The Club des Hashischins

The Club des Hashischins names a circle associated with experiments in hashish among Parisian writers, artists and physicians in the 1840s. Its setting was Hôtel Pimodan, now usually called Hôtel de Lauzun, on the Île Saint-Louis. The physician Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours and writer Théophile Gautier are central to its history.

The name is memorable, but can suggest a more formal organisation than the evidence supports. Historian Erwan Pointeau-Lagadec distinguishes documented gatherings from the enduring picture of a secret society devoted to drugs. The literary account and the social circle must be read together without treating them as identical.

A physician and an artistic circle

The atlas’s 1844 history entry follows the conventional starting date. Pointeau-Lagadec identifies documented experimental meetings at Hôtel Pimodan between 1845 and 1849. Those dates describe a small nineteenth-century circle, not a continuous institution still operating in Paris.

Moreau’s 1845 book on hashish and mental alienation placed intoxication within medical inquiry. Artists and writers approached the experience through perception, imagination and literature. Calling the gatherings medical experiments alone would obscure their sociability; treating them simply as parties would obscure the physician’s questions.

The BnF’s bibliographic account locates the meetings with painter Fernand Boissard at the mansion. It also identifies dawamesk, a sweetened hashish preparation, as the substance in Gautier’s narrative. This was an ingested preparation, distinct from the smoking associated with many later cannabis gathering places.

Gautier’s dinner

In Le Club des Haschischins, Gautier describes arriving at an elaborate old interior, receiving a portion of green paste and sitting down to dinner. Taste, appearance and time become unstable. The narrator’s surroundings pass from luxurious amusement into fantastic and troubling transformations.

Maurice Stang’s translation preserves the sequence of the meal: the doctor distributes the green preparation on small saucers, coffee with grounds and without sugar follows, and only then does dinner begin. Gautier’s narrator explicitly draws attention to this reversal of the usual order of sweets and coffee. The description makes the gathering a staged social occasion as well as a story about altered perception.

The work appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in February 1846. It is a literary text, shaped by humour and the fantastic, rather than a clinical transcript of a meeting. Its elaborate effects should not be presented as a reliable prediction of what cannabis does to every person.

The legend around the room

Gautier also repeats the tale of the Old Man of the Mountain and the Assassins. That passage shows how nineteenth-century French writing framed hashish through imagined scenes of the East. It documents the story’s circulation, not proof that medieval killings were produced by cannabis.

Pointeau-Lagadec’s distinction is useful here: real experiments need not validate every later claim about an organised fraternity or its famous membership. The photograph likewise records the mansion in 1905; it does not show a meeting or identify the exact room used by the circle.

A literary afterlife, then drug control

Baudelaire’s Les Paradis artificiels of 1860 belongs to the wider French literary engagement with intoxication. It is part of the circle’s cultural context and afterlife, rather than evidence of a later continuation of the club.

France’s first national drug law in 1916 belongs to another period. It should not be projected backwards as the legal setting of the 1840s meetings. What remains of the Club des Hashischins is a documented social practice, a body of writing and a legend about a particular Parisian address.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}