From the Café-Concert des Ambassadeurs to the Moulin Rouge: The Golden Age of Paris Entertainment, 1860-1900

with Chris Boïcos

Between 1860 and 1900 the population of Paris tripled, from one million to three million inhabitants. This mass urbanization favored the explosive growth of entertainment venues in the city, from cafés, brasseries, theaters, music halls, dance halls, fairgrounds, circuses and towards the end of the era, cinemas. Most of these were located on the central boulevards of Right Bank Paris, the sequence of tree-lined thoroughfares known as the “grand boulevards”, or on what Vincent Van Gogh called the “petit boulevard” the exterior boulevards near Montmartre, running from place de Clichy to the boulevard Barbès.

Our lecture will examine a selection of these venues as portrayed or illustrated by some of the great artists of the day – Degas, Manet, Forain, Béraud, Seurat, Chéret, Steinlen, Gill, Ibels and Toulouse-Lautrec. We will look at the chief types of entertainment from the circus horse rider (écuyère), the clown, the can-can dancer, the fairground wrestler to the music-hall singer, and introduce some of the great “stars” of the day like the singers Théresa, Yvette Guilbert and Aristide Bruant and the dancers La Goulue and Jane Avril. These new venues and figures of entertainment fascinated writers and artists, providing them with an exciting new subject matter, as much as they repelled the guardians of public morality who, as ever, saw in them the proof of the moral decadence of modern society.