Le Club des Hashischins

Background: hashish arrives in Paris

Cannabis was not unknown in early-19th-century France, but it became a serious topic after Napoleon's 1798–1801 Egyptian campaign, when soldiers and savants brought back firsthand exposure to hashish use in the Arab world ^[1]. By the 1830s and 1840s, French colonial activity in Algeria gave Parisian doctors and travelers regular access to dawamesk, a sweet green paste typically made from cannabis resin, butter or fat, sugar, pistachios, and spices ^[2].

The key figure linking medicine and literature was the psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours. Moreau experimented with hashish on himself and his patients and published Du hachisch et de l'aliénation mentale in 1845, arguing that the hashish experience could model mental illness and let physicians study it from the inside ^[3]. He needed articulate volunteers. He found them among Théophile Gautier's circle of Romantic writers.

The Hôtel Pimodan meetings

From roughly 1844 to 1849, an informal group met about once a month at the Hôtel Pimodan (today the Hôtel de Lauzun) on the Île Saint-Louis. The painter Fernand Boissard de Boisdenier kept an apartment there; Baudelaire also lived in the building for part of 1843–1845 ^[4].

The routine, as Gautier later described it in La Revue des Deux Mondes in February 1846, was simple: guests arrived in the evening, were served a spoonful of dawamesk in coffee, ate dinner, and then spent several hours in hallucinatory reverie in the salon while waiting for the effects to pass ^[5]. Gautier called the host 'the Doctor' — clearly Moreau — who doled out the dose 'like a sultan distributing favors.'

Attested participants across the dinners include:

• Théophile Gautier — chronicler of the club
• Charles Baudelaire — though he attended only sporadically and, by his own later account, ate hashish rarely ^[6]
• Gérard de Nerval
• Honoré de Balzac — attended at least once; reportedly declined to actually consume the dawamesk ^[7]
• Eugène Delacroix — attendance is traditionally claimed but rests on thin documentary evidence Disputed
• Fernand Boissard, Jean-Jacques Pradier, Alphonse Karr, and others from the Parisian art world

The 'club' had no charter, no membership list, and no published proceedings. Calling it a club at all is mostly Gautier's literary framing.

What they actually took

Dawamesk was an oral cannabis preparation, not smoked hashish. Doses described by Moreau ran around 15–30 grams of the paste, containing a variable but substantial amount of cannabis resin ^[3]. Oral cannabis has slower onset, longer duration, and a stronger tendency toward intense psychoactive effects than smoked cannabis — which fits the writers' descriptions of multi-hour, dreamlike, sometimes frightening experiences Strong evidence ^[8].

This matters for reading the texts honestly: Gautier and Baudelaire were describing high-dose oral cannabis intoxication in a controlled, candle-lit, expectation-loaded salon. Their reports of synesthesia, time dilation, grandeur, and terror are consistent with what is known about set, setting, and edible dosing today — not evidence that 19th-century hashish was uniquely powerful or chemically different from modern cannabis. See Edibles and Set and Setting.

The literary output

Three primary sources do most of the work for what we know:

1. Théophile Gautier, 'Le Club des Hachichins' (Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 February 1846). The founding document of the legend; a vivid first-person account framed as fiction-tinged reportage ^[5].
2. **Jacques-Joseph Moreau, *Du hachisch et de l'aliénation mentale*** (1845). The clinical companion piece — eight 'phenomena' of hashish intoxication, including mood change, dissociation of ideas, and hallucination ^[3]. Still cited in the history of psychopharmacology.
3. **Charles Baudelaire, *Les Paradis artificiels*** (1860), which contains 'Le Poème du hachisch.' Written more than a decade after the meetings, it is part essay, part moral argument; Baudelaire ultimately frames hashish as a sterile shortcut compared to the disciplined imagination of the artist ^[6].

Gérard de Nerval's Voyage en Orient (1851) also draws on hashish imagery, though not specifically on the Pimodan meetings.

How the myth grew

Several durable claims about the Club don't survive contact with the primary sources:

• 'It was a secret society with rituals.' Gautier's prose is theatrical — robes, a Doctor figure, an 'initiation' — but he is writing literary scene-setting, not documenting a rite. There is no evidence of an organization beyond recurring dinners Weak / limited.
• 'Alexandre Dumas was a member.' Often repeated; not supported by the contemporary accounts. Dumas wrote about hashish in The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–46), which probably reflects general Parisian familiarity with the drug rather than club attendance Disputed.
• 'Baudelaire was a heavy hashish user.' Baudelaire explicitly says otherwise in Les Paradis artificiels; he describes himself as an observer who took it only a few times, and was more sustainedly involved with opium and wine ^[6].
• 'The Club invented modern cannabis culture.' It didn't. It documented an elite Parisian moment. Hashish use across North Africa, the Levant, and South Asia long predates and dwarfs it ^[1][2].

The Club's real legacy is narrower and more interesting: it produced the first body of high-quality Western prose written from inside a cannabis experience, and it linked that prose to a clinical research program in Moreau's work. Later writers from Walter Benjamin to Aldous Huxley were reading these texts when they thought about drugs and consciousness ^[9].

Aftermath and afterlife

The meetings tapered off around 1849, with no formal dissolution. Moreau continued his psychiatric work; Gautier moved on to other subjects; Baudelaire's relationship to intoxicants darkened into the moralized account of Les Paradis artificiels. The Hôtel Pimodan still stands on the Quai d'Anjou and is occasionally cited on Paris literary tours ^[4].

In cannabis culture today, the Club is mostly invoked as a Romantic origin story — sometimes accurately, often as decoration. The honest version is smaller and better: a handful of writers in a Paris apartment ate strong edibles under medical supervision, wrote unusually well about it, and left a paper trail that historians and pharmacologists still consult.

Sources

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