Le Club des Hashischins: When Hashish Met French Romanticism

For five years in the middle of the 19th century, a group of Parisian writers, painters, and intellectuals met once a month at the Hôtel Pimodan — a 17th-century mansion on the Île Saint-Louis — to eat hashish and report what happened. They called themselves Le Club des Hashischins. The Club of the Hashish-Eaters.

It was, depending on how you look at it, the first cannabis salon in Western history, an early experiment in what we would now call psychiatric research, or the most literarily distinguished drug circle ever assembled. The membership rolls included Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, the painter Eugène Delacroix, and — at least once — Victor Hugo.

The man who organized it was not a writer. He was a doctor.

Dr. Moreau's Question

Jacques-Joseph Moreau, known professionally as Moreau de Tours, was a French psychiatrist working at the Bicêtre asylum in Paris. He had spent time in North Africa and the Middle East and had observed the use of hashish there with the eye of a clinician. He came to a conclusion that was, for 1840, radical: the experiences induced by hashish resembled the experiences of his mentally ill patients. If he could understand the drug, he might understand the illness.

But Moreau needed introspectors — people articulate enough to describe what they were feeling from the inside. Asylum patients couldn't do it. Writers could.

He brought a quantity of dawamesk — a sweet green hashish paste imported from Egypt or Algeria, mixed with sugar, pistachios, almonds, and orange essence — to a literary friend, Théophile Gautier. Gautier brought his friends. The Club was born.

What Actually Happened in the Room

The meetings were held in Gautier's apartment at the Hôtel Pimodan, also called the Hôtel de Lauzun. The members would arrive in formal dress, eat a teaspoon-sized portion of the green paste, sit through a long ceremonial dinner, and then — as the dose came on — drift through the rooms of the old mansion experiencing what Gautier later described in vivid, hallucinatory prose.

His essay "Le Club des Hachichins," published in Revue des Deux Mondes in 1846, is the best surviving account. He describes time dilation, synesthesia, geometric visions, and the strange certainty that he had become, briefly, a piece of Persian carpet. He wrote it as straight reportage, the way a 19th-century traveler might describe a foreign country.

Baudelaire was there too, but he was a complicated participant. His own writing on the subject — Les Paradis Artificiels (1860) — is more skeptical. Baudelaire admired the hashish vision but was suspicious of any chemical that promised to do the imagination's work for it. The poet who wrote about artificial paradises did not, in the end, recommend them.

What It Was, and What It Wasn't

It is tempting to read the Club through the lens of 1960s counterculture — a kind of proto-Haight-Ashbury for top-hatted Romantics. That misses the texture. The Club des Hashischins was not a rebellion. It was a salon. It met inside an institution, with a doctor present, in a culture that was actively curious about consciousness and felt no particular need to apologize for it. The drug was Eastern, exotic, expensive, and ate from a spoon like jam. There was no smoking, no countercultural identity, no political program.

What the Club produced, more than anything else, was writing. Gautier's essay. Baudelaire's meditations. Moreau's Du Hachisch et de l'Aliénation Mentale (1845), which is still cited as one of the first systematic studies of psychoactive drugs in psychiatry.

The 19th century was, briefly, very interested in what cannabis could tell it about the mind. The 20th century was not. We are now, slowly, becoming interested again. The Club des Hashischins is what it looks like when serious people approach a serious plant without the intervening century of moral panic.

You can still walk past the Hôtel Pimodan. It is on the quai d'Anjou. It is private now.