Bret Easton Ellis and I were just discussing this very topic as we snorted coke off the same stripper's tits

Do artists need narcotics even more than ordinary people?

The Paris hashish users resembled the Californian potheads of the 1960s in their idealism, poses and self-indulgence. "We were troubadours, rebels," said Flaubert, "above all we were artists." He and his contemporaries used hashish as part of their rebellion against middle-class conventions and industrial capitalism - what he castigated as "the shrivelled runt of human aspirations" typified by "railways, enema pumps, cream cakes and the guillotine". Parisian hashish smokers and eaters remained subversive types. As late as the 1870s, Arthur Rimbaud smoked hashish during the defiant phase of his adolescence when he was contemplating becoming an urban terrorist.