Expatica France is pleased to offer a historical and cultural tour of Paris from City of Light expert Thirza Vallois as we enter the eighteenth arrondissement and discover the history of two dens of iniquity - Le Chat Noir and Le Moulin Rouge...

Paris society had always thrived on new thrills and Tout-Paris thronged to the opening of Le Chat Noir, in 1880. Its founder, the bohemian Rodolphe Salis, collaborated with Emile Godeau, who brought with him from the Latin Quarter its literary spirit and humour, adapting it to the new environment.

The Montmartre genre, with its crude, cocky wit was born. "God created the world, Napoleon the Légion d'honneur, but I created Montmartre!" Salis rightly claimed. Debussy, Steinlen and Willette, who had painted the famous poster for the cabaret, could be seen here, as well as the future Edward VII of England, who seems to have frequented every establishment of Belle-Epoque Paris. However, Le Chat Noir was located next to the Elysée-Montmartre and the Boule-Noire on the Boulevard de Rochechouart, and this was lower-class territory. If a bourgeois wished to come here, he had better keep a low profile. Pestered by the undesirable visitors, Salis eventually moved the cabaret a few blocks south, to the safer environment of rue Victor Massé (see feature on the 9th arrondissement).

Aristide Bruant, who was one of the performers at Le Chat Noir and was immortalised by Toulouse-Lautrec in his black, wide-brimmed felt hat and red neck scarf, took over the old premises on Boulevard de Rochechouart where he operated his own cabaret, Le Mirliton. This time there was going to be no social segregation and the bourgeois rushed in, delighted to be the butt of Bruant's jokes. Night after night, top-hatted, monocled men had their airs and graces dragged in the mud in his verses, while their bejewelled companions were urged to dump their strait-laced gentlemen and instead go after one of the he-men prowling around. When one such woman, with her husband's encouragement, did just that, it ended in a bloodbath: Disgusted both by her husband, who was hoping vicariously to regain his failing virility, and by the common brute, she ended by murdering them both in the beautiful setting of her townhouse.

Le Chat Noir made a splash but it was the opening of Le Moulin Rouge, on 5 October 1889, that was to mark Montmartre as the world's Mecca of pleasure and entertainment.

From the start, Le Moulin Rouge was a sensation, and its opening was no less a historic event than the completion and inauguration of the Eiffel Tower. Both were timed to coincide with the 1889 World Fair, a key date since it also commemorated the first centenary of the French Revolution. The nightclub's founder, Charles Zidler, was a brilliant entrepreneur who had started out as a butcher on the oozing banks of the Bièvre in southern Paris (see feature on the 13th arrondissement). By choosing the year 1889, Zidler and his partner Joseph Oller (who a few years later opened the prestigious Olympia (see feature on the 9th arrondissement) turned the inauguration of the Moulin Rouge into a national event! The same nationalistic fervour that surrounded the technological excellence of the Eiffel Tower surrounded the glamour of the female bodies at the Moulin Rouge, as they paraded to the sound of the Marseillaise, all decked in tricolours for the occasion.

Outside, on the Boulevard, the bright red mill with its rotating sails was an irresistible invitation. The Montmartre writer Mac Orlan described "the vermilion mill with its slow turning, blood-coloured sails...One felt snapped up by the inexorable jaws of the night." The Moulin Rouge offered "Gay Paris" what it really wanted - not social protest but glitter and flash and, above all, a display of female flesh - the exotic flesh of belly dancers and frilly thighs furiously beating out a provocative French cancan.

Those Boulevards outside the Moulin Rouge, with their treacherous, flashy electric lights, where scandalous luxury mingled wiht utmost misery, were bound to deprave and corrupt. Sex and crime could provide easy money and abolish social barriers. Many a wealthy, foolish gentleman, washed by champagne and wheedled by a coquette, found his home broken into within the next few days. Many a bejewelled lady, drawn irresistibly into the arms of an unknown seducer, found herself stripped of her valuables by the break of dawn. It was Edith Piaf's job in her earlier days to spy out the land, spot out a likely prey and inform her man of the victim's whereabouts. After the initial seduction, the victim would be stripped of her booty, not without first putting up a useless struggle. This was the price paid for poaching in underworld territory.

This is an excerpt from Thirza Vallois's Around and About Paris series (Volume 3 - New Horizons: Haussmann's annexation).

Around and About Paris (volume 1, 2 and 3) is published by Iliad Books, UK
For more information, and to order Thirza Vallois's titles, go to: www.thirzavallois.com