What does the phrase "La Vie Boheme" mean?

Question

What does it mean? And if you happen to know, how did it come about?

Answer 1

Literally,"The Bohemian Life",concerning the artists quarters on the Left bank of the Seine in Paris,during the 19th;century.

Answer 2

La vie Boheme refers to a carefree life.  Someone who really does not care about everyday struggle and really doesn't bother about what  tomorrow may bring.  He tries to find happiness in the present.

the word Boheme actually has French origins an was used to refer to this group of people who lived as described in the previous line. They were called "Les BOHEMIENS". there may be other explanations as to the origins of this expression but what I am quite sure of is that " La vie boheme" simply means " carefree Life".

Answer 3

ummm....i 4get....sumthing like 'long live bohimia' or long live unknown artists (as in painters, acters, dancers, singers etc)

Answer 4

La Vie Boheme is french for The Bohemian Life

The term bohemian was first used in the nineteenth century to describe the untraditional lifestyles of marginalized and impoverished artists, writers, musicians, and actors in major European cities. Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or antiestablishment political or social viewpoints, which were often expressed through extramarital sexual relations, frugality, and/or "voluntary poverty".

The term emerged in France in the 1800s when artists and creators began to concentrate in the lower-rent, lower class gypsy neighbourhoods. The term "Bohemian" reflects a belief, widely held in France at the time, that the Gypsies had come from Bohemia.

Origin of term

Literary Bohemians were associated in the French imagination with roving Gypsies, outsiders apart from conventional society and untroubled by its disapproval. The term carries a connotation of arcane enlightenment (the opposite of 'Philistines'), and also carries a less frequently intended, pejorative connotation of carelessness about personal hygiene and marital orthodoxy. The Spanish gypsy in the French opera Carmen set in Seville, is referred to as a bohémienne in Meilhac and Halévy's libretto (1875).

"The term 'Bohemian' has come to be very commonly accepted in our day as the description of a certain kind of literary gypsy, no matter in what language he speaks, or what city he inhabits .... A Bohemian is simply an artist or littérateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art." (Westminster Review, 1862)

Henri Murger's collection of short stories, Scènes de la Vie de Bohème ("Scenes of Bohemian Life"), published in 1845, popularized the term's usage in France. Ideas from Murger's collection formed the theme of Giacomo Puccini's opera La bohème (1896). Puccini's work, in turn, became Jonathan Larson's source material for the musical he created, Rent, later a feature film of the same name. Like Puccini, Larson explores a Bohemian enclave in a dense urban area, in this case, New York City at the end of the 20th century. The show features a song, La Vie Bohème, which celebrates postmodern Bohemian culture.

In English, Bohemian in this sense was initially popularized in William Makepeace Thackeray's novel, Vanity Fair, published in 1848, although public perceptions of the alternative life-styles supposedly led by artists were chiefly moulded by George du Maurier's highly romanticised best-selling novel of Bohemian culture Trilby (1894). The novel purports to outline the fortunes of three expatriate English artists, their Irish model, and two very colourful Eastern European musicians, in the artist's quarter of Paris.

Academics and theorists have been slow to diagnose Bohemianism as against the more abrasive, and politically non-conformist Avant-gardism. The most serious study of the tendency has been Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939 (2002) by the English writer Virginia Nicholson (granddaughter of the Bloomsbury aesthete Clive Bell and his wife, the English painter Vanessa Bell). Her work systematically analysed the Bohemian lifestyle led by a broad and diverse wave of artists, writers and musicians over the early- to mid-twentieth century, showing that they were indeed unified via a set of commonly-held attitudes towards money, s*x and relationships, child-rearing, beauty, clothing and personal presentation, cuisine, personal cleanliness, travel, and social mores.

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