. Balzac attended the club but preferred not to indulge, though some time in 1845 the great man cracked and ate some. He told fellow members he had heard celestial voices and seen visions of divine paintings.
It is Gautier, a journalist rather than a poet, who is the best informant. In his essay "Le Club des Hachichins", published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1846, he conveyed exactly the sort of melodramatic atmosphere such a drug, and such a place, was supposed to have. It begins: "One December evening... I arrived in a remote quarter in the middle of Paris, a kind of solitary oasis which the river encircles in its arms on both sides as though to defend it against the encroachments of civilisation. It was in an old house on the Ile St Louis, the Pimodan hotel built by Lauzun, where the strange club which I had recently joined held its monthly séance. I was attending for the first time."
After a description of the hotel's interior, Gautier arrives in a room where "several human shapes were stirring about a table, and as soon as the light reached me and I was recognised, a vigorous shout shook the sonorous depths of the ancient edifice. 'It's he! It's he!' cried some voices together; 'let's give him his due!' "
His "due", of course, was his potion of dawamesk. "The doctor stood by a buffet on which lay a platter filled with small Japanese saucers. He spooned a morsel of paste or greenish jam about as large as a thumb from a crystal vase, and placed it next to the silver spoon on each saucer. The doctor's face radiated enthusiasm; his eyes glittered, his purple cheeks were aglow, the veins in his temples stood out strongly, and he breathed heavily through dilated nostrils. 'This will be deducted from your share in Paradise,' he said as he handed me my portion..."
There follows a banquet. By the time the meal ends, the hashish is beginning to take effect. His neighbours begin to appear "somewhat strange. Their pupils became big as a screech owl's; their noses stretched into elongated probosces; their mouths expanded like bell bottoms. Faces were shaded in supernatural light". Meanwhile "a deadening warmth pervaded my limbs, and dementia, like a wave which breaks foaming on to a rock, then withdraws to break again, invaded and left my brain, finally enveloping it altogether. That strange visitor, hallucination, had come to dwell within me."
It was inevitable that Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), author of the 1857 collection of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal, joined the club. He had a reputation for debauchery and a taste for the exotic, which would surely have predisposed him to a new drug, but the truth was that he rarely, if indeed ever, indulged. He wrote on hashish with great acuity, but it was from his studious note-taking, rather than any in-depth personal experience.
Gautier, writing an essay on the poet, noted that, "It is possible and even probable that Baudelaire did try hascheesh once or twice by way of physiological experiment, but he never made continuous use of it. Besides, he felt much repugnance for that sort of happiness, bought at the chemist's and taken away in the vest-pocket, and he compared the ecstasy it induces to that of a maniac for whom painted canvas and rough drop-scenes take the place of real furniture and gardens balmy with the scent of genuine flowers. He came but seldom, and merely as an observer, to the meetings in Pimodan House [Hôtel Lauzun], where our club met..." As Baudelaire put it, "wine makes men happy and sociable; hashish isolates them. Wine exalts the will; hashish annihilates it."
Baudelaire's best piece on hashish was published in 1860 and entitled "Les Paradis Artificiels" (Artificial Paradises) - a comparison of hashish and wine "as means of expanding individuality". For him, "among the drugs most efficient in creating what I call the artificial ideal, leaving on one side liquors, which rapidly excite gross frenzy and lay flat all spiritual force, and the perfumes, whose excessive use, while rendering more subtle man's imagination, wear out gradually his physical forces; the two most energetic substances, the most convenient and the most handy, are hashish and opium".
A century and a half later, Baudelaire's note-taking again rings true: "At first, a certain absurd, irresistible hilarity overcomes you. The most ordinary words, the simplest ideas assume a new and bizarre aspect. This mirth is intolerable to you; but it is useless to resist. The demon has invaded you...
"It sometimes happens that people completely unsuited for word-play will improvise an endless string of puns and wholly improbable idea relationships fit to outdo the ablest masters of this preposterous craft. But after a few minutes, the relation between ideas becomes so vague, and the thread of your thoughts grows so tenuous, that only your cohorts... can understand you.
"Next your senses become extraordinarily keen and acute. Your sight is infinite. Your ear can discern the slightest perceptible sound, even through the shrillest of noises. The slightest ambiguities, the most inexplicable transpositions of ideas take place. In sounds there is colour; in colours there is a music... You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. This fantasy goes on for an eternity. A lucid interval, and a great expenditure of effort, permit you to look at the clock. The eternity turns out to have been only a minute.
"The third phase... is something beyond description. It is what the Orientals call 'kef' it is complete happiness. There is nothing whirling and tumultuous about it. It is a calm and placid beatitude. Every philosophical problem is resolved. Every difficult question that presents a point of contention for theologians, and brings despair to thoughtful men, becomes clear and transparent. Every contradiction is reconciled. Man has surpassed the gods".
Unlike Gautier, Baudelaire believed that the hashish taker was likely to suffer psychological problems. "Les Paradis Artificiels" concludes with a section entitled "Morale" in which Baudelaire says that while hashish certainly enhances the imagination and thus creativity, it is highly dangerous to subordinate all such processes to the drug. For the creative artist to believe that they can create only when "high" is a disaster. In the end, cannabis destroyed your personality and that was unacceptable.
The Club des Hachichins had broken up by the middle of the 19th century but in strictly scientific terms it had done its work. In 1846 its instigator, Dr Moreau, published his major work on cannabis: the 439-page book De Hachish et de l'Alienation Mentale - Études Psychologiques (Hashish and Mental Illness - Psychological Studies).
· This is an edited extract from Cannabis by Jonathon Green,
In 1798 Napoleon invaded Egypt, the first step on his campaign to establish a French kingdom there and, in time, to drive on to India. He was expelled in 1801. Before then, however, his troops had made a new discovery - hashish - possession and consumption of which was soon banned. But the ban had no real effect, and when the troops came home, they brought cannabis with them. The upshot was its gradual popularisation in Europe, particularly in France.
Regular imports of hashish, the dried leaf form of cannabis, followed and it could soon be bought at any pharmacy. It was not suprising that the medical establishment, particularly Dr Jacques-Joseph Moreau (1804-84), began to take an interest in its properties. In 1840, Moreau swallowed some cannabis, with the intention of reporting on its intoxicating effects. He experienced a mixture of euphoria, hallucination and incoherence, and an extremely rapid flow of ideas. He realised that experimenting on oneself with a drug whose nature was to distort sensations and impressions was not enough. He needed guinea pigs.
In 1844 Moreau met the French philosopher, writer and journalist Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), a man at the heart of Romanticism - the current intellectual movement - and whose manifestos were among its primary underpinnings, epitomised by the slogan "art for art's sake". Gautier was impressed by Moreau's theories, especially perhaps his description of cannabis as "an intellectual intoxication", preferable to the "ignoble heavy drunkenness" of alcohol.
Gautier brought with him a number of leading Parisian littérateurs: Alexandre Dumas, Gérard de Nerval, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Eugène Delacroix and many others. The group, calling themselves the Club des Hachichins (Hashish Club), would gather regularly between 1844 and 1849 at the suitably gothic Pimodan House, also known as the Hôtel Lauzun.
Here, ritualistically garbed in Arab clothing, they drank strong coffee, liberally laced with hashish, which Moreau called dawamesk, in the Arabic manner. It looked, reported the members, like a greenish preserve, its ingredients a mixture of hashish, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, pistachio, sugar, orange juice, butter and cantharides. Some of them would write of their "stoned" experiences, although not all. Balzac attended the club but preferred not to indulge, though some time in 1845 the great man cracked and ate some. He told fellow members he had heard celestial voices and seen visions of divine paintings.
It is Gautier, a journalist rather than a poet, who is the best informant. In his essay "Le Club des Hachichins", published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1846, he conveyed exactly the sort of melodramatic atmosphere such a drug, and such a place, was supposed to have. It begins: "One December evening... I arrived in a remote quarter in the middle of Paris, a kind of solitary oasis which the river encircles in its arms on both sides as though to defend it against the encroachments of civilisation. It was in an old house on the Ile St Louis, the Pimodan hotel built by Lauzun, where the strange club which I had recently joined held its monthly séance. I was attending for the first time."
After a description of the hotel's interior, Gautier arrives in a room where "several human shapes were stirring about a table, and as soon as the light reached me and I was recognised, a vigorous shout shook the sonorous depths of the ancient edifice. 'It's he! It's he!' cried some voices together; 'let's give him his due!' "
His "due", of course, was his potion of dawamesk. "The doctor stood by a buffet on which lay a platter filled with small Japanese saucers. He spooned a morsel of paste or greenish jam about as large as a thumb from a crystal vase, and placed it next to the silver spoon on each saucer. The doctor's face radiated enthusiasm; his eyes glittered, his purple cheeks were aglow, the veins in his temples stood out strongly, and he breathed heavily through dilated nostrils. 'This will be deducted from your share in Paradise,' he said as he handed me my portion..."
There follows a banquet. By the time the meal ends, the hashish is beginning to take effect. His neighbours begin to appear "somewhat strange. Their pupils became big as a screech owl's; their noses stretched into elongated probosces; their mouths expanded like bell bottoms. Faces were shaded in supernatural light". Meanwhile "a deadening warmth pervaded my limbs, and dementia, like a wave which breaks foaming on to a rock, then withdraws to break again, invaded and left my brain, finally enveloping it altogether. That strange visitor, hallucination, had come to dwell within me."
It was inevitable that Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), author of the 1857 collection of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal, joined the club. He had a reputation for debauchery and a taste for the exotic, which would surely have predisposed him to a new drug, but the truth was that he rarely, if indeed ever, indulged. He wrote on hashish with great acuity, but it was from his studious note-taking, rather than any in-depth personal experience.
Gautier, writing an essay on the poet, noted that, "It is possible and even probable that Baudelaire did try hascheesh once or twice by way of physiological experiment, but he never made continuous use of it. Besides, he felt much repugnance for that sort of happiness, bought at the chemist's and taken away in the vest-pocket, and he compared the ecstasy it induces to that of a maniac for whom painted canvas and rough drop-scenes take the place of real furniture and gardens balmy with the scent of genuine flowers. He came but seldom, and merely as an observer, to the meetings in Pimodan House [Hôtel Lauzun], where our club met..." As Baudelaire put it, "wine makes men happy and sociable; hashish isolates them. Wine exalts the will; hashish annihilates it."
Baudelaire's best piece on hashish was published in 1860 and entitled "Les Paradis Artificiels" (Artificial Paradises) - a comparison of hashish and wine "as means of expanding individuality". For him, "among the drugs most efficient in creating what I call the artificial ideal, leaving on one side liquors, which rapidly excite gross frenzy and lay flat all spiritual force, and the perfumes, whose excessive use, while rendering more subtle man's imagination, wear out gradually his physical forces; the two most energetic substances, the most convenient and the most handy, are hashish and opium".
A century and a half later, Baudelaire's note-taking again rings true: "At first, a certain absurd, irresistible hilarity overcomes you. The most ordinary words, the simplest ideas assume a new and bizarre aspect. This mirth is intolerable to you; but it is useless to resist. The demon has invaded you...
"It sometimes happens that people completely unsuited for word-play will improvise an endless string of puns and wholly improbable idea relationships fit to outdo the ablest masters of this preposterous craft. But after a few minutes, the relation between ideas becomes so vague, and the thread of your thoughts grows so tenuous, that only your cohorts... can understand you.
"Next your senses become extraordinarily keen and acute. Your sight is infinite. Your ear can discern the slightest perceptible sound, even through the shrillest of noises. The slightest ambiguities, the most inexplicable transpositions of ideas take place. In sounds there is colour; in colours there is a music... You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. This fantasy goes on for an eternity. A lucid interval, and a great expenditure of effort, permit you to look at the clock. The eternity turns out to have been only a minute.
"The third phase... is something beyond description. It is what the Orientals call 'kef' it is complete happiness. There is nothing whirling and tumultuous about it. It is a calm and placid beatitude. Every philosophical problem is resolved. Every difficult question that presents a point of contention for theologians, and brings despair to thoughtful men, becomes clear and transparent. Every contradiction is reconciled. Man has surpassed the gods".
Unlike Gautier, Baudelaire believed that the hashish taker was likely to suffer psychological problems. "Les Paradis Artificiels" concludes with a section entitled "Morale" in which Baudelaire says that while hashish certainly enhances the imagination and thus creativity, it is highly dangerous to subordinate all such processes to the drug. For the creative artist to believe that they can create only when "high" is a disaster. In the end, cannabis destroyed your personality and that was unacceptable.
The Club des Hachichins had broken up by the middle of the 19th century but in strictly scientific terms it had done its work. In 1846 its instigator, Dr Moreau, published his major work on cannabis: the 439-page book De Hachish et de l'Alienation Mentale - Études Psychologiques (Hashish and Mental Illness - Psychological Studies).
· This is an edited extract from Cannabis by Jonathon Green,
