Inside the Moulin Rouge

The Moulin Rouge opened its doors in 1889, at the height of the Belle Epoch - 'the Beautiful Age'. Its famous windmill structure stood on the fringes of Paris, where intellectuals and artists mixed with thugs and criminals in a hedonistic neighbourhood. What really went on inside the Moulin Rouge? Why was there a giant elephant in the garden? And did sex workers really solicit business while riding donkeys?! Joining Kate today is the wonderful Mike Rapport, author of ‘City of Light, City of Shadows: Paris in the Belle Epoque’. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. You are back once again, hurrah! I'm so pleased to see you. But before we can go any further, I do have to let you know, just in case you've forgotten everything that I've been telling you over the past three years, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Right, can you tick all of that off? Can you? Can you? Because if you can't, you can't come in, I won't let you. Right, okay, let's get on with it.

• 1:06Kate Lister?

  Well, fancy seeing you, hippytwixters. We are at the Moulin Rouge at the end of the 19th century, and what a night, what a time to be alive. We are out in the back garden, and we will acknowledge the elephant in the room. No, literally, there is a massive elephant out in this garden, and patrons climb into it, and, well, you'll have to keep listening if you want to know what they get up to there. There is so much to see and do here, I'm not even sure I'll have time for a donkey ride. Yes, an actual donkey ride. It does feel a bit more Blackpool than Paris at the height of the Belle Epoque, but let's just go with it. But of course, people don't just come here for the elephants and the donkeys, they come here for the dancers. So shall we go inside and find out more about them?

• 2:11Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister.

• 2:17Kate Lister?

  Paris at the end of the 19th century was the place to be, make no mistake. They didn't call it the Belle Apoc, the Beautiful Age, for nothing. And on the fringes of society in Monmartre was a heady cocktail of artists, intellectuals, and a strong whiff of hedonism, not to mention absinthe. So it was the perfect setting for the Moulin Rouge, but what really went on inside? Taking us there today is the wonderful Mike Rapport, author of City of Light, City of Shadows, Paris in the Belle Apoc. And whilst I'm here, I wanted to let you know again about the two live shows that we've got going, happening in May, one in Edinburgh and one in London. Tickets are available at fein.co.uk, just search for Betwixt. And for everyone saying, will you put on more shows? Yes, we will, if those ones do well.

• 3:01Kate Lister?

  So you need to make people come to those ones. Right. On with the show.

• 3:13Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets, it's only Mike Rapport. How are you doing?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  How are you, Kate? Well, thank you. You're doing good. Looking forward to our chat.

• 3:22Kate Lister?

  Well, thank you so much. Oh, I am too. I mean, we're talking about the Moulin Rouge. I'm not sure how we've been going this long and we haven't spoken about the Moulin Rouge. But you are the author of City of Light, City of Shadows, Paris in the Belle Apoc. So as a first question then, Mike, what brought you to studying Paris at this era?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, it's a lure. It has this kind of image of a bit of style, of speed. This is a period of the Paris metro, of bicycles becoming democratised, of the first aeroplane flights, all that sort of thing. But also of science, of progress, of glamour, of fashion, a little bit of raunchiness and sexuality. But there was also a very dark side to it as well. This is a period of political extremes, of instability, of international friction, and of extremes of wealth and poverty. And that's what I was exploring in the book. Through the lens of places and around Paris.

• 4:22Kate Lister?

  Holy moly, Mike. Wow, you go big, don't you?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  It was based on my teaching, so it was actually rather, it was the sort of thing my students like to talk about. So we, I had that very much in mind when I was doing this. It's great fun as well. It was a labor of love because it got me walking around Paris, which is a good job if you can do it.

• 4:44Kate Lister?

  Oh, that sounds glorious. What does Bellepoc mean and when was that?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  The Americans have a term for it. They call it the Gilded Era or the Gilded Age. It means the beautiful period. The thing is, it was coined retrospectively after the First World War, when people went, oh, my gosh. And after the carnage of the First World War, you know, what have we lost? And what had gone on before suddenly seemed quite remarkable, like a golden age, a Gilded Era in the light of what had happened. And so people started to romanticize it. So the term wasn't used at the time, but it's roughly from the 1880s, more or less up to 1914. So those decades before the First World War, where people, whether it was a period of relative international peace, there was a lot of friction, as I've said, a lot of tension.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  But there was also periods of kind of a lot of material progress, although that progress was shared very unequally.

• 5:40Kate Lister?

  Did the people living in the Bellepoc, did they have a sense that they were living in a particularly unique time? Or was this all kind of retrospective appreciation?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Unique time in the kind of the positive sense that this is a wonderful, this is a silver age or a golden age. I think that's retrospective. At the time, actually, people were really, really worried about the way, the direction society was, was moving. People were worried about all these, these technological advances or the, the speed of travel, for example, the rise of the mass media. There were concerns actually about fake news, just as there are today. You know, all these things like, is this going to lead, yeah.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  I mean, there's a real, really good striking parallels today. You know, we're worried about mass media today, understandably and quite rightly. But, you know, they were worried about the impact of the mass media. Mass culture, consumerism, and there was a great sense that this was somehow going to make society decadent. It was going to fall apart. It was going to atomize it. Even physiologically, there was a fear that some people, that this is going to have an impact on on health, on people's health and wellbeing, and actually the development of human beings in an evolutionary sense. There was all kinds of ideas of this knocking around. So it was also a period of great anxiety.

• 6:55Kate Lister?

  Why Paris? Because like Paris just becomes this epicenter of, well, you can tell me, because maybe this is all retrospective as well, but it seems like it becomes the epicenter for bohemian artists and actors and free thinkers, revolutionaries, radicals. And they all go there and they wear berets and they eat baguettes and they live in studio apartments and paint naked women and it's all amazing. But why Paris?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Well, I would say that's a really good question because first of all, Paris isn't the only place which has a belle epoque. You know, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Prague, all these other wonderful places around Europe have their own versions of the belle epoque. Britain does, of course, London, Glasgow, where I teach.

• 7:38Kate Lister?

  Did we?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have, you know, this is a period of Charles I, MacIntosh and Glasgow. You know, all these sorts of people, it's wonderful, you know, the kind of Art Nouveau style and so on in the Edwardian period, you know, those sorts of things are all kind of associated with the belle epoque. But Paris in particular, yeah, does have this reputation in particular. And I think it's partly because, first of all, Paris itself had changed within living memory at that point in time. It had been renovated under Napoleon III, who fell from power in 1870 and was replaced by the Third Republic. Houseman, his prefect of the sand, created the boulevards that we know today. Street lighting was introduced, electricity, all these sorts of things. Electrification a bit later, not under Houseman, but the meetings we associate with the modern theatre

• 8:23Speaker 01

  were being introduced from Houseman onwards. So Paris becomes this epicenter of what people began to think of as modernity. I stress the kind of the anxiety in this course, but there is a positive side to that as well. But the idea of bohemia, your artist painting naked people in their garret or their studio apartment, has a much longer pedigree, probably goes back to the 1830s. The idea of bohemia, La Boheme, some people on the left bank of Paris in the 1830s, some students and artists and intellectuals, who thought about art and so on being outside mainstream culture. This was outside mainstream culture because, of course, the old networks of patronage.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  In the old days, in the 18th century, 17th century, art was being produced at the behest of patrons who paid artists to produce religious works. So things like the church, the king, the crown, rich nobles, rich merchants even, would pay artists to produce the works they wanted. What happens is you get the rise of a much more free market, if you like, a capitalist form of art market, where the artists are pretty much on their own and they have to do what they can. So they end up being very much dependent on basically a consumer market. They have to produce what a much broader range of people want. So bohemia is somehow dependent on a kind of a rising middle class clientele, which

• 9:47Speaker 01

  has its own tastes, but also seeks to be separate from it, independent from it, because it sometimes looks down on it. And so, but also, the idea of the penniless artist is not myth. I mean, if you walk around Montmartre and you can see the Batteau La Voie, where Picasso lived and all that, it looks lovely now, but these areas were pretty much slums back then.

• 10:07Kate Lister?

  There is a certain image of Paris at this time of hanging out in almost like genteel poverty, which it's an odd idea in itself, because as soon as you become a successful artist, you're not poor anymore. But it does kind of depend on this idea of this impoverished artist, Toulouse-Lautrec, hanging around at boarding houses and the kind of the artists all banding together. Was that true or is that a myth?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  It's actually, there's a lot of truth in it. It's interesting you mentioned Toulouse d'Attrez. Toulouse d'Attrez was one of the few, I mean, I love Toulouse d'Attrez, but he's one of the few who actually didn't have to worry about money because he was independently wealthy. So he could do all this, hang around in behavior because he's a scared of aristocracy. So he could afford to do this. Well, you know, he, he, he has a very difficult, difficult life. Exactly. So, I mean, I don't, don't get me wrong. I mean, I love his, I love his, his artwork. But yeah, we mentioned Montmartre, but the Nouvelle-Atten was a café down on Place Piga, which is where the Impressionists used to hang out, you know, in the 1860s. And then later on, the whole area becomes associated with the opposed Impressionists and the Modernists and so on, all the way into the 20th century, partly because rents

• 11:17Speaker 01

  were cheap. The boot, the hill of Montmartre was one of the areas where housemanization, this modernization had bypassed because of its topography. It's very steep sided hill and all that. And so it got, it got avoided by housemen. And so the rents remained quite cheap. It was very poor part of Paris, but nonetheless, it had a pretty, had a cohesion as a community, had a sense of a village, of being a separate village. And the artists liked that, but also the rents were cheap and they do club together. They drink in the same cafes. They meet each other. They chat. They sometimes fall out with each other over politics and so on. So, yeah.

• 11:51Kate Lister?

  And this is, this is Montmartre, is it?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 11:54Kate Lister?

  All right. So who's hanging around Montmartre then? Who, who, if you went walking around Bellic, Paris, Montmartre, who might you see?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Well, there are really two parts of Montmartre. Sorry to, there's the boot, which most people think of as Montmartre today, and that is the original Montmartre, literally the mountain of martyrs, the hill of martyrs. And there's a story behind that name as well. But then there's what I call lower Montmartre. I'm not sure if that's an official term, but the Montmartre, the boulevards down below, which is where the Moulin Rouge is and so on, and all these cafes were. But the sort of people you'd meet are first of all, quite a lot of poor people, especially on the boot. But you'd also meet people who were kind of marginalized in other ways, like politically. There's actually a bit of an anarchist community. Montmartre, yeah, not too far from the Sacré Coeur, where the Sacré Coeur was being built during the Belle ÉEpoque. There was an anarchist kind of, I always say hideaway,

• 12:47Speaker 01

  everybody knew it was there, but it was, it was a place where anarchists could come and crash if they needed to. And there was basically like a, like digs, if you like, like bed sits for anarchists and, you know, who had no money and so on, and they could crash there. And artists as well, I mean, the people, the sort of people who lived, who lived and worked in Montmartre were Picasso, Suzanne Valladon, who earned fame as Renoir's redheaded model for the, let me see, what the painting, the painting of the, the one with the umbrellas, you know, everybody's dressed in black now, that's Suzanne, the redheaded, carrying the basket, that's Suzanne Valladon. She may have been the model for le bal ansoir, the swing, and you could see a replica of that in the garden of the Musée Montmartre, which is well worth a visit, by the way.

• 13:30Kate Lister?

  Very saucy.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yes, Suzanne Valladon is lovely. Her museum is Musée Renoir Valladon, and she produced some great modernist artworks herself. Her son Molly Sotrio is famous for drawing, you know, the, these kind of very kind of almost like pen and ink style drawings and paintings of Montmartre as well. Horst Renoir lived there for a while, Van Gogh lived there for a while, and Rouge Pic. Lots of different people gathered there. Toulouse de Treck, we've mentioned, Degas, down just below the boulevard, and so on. A few American artists as well. It was quite a community.

• 14:13Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Mike after this short break.

• 14:21Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 15:03Kate Lister?

  All right, let's talk another big name, Moulin Rouge.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Good gosh, here we go.

• 15:09Kate Lister?

  So we've got this sort of cultural melting pot of everybody from the people living in poverty to artists and radicals and revolutionaries and artist models, and I'm going to assume actors and actresses were there as well. Whose idea was the Moulin Rouge? Who said, "Let's build a giant windmill and put dancing people in it"? Where did it even come from?

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Well, it came from, well, first of all, the people involved was a guy called Oscar Zidler and Joseph Oller. I may have mixed the first names up. But they had a lot of experience of, in some of the older literature, they're called impresarios. These are people who are businessmen, who have an eye for what will go down very well in entertainment. So they'd done stuff over Paris in the past. Now, Zidler in particular realised that there was maybe a gap in the market for a venue which would allow this kind of middle-class clientele, I talked about briefly at the start in reference to bohemia, to actually go and visit these places, associated with bohemia and with working-class poverty, but safely.

• 16:16Kate Lister?

  They're going slumming.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Slumming, exactly. It's the sort of thing that was happening in late Victorian London as well. I think they would go and travel into the east end, rather, to witness the poverty for themselves. But anyway, so Zidler realised that to have that in a kind of a safe or safe-ish environment would be a real money spinner, and so it proved. The idea of a dance hall in Montmartre, though, wasn't anything new, and Zidler drew on this as well in terms of, for the idea, but also in terms of the dancers, that people are going to actually be the attractions in the Moulin Rouge. Because Montmartre, apart from artists, anarchists, poverty and all these other things, Montmartre was also famous for its dance halls, its café.

• 17:00Kate Lister?

  Wow, okay.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So up on the hill, you can still see it. It's called the Moulin de la Galette, literally the windmill of the biscuit, if you like. Because the venue had been a bakery in the 18th and early 19th century, so it had gallette, and it produced this special type of biscuit called the galette, had its own windmill. And the Moulin de Galette becomes a really popular dance venue, mostly for the neighbourhood, the working people of northern Paris who would come and dance in the evenings and so on. It could be quite dangerous. You'd have a lot of thugs going there. You often had people mixing with prostitutes and so on, soliciting and so on and so forth. But by and large, it was a place for people just to unwind and blow out after really hard,

• 17:44Speaker 01

  long working days. The weekends, though, these places became populated by often more middle-class or lower-middle-class Parisians who'd come from further afield to have a good time. And Renoir actually painted a painting of the Moulin de Galette at night. And you could tell it was probably on the weekend because of the way the clientele are dressed. They're dressed in top coats, tails, that sort of thing, ties. And so this is probably a weekend because that's when, by and large, the more middle-class population of Paris went to enjoy dancing there.

• 18:17Kate Lister?

  Ah, what's with all the windmills?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Ah, Montmartre had windmills because it was on a hill, right? It was a place where, you know, where farmers could go and so on and grind down their grain into flour. So the Moulin, the Moulin were actually a landmark. If you look at the editions of Le Charnois, the newspaper of the famous nightclub, which is full of jokes and stuff and ribaldry and poetry and drawings and things. On its front cover is the eponymous scruffy cat, the black cat. But also in the background are the windmills of the bout de Montmartre. And the darker side of all this is that the Moulin de Galette, the windmill,

• 19:00Speaker 01

  was used when the Prussians entered Paris at the end of the Polonian Wars in 1814. The myth goes is that the bakery owner at the time resisted. And he got nailed up onto the windmill, which apparently is the idea for the Moulin Rouge, the red windmill. It recalls that bloody episode, which may be a myth. It may be just so you know, an atrocity story to enrage people. But you know, that's a story which which had a great deal of currency. Yes. So yes, there's an awful lot going on in Montmartre. Not all of it good.

• 19:34Kate Lister?

  There is lots going on. Okay. So we've got, there are already dance halls, already has this reputation. These two businessmen think, aye, aye, we've got an idea here. Was the Moulin Rouge a bigger dance hall? Was it more luxurious? What were they going to do with it to make themselves stand out? Because if there's already dance halls there, people could have come to those ones.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's first of all, far more luxurious. It changes over time, but at its original inception, there is a dance floor. There was a dance floor. So there was a kind of a separation to the dance floor and spectators, just like there was in the original dance halls, the original dance halls. There'd be a wooden bar, which is separate people seating in very simple wooden benches and tables, having drinks, maybe a bit of something to eat. And then the dancing, and that was it, more or less. The Moulin Rouge had that, but it had decor, it had mirrors everywhere. It had a raised dance bandstand. And then at the back, it had lots of other additional attractions. It had a big garden.

• 20:35Kate Lister?

  A garden?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Yep, it had donkey rides. At one point, it had a small roller coaster, which

• 20:43Kate Lister?

  That wasn't in the film.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  No, exactly, which the French call, was the French call montagnes russes, Russian mountains, because the Russians introduced the roller coaster when they occupied Paris with the Prussians in 1814. And they had a big plaster elephant, which had been bought or acquired from the great Universal Exposition in Paris in 1889, which is the same year the Moulin Rouge opened up. And inside, they opened up the belly of the elephant to create a mini stage where you could have belly dancing. And when the belly dancing wasn't going on, you could lie back and smoke opium. And so on. So it was basically, yeah, and outside had lots of fairy lights and other kind of distractions and tables for people to sit outside on too.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  There's, there's plenty of stuff going on outside.

• 21:30Kate Lister?

  This must have cost a fortune.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, but that was the, that was the other big difference is the entrance fee for the Moulin Rouge was much, much more expensive than it was for these other dance halls like the Moulin de la Colette, the Élysée Montmartre and others. So it's definitely aiming more at a middle-class clientele, definitely.

• 21:47Kate Lister?

  Okay. Was it a big hit straight away or was it a slow burner?

• 21:51Speaker 01

  It was a big hit. Eighteen nineties, they, they nailed it straight away. There were issues with it after about nineteen oh two, it began to shift more towards the Moulin Rouge we think of, which is not so much like lots of the public dancing on the floor as a much more like the dance lines of uniform dancers. It shifted much more that on in the days just before the First World War. It just depends what you think of as its golden age. But I think the eighteen nineties was probably the time when it was like, this is it, you know, this is because that was when it was a dance hall for the clientele. It was where it had all the activities going on. It was much less regimented. I mean, you read some of the witnesses and people are shouting and yelling and

• 22:36Speaker 01

  they're not sitting there passively watching a spectacle. They're actually taking part in it. They were dancing on the floors as well with the dancers. So the can-can, for example, wasn't this well-choreographed thing. It was much more rough and ready. Although the dancers themselves trained and worked very hard at that and physically very demanding.

• 22:54Kate Lister?

  So if you were going to go to the Moulin Rouge in the eighteen nineties, you've described some of the things going on there, but like, it's like you were walking through it. What kind of atmosphere would you be in? How many people could it hold? Was it just one stage? Was it lots of stages? Was there a guy who was like in charge of this, a master of ceremonies? Was it just carnage with donkeys and opium and can-can girls everywhere?

• 23:16Speaker 01

  It wasn't regimented, no. There was one big stage, to the best of my knowledge. But you know, there's an awful lot of other things going on. I mean, one of the things you had people kind of drinking. Didn't introduce kitchens for places to eat until after the First World War, maybe even later. So it was basically a place we had a drink, you know, a bit later, sort of after this period in the 20s, this is in the 20th century. I think, I think it was the 1920s, they, they introduced a kitchen where it becomes much more kind of the, the, the show that people pay to go see rather than to participate and to go dancing. But I'm trying to think, yeah. One of the things you did have was potential was possibly you had sex workers soliciting for business, both in the dance hall going around the kind

• 24:01Speaker 01

  of promenade, the kind of the area around the dance stage where people were watching. Also, apparently it is said that the donkey rides were kind of mysteriously, I'm not sure how you would do this, but sex workers would solicit for business while riding donkeys.

• 24:16Kate Lister?

  They're so inventive.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  I guess you could show more ankle or something that way or more leg. But there we are. Yeah.

• 24:21Kate Lister?

  This is carnage.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was raucous, but the original dance halls were as well. But this is what middle-class Parisians wanted to go see safely, you know, they didn't want to go to get potentially to run into, you know, a mugger, which happened a lot in Montmartre. Montmartre was not exactly a safe area, generally speaking. I mean, Picasso used to carry a revolver when he walked around, just in case he got attacked.

• 24:55Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Mike after this short break.

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• 26:11Kate Lister?

  Let's talk about the Can Can then, because that's what the Moulin Rouge is famous for. But I wonder, like now you're saying donkeys, opium, sex workers, food, drink, artists. Ah, it's like, was the Can Can the most famous thing about it? Or was that the main event? When, where did that even come from?

• 26:29Speaker 01

  The Can Can came from a working class Parisian dance called the chahut.

• 26:36Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Which basically involved a lot of kicking of the legs. It was very energetic, very boisterous, pretty unregimented. And that's the sort of thing that was done in these other dance halls we've been talking about. It's also based, and the chahut itself apparently comes from a dance called the quadrille. Now, before I looked into this, I always thought the quadrille was a very genteel dance, a sort of thing you see in Jane Austen movies, you know, movies based on Jane Austen, where they, they're all moving around in very well-disciplined circles and talking to each other about marriage and things like that, calling each other misses and miss and so on. But the quadrille, apparently, in this kind of more rough-and-ready working class context, and I think they had something similar in music halls in London too, was much more kind of flat-buoyant.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Again, like the chahut, lots of high kicking and so on and so forth. Now, the Can Can is kind of a finessing of all this. And it did, to do it properly, you did have to be actually a professional dancer. I think one of the kind of the myths that went around was that a lot of these dancers were also sex workers. I don't think that was the case, not the case of the dancers themselves. They turned up, and some of them were just really enthusiastic amateurs. And we can talk about some of those. But some of them were really well drilled. And there was a house just to one side of the Moulin Rouge, where one of the more experienced dancers would train the more professional dancers who wanted to be paid for what they did. And so it was things like, they had special moves.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  So you had the port d'armes, which literally means the shoulder arms, which literally meant that when you lifted, if you're one of the women dancers or lady dancers, you would lift your leg as high up into the air and hold it up like that, one of the famous moves. And also the grand écart, where you basically did the splits all the way horizontally. And that was often at the end of the dance. So there are specific dance steps that can kind of, and of course, the leg kicking, high as possible. And the reason it got such a loose reputation, or rather titillating reputation, was that one of the whole points of the can-can, as opposed perhaps to the chahou, in fact, is that it was deliberately designed to show off

• 28:49Speaker 01

  the petticoats and the knickers below and so on. You know, a flash of garter, a flash of stocking and so on and so forth. That's what it's designed to do amongst the dancers. But interestingly enough, not flesh, which was considered to be very, very gauche, a bit dirty. So, yeah. But one of the reasons Moulin Rouge actually became very popular with British tourists in particular in the 1890s and 1900s was that you could go and be shocked. You know, you wanted to go, "God, that's shocking." But, "I haven't seen such a terrible thing in all my life." But, "Oh, this is great." You know, but yeah. There are certainly some French writers who note this. The Brits love this, but they pretend to be shocked, you know.

• 29:29Kate Lister?

  That sounds like us. That does sound like what we would do. Is it true that the can-can was invented by, I'm going to say this wrong now, but la goul? Or did she just say that it was invented by her?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  La goulou, which means the glutton. Yeah, because of the way she so energetically threw herself into it. Yeah, she was one of the more professional dancers that Zidler recruited from the Élysée Montmartre down the road. So he got a lot of the professional dancers or enthusiastic amateurs, like Jane Avril, who's another one, who doesn't do the can-can but does other types of dancing.

• 30:04Kate Lister?

  The firework.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  And gets brought in to kind of to really kind of get the dancing going. So La Goulou, there's also another enthusiastic amateur called Valentine Le Désosé, literally Valentine, the boneless one, who was actually very respectable, middle class. He actually ran a wine shop in the centre of Paris, near the Court Exchange. Yeah. Or Hugues de la Coquillière. I used to pass up Hugues de la Coquillière on my way to do my research in the bibliothèque now. And I said, Dr. Osteen, I thought, if I'd known that, I thought, wow, I might have looked out for a plaque or something. But Valentine Désosé was was called the boneless one, Désosé was or the the deboned, because he was so flexible in the way he danced, long and lanky. And he may have had an affair with La Goulou. We're not sure.

• 30:50Kate Lister?

  We know Dirty Bertie did, don't we?

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, he was there. He went to.

• 30:54Kate Lister?

  We know the Prince Wales was there, having an affair with La Goulou.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was. Yeah, La Goulou at one point shouted at him, hey, Wales, Prince Wales, hey, Wales, the champagne's on you. So she, she, and that was one of the whole points about the Moulin Rouge, you know, your, your, your kind of deferences of class and so on were not really respected. And that's what people went for, you know, you know, you have entertainers now who kind of thrive because people like to go to be offended or insulted in the safe environment of a comic show or a comedic comedian show, that sort of thing.

• 31:30Kate Lister?

  Jane Avril, she was the she was the redhead in some of Toulouse-Lautreque's paintings, wasn't she?

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. She was much more dancing, much more sinuous way. She doesn't do the can-can. She saw the can-can apparently as a little bit, little bit obscene. She had her own style and was much more kind of respectable is probably what people would have said at the time. But she was much more kind of lyrical in the way she kind of approached the music and the dancing. And that's the other thing about the Moulin Rouge is that unlike a lot of the other review shows that emerged later on in the 20th century, it had both male and female performers and acts which were either exclusively female or exclusively male or mixed.

• 32:13Kate Lister?

  There was a le pete main, wasn't there? The guy, the guy who could fart on cue.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  The pete man. Oh, my God. Yeah, I was kind of dreading this part of it, the conversation.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Because I'm gonna have to say it.

• 32:27Kate Lister?

  Still funny.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  It's still very funny. I'm gonna have to say it, aren't I? This is a guy who claimed to have a, the word is aspirating anus. In other words, an anus that could actually suck in air, which meant that he could basically fart at will. Yeah.

• 32:43Kate Lister?

  And to tunes as well, apparently.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  His number, which apparently drew King Leopold, King of the Belgians. So Leopold wasn't busy doing horrible things in the Congo. He would go to Paris and watch the Petto Man do his act playing songs. And apparently the audience, well, I think the audience would love it today.

• 33:03Kate Lister?

  They would. That would win Britain's Got Talent any day of the week.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Well, you see, there we are. I'm pretending to be shocked and horrified by it, but I'm kind of laughing. I'm kind of laughing about it. As you say, it's a bit infantile, but there we are. Lavatory humour.

• 33:17Kate Lister?

  So there's a wide variety of entertainment on offer then. So what starts to happen? I know that the Moulin Rouge is still there today, but it had its heyday and then we have a decline. What happens? How does women dancing in their scanties and men farting to songs go out of fashion?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Well, what is, is first of all, a bit of a cultural shift after the First World War. In the 1920s in particular, it became much more a kind of a floor show because with lots of different acts on it and stars. One of them was Miss Dangue, who gave also Jean Gabin, who becomes later on a famous actor in the 1930s and 40s, his break. And so on. It becomes much more of a, much more about really trying to present a particular image of Paris. There was a, I think there was a show called Ça c'est Paris, right? That's Paris. And that it was meant to be much more about presenting this kind of particular image of Paris as a little titillating,

• 34:16Speaker 01

  the true, if you like, if you will, working class culture of Parisians and so on. The language, the dancing, all these sorts of things. The image of Paris as this kind of mixture of culture and a bit of raunch, really. And then post-war, that definitely begins to take off. It becomes more of a tourist attraction, actually. And so its purpose shifts over the 20th century.

• 34:43Kate Lister?

  Yeah, okay. Like, it becomes too commercial, almost, would you say? Like, that happens sometimes when you get something that's, like, really unique and it's kind of edgy and it's like, it's of the people and then suddenly it works and then it becomes mass-produced and then all the tourists get there and then you've kind of lost that edge that it had originally.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, the edge went, I think, quite fairly early on. It didn't help that it had a fire at some point. It had a fire fairly recently, too. And a couple of years ago, one of the wings of the windmill fell off, too. So there was a bit that had to be repaired and so on. And that's, that, that happens, right? It happens to anything, anywhere. But, yeah, it, it's purpose shifts. It's, it's audience shifts to some extent.

• 35:21Kate Lister?

  Was it a big fire? This was in 1915, wasn't it? How, what happened?

• 35:25Speaker 01

  I'm not terribly sure what happened with, with the fire, but they had to kind of remodel it completely. The original decor, so it was done by an artist called Adel Viet. He's a great painter, great artist. I don't think I would have liked him very much. His politics were very extreme. Extreme on the right, anti-Semitic, all this kind of horrible stuff going on in the 1890s.

• 35:47Kate Lister?

  Oh, yeah, he sounds like a prick.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was not a very nice man, I don't think. But he did a lot of the decor and that, I think a lot of that disappeared. Although it was his idea to put the Moulin, the red windmill, on top. And that's what gave it its iconic status. So I think a lot of that went. So they had to kind of reconstruct it on the inside.

• 36:07Kate Lister?

  Did it ever close and then was reopened? Or has it been there the entire time, still going? Like, the Moulin Rouge that exists today, that they, you know, they did the film around, it's very exciting. But did it ever close down?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's still in the same venue, right? The same, same building, which itself had been a, had been a dance hall that, that had fallen into disrepair, disuse. But, yeah, did it close? Yeah, I was trying to read up on this. It shut for a period, I think, in 1929. So there were some news reports about that. It does keep going during the war. PF sang there just before the liberation.

• 36:40Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think it's pretty much, apart from the odd closure, I think it's been pretty much continuous. It's certainly now the longest, I think, the longest surviving music hall in France.

• 36:51Kate Lister?

  Wow. Have you been to the Moulin Rouge, Mike?

• 36:55Speaker 01

  I was going to say, no, I have not. And in fact, when I was preparing for the show, I looked up to see out of curiosity how much tickets are. And I can realise, I realise there's probably a reason I've not been to the Moulin Rouge.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  But.

• 37:08Kate Lister?

  Is it dead pricey still?

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yes, it'll set you back a couple of hundred euro. Yeah, I think.

• 37:12Kate Lister?

  Woo, okay.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  For the whole thing.

• 37:15Kate Lister?

  Okay, but I bet they don't even have a man farting there anymore.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  No, they won't. No, somewhat regrettably, I think.

• 37:21Kate Lister?

  As a final question then, Mike, what did you think of the film? Have you seen the film Moulin Rouge?

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yes, some time ago, I think when it first came out, I rather liked it. I know a lot of people don't. But I loved it. It was fun. I thought Broadbent, the guy who plays Zidler, was absolutely superb.

• 37:41Kate Lister?

  Jim Broadbent.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Jim Broadbent, thank you, thank you. That's right. Was absolutely superb as Zidler. And what it does do rather well is it does depict, although geographically it inverts, in the movie, you walk through the garden to get to the dance floor, whereas in the real Moulin Rouge, you walk through the dance floor to get to the garden at the back. But that doesn't matter. It's a very stylish movie, pretty fast paced, lots of different stories within it, I think, which I really enjoyed. Yeah, it's been a while since I've seen it though.

• 38:05Kate Lister?

  Seems to capture the madness of it pretty well.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the frenetic energy, particularly at the start. Yeah, no, I enjoyed it.

• 38:12Kate Lister?

  Mike, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much for coming along to tell us about the Moulin Rouge. And if people know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  University of Glasgow.

• 38:24Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much. You've been fabulous.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Thanks, Kate. Great conversation. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you.

• 38:33Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Mike for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we've got an episode on the Maquis de Sade and another exploring sex work during the American Revolution. And if you'd like us to explore a subject, if you wanted to say hello, you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Fyodorov and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt and Sheats, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.