Loading summary
Transcript92 lines
- [00:00]
A
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.
- [00:38]
B
Ondeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team or bridging cash flow gaps, Ondeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star Trustpilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply minutes@ondeck.com depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by On Deck or Celtic Bank. On Deck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans an amount subject to lender approval.
- [01:09]
A
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 adult things in adultery way, covering range, adult subjects. And you should be an adult too, right? Can you take 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. Well, fancy seeing you hippie tricksters. 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 should we go inside and find out more about them? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. Paris at the end of the 19th century was the place to be. Make no mistake, they didn't call it the Belle Epoque, the beautiful age for nothing. And on the fringes of society in Montmartre 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 Epoque. 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@thane.co.uk, just search for betwixt and for everyone saying, will you put on more shows? Yes, we will, if those ones do well. So you need to make people come to those ones. Right, on with the show. Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Mike Report. How are you? Are you doing?
- [03:53]
C
How are you, Kate? I'm well, thank you. You're doing good. Looking forward to our chat.
- [03:56]
A
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 Epoque. So, as a first question, then, Mike, what brought you to studying Paris at this era?
- [04:19]
C
Well, first of all, it's allure. It has this kind of image of a bit of style, of speed. This is a period of the Paris Metro, of bicycles becoming democratized, of the first airplane flights, all that sort of thing, but also 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 around Paris.
- [04:56]
A
Holy moly, Mike. Wow, you go big, don't you?
- [05:02]
C
It was based on my teaching, so it was actually rather. It was the sort of thing my students like to talk about. So I had them 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.
- [05:19]
A
Oh, that sounds glorious. What does Belle Epoque mean? And when was that?
- [05:25]
C
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, after the carnage of the First World War, what have we lost? 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. But there's also periods of kind of a lot of deal of material progress, although that progress was shared very unequally.
- [06:14]
A
Did the people living in the Belle epoch, did they have a sense that they were living in a particularly unique time, or is this all kind of retrospective appreciation?
- [06:25]
C
Unique time in the kind of the positive sense. 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 moving. People were worried about all these technological advances or the speed of travel, for example, the rise of the mass media. There were concerns actually about fake news, just as there are today. All these things like, is this going to lead? Yeah, I mean, there's some real, really good, striking parallels today. We're worried about mass media today, understandably and quite rightly. But they were worried about the impact of the mass media, then 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 well being 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.
- [07:29]
A
Why Paris? Because 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 in the way they wear berets and they eat gets and they live in Studio apartments and paint naked women and it's all amazing. But why Paris?
- [07:56]
C
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 Pocket. Britain does, of course. London, Glasgow, where I teach. Yeah, you have, you know, this is a period of Charles Rennie, Mackintosh in Glasgow. You know, all these sorts of people. It's wonderful. You know, the kind of art nouveau St Style and so on in the Edwardian period. 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. Haussmann, his prefect of the Seine, created the boulevards that we know today. Street lighting was introduced, electricity, all these sorts. Actually, a bit later, not under Haussmann, but the meetings we associate with the modern city were being introduced from Haussmann onwards. So Paris becomes this epicenter of what people began to think of as modernity. I stress the kind of the anxiety that this caused, but there was 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, 30s, some sort of 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 in the old days, in the 18th century and 17th century, art was being produced at the behest of patrons who paid artists to produce religious work. 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 that people want. Bohemia is somehow dependent on a rising middle class clientele which has its own tastes, but also seeks to be separate from it, independent from it, because it sometimes looks down on It. The idea of the penniless artist is not myth. I mean, if you walk around Montmartre and you can see, you know, the Bateau Lavoie where Picasso lived and all that, it looks lovely now, but these areas were pretty much slums back then.
- [10:41]
A
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 boarding houses and the kind of the artists all banding together. Was that true or is that a myth?
- [11:07]
C
It's actually. There's a lot of truth in it. It's interesting that you mentioned Toulouse Lazar Trek. Telusa Trek was one of the few. I mean, I love Toulouse Trek, 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 Bohemia because he's a skean of aristocracy. So he could afford to do this. Well, you know, he has a very difficult, difficult life. Exactly. So you don't get me wrong, I mean, I love his artwork. But yeah, we mentioned Montmartre the Nouvelle at a cafe down on Place Spigall, which is where the Impressionists used to hang out in the 1860s. And then later on the whole area becomes associated with the Post Impressionists and the modernists and so on all the way into the 20th century, partly because rents were cheap. The boot, the hill of Montmartre was one of the areas where Haussmanization, this modernization had bypassed because of its topography, its very steep sided hill and all that. And so it got avoided by Haussmann. 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, as it had a sense of a village being a separate village and the artists like 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.
- [12:25]
A
And this is Montmartre, is it?
- [12:28]
C
Yes, that's right.
- [12:28]
A
All right, so who's hanging around Montmartre then? Who? Who? If you went walking around Belle Epoque, Paris, Montmartre, who?
- [12:37]
C
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. And then there's what I call Lower Montmartre. I'm not sure if that's an official term, but the Montmartre are 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 on Montmartre. Yeah. Not too far from the Sacre Coeur, where the Sacre Coeur was being built during the Belle Epoque, there was an anarchist kind of, I would say, hideaway. Everybody knew it was there, but it was a place where anarchists could come and crash if they needed to. And there was basically like a, like dakes, if you like, like bedsits 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 in Bourquet de Montmartre were Picasso. Suzanne Valadon, who earned fame as Renoir's red headed model for the. Let me see, what. The painting, the painting of the one with the umbrellas. You know, everybody's dressed in black there. That's Suzanne, the red headed, carrying the basket. That's Suzanne Valadon. She may have been the model for Le Balancoise, the swing. And you can see a replica of that in the garden of the Musee Montmartre, which is well worth a visit, by the way.
- [14:04]
A
Very saucy.
- [14:05]
C
Yeah. Yes, Suzanne Valadon is lovely. Her museum is Musee Renoir Valadon and she produced some great modernist artworks herself. Her son, Molly Sotrillo is famous for drawing these kind of very kind of almost like pen and ink style drawings and paintings of Montmartre as well. Jose Renoir lived there for a while. Van Gogh lived there for a while in Rue Lepic. Lots of different people gathered there. Toulouse, a trek. We've mentioned Degas down just below the boulevard and so on. A few American artists as well. It was quite a community.
- [14:47]
A
I'll be back with Mike after this short break.
- [14:56]
B
Cash flow crunch on deck. Small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover c, manage payroll, restock inventory or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws transparent pricing and control over repayment. Get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today@ondeck.com funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by Ondeck or Celtic Bank. Ondeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans, an amount subject to lender
- [15:25]
A
approval, day or night. VRBoCare is here 247 to help make every part of your stay seamless. If anything comes up or you simply need a little guidance, support is ready whenever you reach out from the moment you book to the moment you head home. We're here to help things run smoothly because a great trip starts with the right support. And hey, a good playlist doesn't hurt either. All right, let's talk another big name, Milan Rouge.
- [16:11]
C
Here we go. Here we go.
- [16:13]
A
So we've got this sort of cultural melting pot of everybody from people living in poverty to artists and radicals and revolutionaries and artists, models, I'm going to assume actors and actresses were there as. As well. Whose idea was the Moulin Rouge? Where does it. Who said let's build a giant windmill with. And put dancing people in it? Where did it even come from?
- [16:35]
C
Well, it came from. Well, first of all, the people involved was a guy called Oscar Zidler and Joseph Voller may have made mixed the first names mixed 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 realized that. 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 going, slumming. Slumming, exactly. It's the sort of thing 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, you know. But anyway, so Ziddler realized 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 Ziddler drew on this as well in terms of. For the idea, but also in terms of the dancers, the people who 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 hall. It's Cafe Conseil. 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 hence galette. And it produced this special type of biscuit called the galette, had its own windmill. And the Millender Galette becomes a really popular dance venue, mostly for the neighborhood, 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, 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 Moulins, a 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.
- [19:23]
A
What's with all the windmills?
- [19:25]
C
Ah, Montmartre had windmills because it was on a hill. Right. It was a place where farmers could go and so on, and grind down their grain into flour. So the Moulin were actually a landmark. If you look at the editions of Le Chat Noir, the newspaper of the famous nightclub, which is full of jokes and stuff and ribaldry and poetry and. 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 was used when the Prussians entered Paris at the end of Napoleonic 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 had a great deal of currency. Yes. So yes, there's an awful lot going on in Montmartre. Not all of it good.
- [20:38]
A
There is lots going on. Okay, so we've got. There are already dance halls. It 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 gonna do with it to make themselves stand out? Cause if there's already dance halls there, people could have come to those ones.
- [21:01]
C
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 between the dance floor and spectators, just like there was in original dance halls. The original dance halls, there'd be a. A wooden bar which would 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 band stand. And then at the back, it had lots of other additional attractions. It had a big garden. A garden, Yep. It had donkey rides at one point. It had a small roller coaster, which.
- [21:47]
A
That wasn't in the film.
- [21:49]
C
No, exactly. Which the French call Montagne 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. 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. There's plenty of stuff going on outside.
- [22:34]
A
This must have cost a fortune.
- [22:36]
C
Yeah, it was, but 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 dancehalls like the Moulin de la Collette, the Elysees, Montmartre and others. So it's definitely aiming more at a middle class clientele. Definitely.
- [22:51]
A
Okay. Was it a big hit straight away or was it a slow burner?
- [22:56]
C
It was a big hit. 1890s, they nailed it straight away. There were issues with it after about 1902, that began to shift more towards the Moulin Rouge, we think of, which is not so much the public dancing on the floor as much more like the dance lines of uniform dancers. It shifted much more in the days just before the First World War. Just depends what you think of as its golden age. But I think the 1890s was probably the time when it was like, this is it, 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. You read some of the witnesses and people are shouting and yelling, and 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.
- [23:59]
A
So if you were gonna go to the Moulin rouge in the 1890s, you've described some of the things going on there. But like, if, 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 Cancun girls everywhere?
- [24:21]
C
I wasn't regimented. No. There was one big stage, to the best of my knowledge, but there's an awful lot of other things going on. I mean, one of the things you had people kind of drinking. They didn't introduce kitchens for a place to eat until after the First World War, maybe even later. So it was basically a place where you had a drink.
- [24:38]
A
Thank.
- [24:38]
C
You know, a bit later, sort of after this period in the 20th. This is in the 20th century, I think it was the 1920s. They introduced a kitchen where it becomes much more kind of the show that people pay to go see rather than to participate in, to go dancing. But. But I'm trying to think. Yeah, one of the things you did have was potential was possibly you had sex workers soliciting to her business, both in the dance hall, going around the kind of pomme noir, the kind of the area around the dance stage where people were watching. Also, apparently it is said that the donkey rights were kind of mysteriously. I'm not sure how you would do this, but sex workers would solicit for business while riding donkeys.
- [25:20]
A
They're so inventive.
- [25:21]
C
I guess you could show more ankle or something that way, or more leg, but there we are. Yeah, Carnage. 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. Picasso used to carry a revolver when he walked around just in case he got attacked.
- [25:54]
A
Foreign. I'll be back with Mike after this short break.
- [26:07]
B
Cash Flow Crunch on Deck Small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing and control over repayment, get funded quickly and constant confidently. Apply today@ondeck.com funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes. Your business loan may be issued by Ondeck or Celtic Bank. Ondac does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amount subject to lender approval. Lunch was great, but this traffic is awful. Um, can we stop at a bathroom? Are you alright? I keep having stomach issues after eating like diarrhea, gas and bloating, abdominal pain and sometimes oily stools.
- [26:50]
A
Sound familiar? Those stomach issues may actually be a pancreas issue called exocrine pancreatic insufficiency or epi. Creon pancreat lipase may help manage epi. Creon is a prescription medicine used to treat people who can't digest food normally because their pancreas doesn't make enough enzymes.
- [27:06]
C
Creon may increase your chance of fibrosing colonopathy, a rare bowel disorder. Tell your doctor if you have a history of intestinal blockage or scarring or thickening of your bowel wall, if you are allergic to pork or if you have gout, kidney problems or worsening of painful swollen joints. Call your doctor if you have any unusual or severe gastrointestinal symptoms or allergic reactions. Take Creon as directed by your doctor and always with food. Do not chew capsules as this may cause mouth irritation. Other side effects may include blood sugar changes, gas, dizziness, sore throat and cough. These are not all the side effects of Creon. Call 8009110 or visit creoninfo.com to learn more. That's C R E O-N info.com I'm
- [27:35]
B
asking my doctor about EPI and if Creon could help.
- [27:49]
A
Let's talk about the cancan 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 just like was the can can the most famous thing about it or was that the main event? Where did that even come from?
- [28:07]
C
The can can came from a working class Parisian dance called the Shahut C H A H U T which basically involved a lot of kicking of the legs. It's 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 shahu 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. The sort of thing you see in Jane Austen movies, movies based on Jane Austen where they're all moving around in very well disciplined circles and talking to each other about marriage and things like that, and call each other Mrs. And Ms. And so on. But the quadrille apparently in this kind of more rough and ready working class context, and I think they have something similar in music halls in London too, was much more complicated, kind of flamboyant again like the shahu, lots of high kicking and so on and so forth. Now the cancan 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 in 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 them, 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 kind of be paid for what they did. And so it was things like they had special moves. So you had the porte dames, which literally means the kind of the shoulder arms, which literally meant that when you lifted, if you're one of the women dancer, one of the lady dancers, you would lift your leg as high up into the air and hold it up like that. You know, one of the famous moves. And also the, the grand, where you spread, you basically did the splits all the way horizontally. And that was often at the end of the dance. So there, this is a really, there are kind of specific dance steps that can canvas and of course the leg kicking high as possible. And the reason it got such a loose. Got such a loose reputation, or rather titillating reputation, was that one of the whole points of the can, can, can, as opposed perhaps to the shahu, in fact, is that it was deliberately designed to show off 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 Miller Rouge actually became very popular with British tourists in particular in the 1890s and 1900, was that you could go and be shocked. You know, you wanted to go, God, that's shocking. But, ah, 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. They. The Brits love this, but they pretend to be shocked.
- [31:07]
A
You know, that sounds like us. That does sound like what we would do. Is it true that the cancan was invented by. I'm going to say this wrong now, but La goul. Did she just say that it was invented by her. Her.
- [31:19]
C
La goulou. She means the glutton. Yeah. Because of the way she so energetically kind of threw herself into it. Yeah. She was one of the kind of more professional dancers that Ziddler recruited from the Elysement Matre down the road. So he got a lot of the professional dancers or enthusiastic amateurs like Jane Avrille, who's another one who doesn't do the can can, but does other types of dancing. Fireworks. And gets brought in to really kind of get the dancing going. Salagulu. There's also another enthusiastic amateur called Valentin le desorce, literally Valentine the boneless one, who's actually very respectable, middle class. He actually ran a wine shop in the center of Paris. Near the Corn Exchange. Yeah. A Rue de la Coquillier. I used to walk past up Hugue de la Coquillier on my way to do my research in the Biblio Essienneau. When I was a doctoral student, I thought if I'd known that, I thought, wow, I might have looked out for a plaque or something, something. But Valentin Desauss was. Was called the boneless one. Des Ross 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.
- [32:29]
A
We know Dirty Bertie did, don't we?
- [32:31]
C
Oh, yes, he was there. He went to.
- [32:32]
A
We know the Prince of Wales was there having an affair with Lagulu.
- [32:36]
C
Yeah, he was. Lagulu at one point, shouted at him, hey, Whale, Prince of Wales. Hey, Wales, the champagne's on you. And that was one of the whole points about the Moulin Rouge. Your kind of deferences of class and so on were not really respected and that's what people went for. 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 comedian show, that sort of thing.
- [33:08]
A
Jane Avril, she was the redhead in some of Toulouse Lautrec's paintings, wasn't she?
- [33:14]
C
Yes, that's right. She was much more. Danced in a much more sinuous way. She doesn't do the can can. She saw the can can, apparently, as a 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.
- [33:51]
A
There was a la Peter Main, wasn't there? The guy who could fart on cue, the petto man. Oh, my God.
- [33:59]
C
Yeah. I was kind of dreading this part of it, the conversation, because I'm going to have to say childish. I'm going to have to say, aren't I? This is a guy who claimed to have. 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.
- [34:22]
A
And to tunes as well, apparently.
- [34:24]
C
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 Petoman do his act, playing songs. And apparently the audience. Well, I think the audience would love it today.
- [34:42]
A
They would. That would win Britain's Got Talent any day of the week.
- [34:46]
C
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 humor.
- [34:56]
A
So there's a wide variety of entertainment on offer. Then. So what starts to happen? I know that Moulin Rouge is still there today, but it had its heyday. And then we have a decline which. What happens? How does women dancing in their scanties and men farting to songs go out of fashion?
- [35:13]
C
Well, what it 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 missing, 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 about really trying to present a particular image of Paris. There was a. I think there was a show called Sa SES Paris. Right, That's Paris. And it was meant to be much more about presenting this kind of particular image of Paris as a little titillating. 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. 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.
- [36:21]
A
Yeah, okay. It becomes too commercial almost. Would you say that happens sometimes when you get something that's really unique and it's kind of edgy and it's. 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?
- [36:39]
C
Yeah, the edge went, I think, quite fairly early on. It didn't help that I had a fire at some point. I had a fire fairly recently too. And a couple of years ago, the wings of the windmill fell off too. So there was a bit of. Had to be repaired and so on. I mean, that's. That that happens. Right? Happens anything anywhere. But yeah, its purpose shifts. Its audience shifts to some extent.
- [36:59]
A
Was it a big fire? This was in 1915, wasn't it? What happened?
- [37:03]
C
I'm not terribly sure what happened with the fire, but they had to kind of remodel it completely. The original decor was done by an artist called Adolph Viet. He was a great painter, great artist. I don't think I would have liked him very much. His politics were very extreme on the right. Anti Semitic, all this kind of horrible stuff going on in the 1890s.
- [37:26]
A
Oh, yeah. He sounds like a Prick.
- [37:27]
C
Yeah. He was not a very nice man, I don't think, but he. 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.
- [37:46]
A
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?
- [37:56]
C
Yeah, I mean, it's still in the same vein. Same building which itself had been a dance hall that had fallen into disrepair or disuse. But yeah. Did it close? Yeah. Try to read up on this. It shut for a period, I think, in 1929, so some news reports about that. It does keep going. During the war, P F sang there just before the liberation. Yeah. But I think it's pretty much apart from the old closure. I think it's been pretty much continuous. It's certainly now the longest, I think the longest surviving musical in France.
- [38:30]
A
Wow. Have you been to the Moulin Rouge, Mike?
- [38:33]
C
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 realize. I realized there's probably a reason I've not been to the Marouche.
- [38:46]
A
But is it dead pricey still?
- [38:48]
C
Yes, it'll set you back a couple hundred euro. Yeah, I think for the whole thing.
- [38:53]
A
Okay. But I bet they don't even have a man farting there anymore.
- [38:57]
C
No, they won't. No. Somewhat regrettably, I think.
- [39:00]
A
As a final question then, Mike, what did you think of the film? Have you seen the film Moulin Rouge?
- [39:06]
C
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 played Ziddler, was absolutely superb.
- [39:19]
A
Jim Broadbent.
- [39:20]
C
Jim Broadbent. Thank you. Thank you. That's right. Was absolutely superb as Ziddler. And what it does do really 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.
- [39:44]
A
Seems to capture the madness of it pretty well.
- [39:46]
C
Yeah. And the frenetic energy, particularly at the start. Yeah, I know. I enjoyed it.
- [39:51]
A
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?
- [40:02]
C
University of Glasgow.
- [40:03]
A
Thank you so much. You've been fabulous.
- [40:05]
C
Well, thanks, Kate. Great conversation. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you.
- [40:12]
A
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 wherever it is you get. Your podcasts. Coming up, we've got an episode on the Marquis de Sade and another exploring sex work during the America revolution. And if you'd like us to explore a subject, if you wanted to say hello, you can email us@betwixtoryhit.com this podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic. Sound. Support is available 247 with Verbocare. We're here day or night, ready whenever you need help because a great trip starts with the right support.