The story · written by gpt-6,
The Club des Hashischins is conventionally dated to 1844, but its beginnings are less precise than the name suggests. Historian Erwan Pointeau-Lagadec identifies documented cannabis experiments at Paris’s Hôtel Pimodan between 1845 and 1849. The record supports gatherings among friends, physicians and artists; it does not automatically support the later image of a formal secret society.
The familiar founding date should therefore be read as a conventional marker for a circle, rather than a verified inauguration ceremony.
An experiment and a dinner
Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours brought medical questions about altered perception into this artistic setting. His 1845 book on hashish and mental alienation is a separate document of that inquiry. The social gatherings also supplied material for literature.
In Gautier’s account, the narrator enters a richly decorated old mansion, receives green paste and joins a dinner. This ingested preparation matters: the scene is not an account of a room full of people smoking joints. Its changing perceptions unfold through taste, conversation, objects and the passage of time.
A story makes the club
Gautier’s text appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in February 1846. The fantastic transformations give the gathering a powerful literary identity. The surroundings become unstable and the experience passes between amusement and distress.
That narrative is evidence of how the experience was represented, not a clinical transcript. Its extravagance cannot establish what happened to every participant or what cannabis would do to every reader. Gautier’s tale helped make a handful of experiments seem like a much larger institution.
Names and legends
Pointeau-Lagadec’s research distinguishes the documented meetings from the myths around them. The distinction also cautions against treating every later list of famous members as a reliable attendance register.
Gautier repeats a story about the Assassins and the Old Man of the Mountain. This belongs to the nineteenth-century literary framing of hashish through an imagined East; it is not independent evidence that cannabis caused medieval assassinations.
The surviving record
The tradition entry follows the preparation, place and literary setting more fully. Baudelaire’s later Les Paradis artificiels belongs to its cultural afterlife, rather than proving that the same club continued.
What survives is a combination of social practice and writing. Reading the two together preserves the genuine experiments while avoiding the mistake of turning a memorable title into an organisation more definite than the evidence allows.[1][2][3]
In the cultural atlas
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for France here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.