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19th Century 20th Century Film French History Historical Places Paris Theatre Uncategorized

Did Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Love Ever Really Reign at the Moulin Rouge?

Yesterday found me watching Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!. This, I must confess, is not an entirely uncommon occurrence. In fact, were I to feed all my innermost preferences into some kind of film-making robot and send it off for a few months, it’d probably come back with something very like Moulin Rouge! in the can. Belle Époque Paris? Check. Musical (including Sound of Music references)? Check. Naively simple yet cheaply affecting love story? Check. Absurdly lavish set and costume? Double check. With a bottle of French wine and perhaps a good cheese board and an oozing saucisson, it’s an indulgent guilty pleasure – especially with the simply ravishing Blu-ray.

This time though, as I was watching it, I wondered whether there was any truth in the story and its intoxicating portrayal of the Moulin Rouge itself. Was there ever a group of explosively creative, Bohemian artists, animated by the chance to live out their four tenets – Truth, Beauty, Freedom and above all things Love – who found their home beneath the scarlet sails of the iconic windmill?

The short answer, I’m afraid, is no. The Moulin Rouge was driven by, above all things, commercial success, and if it a giant illuminated sign had hung over the place, it would not, as in the film, have read ‘L’amour’, but rather ‘Cancan’. Contrary to some legends, the dance was not invented at the Moulin Rouge. Cancan had existed since the 1830s (originating not in Montmartre but in Montparnasse), but in its life before the Moulin Rouge it was a far more respectable affair – a little rowdy perhaps, with just a soupçon of reckless abandon, but essentially just a high-kicking, high-spirited dance for couples in working class ballrooms, with little to no flashing of knickers. When the Moulin Rouge opened its doors 1889, it took this tamely ribald little jig, supercharged it, yanked it out of those tucked away ballrooms and put it on stage for all the world to see. The reason for this change was a practical one – the dancers of the early Moulin Rouge were courtesans, and so this dance (showing off their legs, undergarments and, as time went on, a lot more) served as an advertisement for their services. The film does a good job of re-choreographing the cancan for the modern age, recapturing a sense of how shockingly physical and dangerous the Moulin Rouge’s version of the dance must have seemed in the 1890s, in contrast to the ploddy, clichéd affair it can seem today.

The cancan quickly became a sensation, with certain sections of society flocking to the Moulin Rouge to enjoy it, and certain sections flocking equally breathlessly to be scandalised. One writer in the 1890s described

the old English ladies and the young misses wrapped up in warm furs even in the midst of summer and who always sit in the front row in order better to ascertain the immorality of the French dancers [and who] cover their faces when it is over and then utter their properly indignant ‘Shockings!’.

Once word of the cancan had spread it was all anyone wanted to see, and so though the cabaret has played host to a string of legendary performers, the film’s troupe of groundbreaking thespians would in reality have had little to do. As the initial shock of the cancan wore off, the dance became more crude and explicit, so while ‘freedom’ and ‘love’ abounded at the Cabaret, it was not exactly of the romantic type.

But what about Toulouse-Lautrec – the poster boy for Bohemia? Didn’t he have his own table there, where he’d be found night after night sketching? Well, yes he did. He was originally commissioned to create posters for the venue in 1891, and he went on to feature the cabaret in many of his paintings.

It strikes me that there’s a big difference between the tone and atmosphere of this famous poster, capturing so much of the Belle Époque joie de vivre we still associate with the place, and that of his other representations of the place.

Self-portrait Au Moulin Rouge, 1892

In these images, joie de vivre seems to be to be utterly absent. There’s something at once stiflingly bourgeois and ghastly going on here. The deathly face in the image above isn’t at the height of ecstacy, it isn’t even under the spell of some chemical – it’s the reflection of a soul that yearns to be somewhere else.

Toulouse-Lautrec two women dancing
Au Moulin Rouge: Les deuxvalseuses, 1892

La danse au Moulin Rouge, 1890

In these two images there’s more of the office Christmas party than the freewheeling melting pot seen in the film. In Les deuxvalseuses two slightly tipsy but otherwise ordinary (not to say dull) women engage in a waltz of all things, the very opposite of the scandalising cancan. And in Le Danse, the drunk girl at the party lifts her skirts and dances with life and vigour (a figure identical to the one in the poster), but everyone else looks uncomfortable and bored. Top-hatted men circle the dance floor not joining in, not even enjoying the spectacle, but it seems tut-tutting, or discussing the weather. The woman in the pink dress is almost asleep. There’s an overwhelming brownness to the whole thing. It isn’t a place I’d want to be.

It would be wrong to project too much of what the Moulin Rouge is today onto what it was then – to imagine the top-hatted men as merely the equivalents of the coachloads of businessmen and bewildered tourists who turn up at the place today. For one thing, I’m sure it didn’t cost over a hundred Euros then. But there is a sense in these pictures of danger and adventurousness being dished up on demand for the mundane, who enjoyed their ‘Shockings!’, and the feeling that they were participating in the demimonde of Montmartre for the evening – almost as if they went on a Safari, gasped at the wildlife, and could then return to their humdrum lives.

This sense is only confirmed when you reflect that there were other clubs in the area that were more the Moulin Rouge of our imagination than the Moulin Rouge itself. In the 1870s the Nouvelle-Athènes club was a favourite haunt of Zola, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Huysmans and Degas. Le Chat Noir, which opened on the Boulevard Rochechouart in 1881 (and of course had its own poster by Toulouse-Lautrec) was started by the failed painter Rodolphe Salis, and its lifesource was the group of artists known as the ‘Hydropathes’ (because they were constantly thirsty). The Hydropathes provided the entertainment for the club, staging shadow plays or dramas, satires, songs, sketches, and insulting the audience as they entered. Le Chat Noir even had its own newspaper. Much closer, then, to Baz Luhrmann’s portrayal of the Moulin Rouge, in every respect other than the ardent right wing politics the Hydropathes were famous for. The Lapin Agile became popular with artists after 1903, with Picasso only the most luminous star to prop up its bar.

The Moulin Rouge of the film is then a distillation of the spirit of the Belle Époque (more potent even than absinthe). While it’s by no means an accurate depiction of the historical Moulin Rouge, it isn’t trying to be, and it succeeds admirably in simulating the giddy, heady thrill of a night out in turn-of-the-century Montmartre, minus some of the more sordid realities paying for sex and the surprise of finding a conservative polemic as the night’s entertainment. The hero Christian’s undying quest for L’Amour marks him out in the film, as it would have done in the Montmartre of 1900, where love was the only pleasure not readily available, differently from now a days that you can find a partner and enjoy love, and even get accessories for this, at sites at TheToy online.  And there’s one last thing the film gets right – there really was a gigantic elephant in the gardens of the Moulin Rouge, which, as I discovered in this post from the Lost Paris series, is a bit of a theme in Parisian history. At the present time today, a shop like Spank The Monkey has a range of male sex toys at a budget that suit everyone to enjoy alone or with a partner.


The Elephant in the gardens of the Moulin Rouge, around 1900. The elephant was said to contain an opium den.

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Good Stuff: Things I’ve Enjoyed This Week

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Welcome to a brand new section on Culture&Stuff, where I share with you, my good and dear reader, some of the treats I’ve come across this week. Don’t be fooled by the graphic, these treats come in the form of things you can find on the internet and in book shops, not sweets. I never share my sweets.

  • ‘A palace of commerce and a 1904 rendez-vous’ on Parisian Fields. The owners of this blog stumbled across a sepia postcard in a market with the enigmatic message – Sunday night – received letter this morning. [I] count on you [to come] on Wednesday. Love to all, Jean – scrawled on the front. The card is postmarked 1904, and features a glorious Parisian building that they didn’t recognise. Most of us would have emitted a vaguely perplexed ‘Hmm’, stuck the postcard on the wall and forgotten about it. That isn’t Parisian Fields’ style though, and this bewitching post uses the postcard as a starting point of a miniature detective story, piecing together the history of the deluxe building. Sadly the identity of Jean, whom he is counting on to come and for what purpose must forever be lost to romantic speculation of the most achingly hopeless sort. This blog has a magnificent eye for telling Parisian detail, and benefits (unlike this blog – would it were not so!) from frequent, actual visits to Paris.
  • The blog Titillating Tidbits About the Life and Times of  Marie Antoinette has this piquant introduction to the deeply intriguing life of Chevalier Saint Georges, intimate of Marie Antoinette “deadly swordsman, skilled equestrian, gifted musician, and unmatched lover”, whose achievements were made all the more remarkable by the fact that he was born in Guadeloupe, the offspring of an illicit encounter between a French slave owner and a 16-year-old slave.
  • I also just finished reading The Thousand Autums of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, an epic, poetically beautiful novel that creates a thoroughly convincing, living, breathing, sweating version of 18th-century Nagasaki. The dialogue especially feels authentic and alive, without that stiff, museumy ‘period’ feeling so often created in historical novels. By turns an ethereal love story and a rollicking adventure, this is a book that rewards patience and tolerance of some stylistic quirks to deliver one of the most satisfying conclusions I’ve read in a long time. Plus, the English hardback version is so beautiful, it’s worth having just as an adornment to your shelf.

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, which is high praise indeed for this handsome volume. It’s even nicer in real life, with lovely shiny bits.

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18th Century French History Historical Places History Lost Paris Paris Uncategorized

Lost Paris: A snapshot of 1730s Paris

This wonderful, 33 megapixel, zoomable marvel is known as the Turgot Map of Paris, and it’s a remarkable document in all sorts of ways. I like to imagine that were you to be offered the chance to drift above Paris in a hot air balloon in the 1730s (disregarding the fact that this was impossible, the Montgolfier brothers being still but a twinkle in their parents eyes) the scene before you would look very like this. Or maybe it’s more like what it would be like to be some all-powerful God, with the world laid at your feet and called to attention for your inspection. The map was commissioned Michel-Étienne Turgot, then prévôt des marchands de Paris (roughly equivalent to the city’s mayor) and created by Louis Bretez. And Turgot certainly got his money’s worth. The completed map was huge, filling 21 sheets and reproducing the city in incredible detail. I recommend you switch the widget to fullscreen mode, scroll and zoom around, and get lost inside it for a while. The map strikes us as odd in several respects. Firstly, it’s oriented very differently from any map of Paris we’re used to, with the viewer facing east. Then there’s the birdseye perspective, technically known as perspective cavaliere, this means that buildings of the same size are shown at the same size on the map, no matter how far away they are. Then there’s the fact that what we see is recognisably Paris, but not Paris as we know it. It’s a stark reminder of the scope and scale of the changes made to Paris under Haussmann and Napoleon III, which have changed so fundamentally the essence of the city. Mostly though, it’s the sheer detail of the thing that startles- enough to give you the slightly eerie sense that you’re looking at a city captured in some crystaline lava flow, and preserved for all time. Turgot set out to record the city as it was, without a window or a leaf out of place, and on one level he succeeded admirably. During his two years drafting the map, he was granted extraordinary access to the city, even being allowed inside the aristocratic hôtels, normally cut-off from public view by their fortress-like walls. As a result, the map is full of vivid and authentic detail, and examining it is as addictive as Where’s Wally (Waldo). There are views of sights such as the Louvre, then flanked by the Tuileries Palace, surrounded by a hodgepodge of medieval housing, and forming the western boundary of developed Paris, with nothing beyond but trees subjected to ever-decreasing levels of manicure, and then waves of green fields. Montmartre is still nothing more than a village, its windmills still real and none rouge. The massive, unforgiving Bastille dominates its neighbourhood. Individual boats are depicted on a river teeming with activity. And there’s a reminder that Haussmann was not the only man who ever dreamed of reshaping Paris – already Henry IV’s Place Royale and Louis XIV’s Place Vendôme stand out from the muddle of streets that surround them – harbingers of the orderly, picture-perfect Paris of the future. Perhaps the reason the map feels slightly disconcerting is because of what’s not there. There’s so much detail and reality in the buildings, and yet slicing through them are clean, white roads. Not only do these streets seem in many places far wider, straighter and clearer than they almost certainly were in real life, there’s also something lifeless and sterile about them. The streets of Paris in the 1730s were many things, but clean was not one of them. Turgot clearly had a political purpose in commissioning the map, and aimed to show Paris as a modern, well-governed, well-maintained city under the control of the authorities. Even the very act of completing such an extraordinary work was testament to the resources available to the city’s elite. Consequently, the Pont Neuf is recorded in exacting architectural detail, but we get no sense of the raucous street life that thrived there. Eagle eyes can spot the Cimetière des Innocents near Les Halles in the centre of the city, but there’s nothing to suggest the supreme squalor of the place, the ground so full of corpses that they frequently burst out into the cellars of nearby buildings. And only when you look at the banks of the Seine, with the streaks of mud that intrude onto the clean white paper of the riverside, do you get a hint of the dirt and filth, the all-pervading brown that would have been the colour of Paris, and the stench that would have ruined that anachronistic balloon ride. The map is at once a tantalising and rare glimpse of a lost Paris at a precise moment in its history, and a fantasy – a Paris that never, quite, was. Incidentally, you can buy huge reproductions of this map in the UK here and in the US here. Oh how I lust after these! And if big, zoomable, historical maps are your bag, you might just explode with happiness if you visit the BIG Map Blog.

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French History Historical Places History Lost Paris Paris Uncategorized

Lost Paris: A new series

Lost Paris. It’s one of those phrases that sounds so much more poetic in French: Paris Disparu. Listen, you can practically hear the sad wind whistling around those forgotten streets. البولو

Paris, it seems to me, has more than its fair share of lieux de mémoire – those places where history “crystallizes and secretes itself”, where it seeps into the very fabric of the world and it seems that all you’d have to do is pull up the right paving stones and you’d find it glitteringly waiting there for you. But if the Paris of today is defined and animated by visible badges and scars of history, it’s equally shaped by places that no longer exist, that have been wiped off the map, or had the life scrubbed out of them, or where people have simply forgotten the long and – this being Paris – frequently macabre stories that lurk in the shadows of the City of Light.

So today I begin a new series, Lost Paris, in which I’ll try to uncover some of these forgotten places, stroll around in them for a while and imagine what it might have been like to see them. Get on board the gaudy double-decker, time travelling history bus, and some of the sights we’ll be taking in over the next few weeks include… دانى الفيش

Do join me. You may want to bring a nose peg and a sturdy pair of Wellington boots… اللاعب جريزمان

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Marie Antoinette and her Children: The queen’s adopted family

Marie Antoinette's adopted children

From the day she arrived at Versailles at the age of only fourteen, one question loomed larger in the life of Marie Antoinette than any other. Versailles was so used to gossip that Whisper was practically its official language, but amidst the idle wagging of tongues and scurillous muck-raking, this question had extremely serious consequences not just for the young Dauphine and Dauphin, but also for the Court, the country and the future of European politics.

Why wasn’t Marie Antoinette pregnant?

Doubts began to germinate on the morning after the young royal couple’s first night together, when their sheets were examined (‘privacy’ being an entirely foreign concept at the palace) and nothing, clearly, had taken place. Weeks turned to months, months to years, and nothing changed. Pressure mounted. Marie Antoinette’s mother, the awesome Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, kept up an unending barrage of questions and criticism on the subject by letter. Every month, messengers raced across the continent to inform the Empress on the coming of Marie Antoinette’s periods, and her continued, growing failure as a Dauphine. The market women of Paris, taking advantage of their peculiar right of access to Versailles, confronted Marie Antoinette directly, demanding of her when she would give France what it needed. Finally, Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Emperor Joseph II was dispatched on what must have been a mortifying visit to Versailles for the young girl, in which he spoke frankly with Marie Antoinette and Louis about the ins and outs of royal duty.

Opinions differ on the precise cause of the delay and its possible physical or psychological components. Essentially though, the problem boiled down to the extreme awkwardness of two people who were by our standards very young and, by nature, shy. Louis especially suffered from an almost crippling lack of confidence and a pronounced sense of his own inferiority. Knowing, as they did, that every detail of whatever happened between them in that vast and imposing royal bed was being talked about – laughed about – by all of Europe, it is unsurprising that intimacy took time to develop.

And though hosts of people seemed to think Marie Antoinette needed constant reminders about the importance of this particular duty, it seems unlikely that anyone felt more strongly about the situation than she did. All commentators on the girl agreed that she had a deep and genuine love of children, which must only have been given added heat by her own inability to become a mother. When the Duchesse de Chartres gave birth to a stillborn child, Marie Antoinette wrote, poginantly, that she would have been happy to have given birth to any child, even a dead one.

Finally, Marie Antoinette delivered her first child, Marie Thérèse, in 1778 – eight long years after her arrival in France. But even before this momentous event took place, it would not be entirely accurate to describe Marie Antoinette as ‘childless’. For though she may not have had children of her own, she became guardian, even mother, to a surprising number of adopted children. This is a topic which many of Marie Antoinette’s recent biographers have overlooked or glossed over, but it is an area that sheds important new light on her character.

From very early on at Versailles, Count Mercy (an Austrian minister charged by Maria Theresa to keep Marie Antoinette in line) complained that the Dauphine kept almost constant company with a 5-year-old boy, the son of her chief femme de chambre, the evocatively named Madame de Misery. Soon, de Misery’s 12-year-old daughter joined in the fun, coming to live with Marie Antoinette. This happy arrangement came to an end following complaints over their extremely noisy games, and the resulting torn clothes and broken furniture. Though stories such as this one were gifts to those who wished to portray Marie Antoinette as empty-headed, frivolous and immature, it is worth remembering that Marie Antoinette, at only fifteen, was pretty close in age to the 12-year-old girl. It is true that her own childhood, during which she was never expected to fill the pivotal role of Dauphine, had included at best a patchy education, and only last-minute attempts at preparing her for the task ahead. She certainly was not ready to engage with adults on their level, especially such forceful personalities as the Royal Aunts, and representatives of the other factions at Versailles which sought to win her favour. Though Marie Antoinette’s retreat into childish behaviour during her early days at Versailles was an extreme reaction, it is in many ways an understandable one.

On another occasion, it is said that Marie Antoinette was travelling in her carriage when the horses ran into a young boy. He was, miraculously, uninjured, but the queen held him in her arms and (so legend has it) declared ‘I must take him. He is mine’. Handily, it turned out that the boy’s mother had died, and his grandmother willingly agreed. He was whisked away to Versailles, and his whole family was placed under royal protection. The boy (called Jacques or Armand, depending on the version of the story) was cared for by Marie Antoinette, who often shared her food with him. His brother Denis was provided with a thorough musical education, becoming Cellist to the King in 1787. Marie Antoinette is even said to have found a way to send Denis money to allow him to embark on his promising musical career after the monarchy fell. Armand’s two sisters were provided with a regular allowance and, according to the marriage contract of one of them, were left a large sum of money following Marie Antoinette’s death.

Armand stayed with the queen until the birth of Marie Thérèse, when he was sent to continue his education, still funded by Marie Antoinette. The tale, however, does not end there, and when the Revolution began, Armand apparently rebelled against his adopted mother, becoming an ardent revolutionary, joining the armies of the Republic and dying, heroically, in battle.

Something has always struck me as a little odd about this story – perhaps it’s the lack of clear, reliable sources for the information, perhaps it’s because so few biographers have made much of what is by any standards a remarkable incident in the life of Marie Antoinette. It has something of the ring of those delicious, intoxicating rumours that Marie Antoinette inspired – a young peasant boy, as good as kidnapped by the childless Queen, scrubbed, dressed up and paraded around the gilded palace, given everything he needs, but who ultimately bites the hand that has fed him so richly. But there is enough evidence both in the story itself and when set in the context of Marie Antoinette’s known history of adopting children to suggest that at least the basics of this story are correct, and these children should rightly be considered a part of Marie Antoinette’s extended family of foundlings.

This family did not stop growing even when Marie Antoinette at last began having her own children. Madame Royale, as Marie Thérèse was known, was a famously difficult child, and it was perhaps in an attempt to soften her intractable character that Marie Antoinette provided her with a companion, in the shape of Marie Phillippine Camriquet, the daughter of one of Madame Royale’s maids. Renamed Ernestine for her new role, the girl initially spent her days with Marie Thérèse before returning to her parents at night. However, when her mother died in 1788, Ernestine was moved into Marie Thérèse’s apartments, and given an almost identical room to the princess. She wore similar clothes and took lessons alongside Marie Thérèse.

Marie Antoinette seems to have been particularly sensitive to the thought of any child being orphaned, and it was usually the impulse to take care of such children that prompted her to bring them into her household. On hearing of the death of one of Louis’ gentlemen ushers and his wife, leaving three orphan girls, it is said that Marie Antoinette immediately declared (much as she had done with Armand) ‘I adopt them!’. The two eldest girls were placed in a convent, but Jeanne Louise Victoire (at 3, the same age as the Dauphin) was installed in the royal apartments and renamed Zoë. She became the companion for the Dauphin Louis-Charles.

In 1787, Marie Antoinette was presented with an unusual gift from the famous traveller Chevalier de Boufflers, who had recently returned from Senegal. He offered the Queen a parrot (to join the vast and rowdy crew of pets that already terrorised Versailles) and a young Senegalese boy. Normal practice at the time would have been to dress the boy up and take him into service (much like the boy pictured in the above painting), but on this occasion Marie Antoinette had him baptised and renamed Jean Amilcar, and instructed one of her houseboys to look after him.

All three of these children remained with Marie Antoinette as the royal family was ousted from Versailles in October 1789, and moved to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. At this point, Jean Amilcar was placed in an institution for children at Saint-Cloud, and Marie Antoinette sent monthly payments to provide for his upkeep. When she was moved from the Tuileries to much tighter imprisonment at the Temple, she was unable to keep up these payments, whereupon it was said that the boy was cast out by the charity, and he starved to death on the streets.

Before the royal family’s attempted escape from the Tuileries in 1791 (which ended in failure at Varennes, and their forced return to Paris), Zoë was sent to join her older sisters at the Convent. Though Ernestine was also dispatched to her father in Versailles for the escape, she returned to rejoin the family following its failure, and only finally left the royal family when the Tuileries was invaded and the family forced to flee to the National Assembly in August.

Ernestine’s father was guillotined during the Terror, but Ernestine herself survived. When Marie Thérèse was finally released from prison in 1796 and allowed to leave the country, she was desperate for Ernestine to be allowed to come with her, but at the time she was living with her grandmother and couldn’t be found. When royalty was restored to France, and Marie Thérèse returned to Paris in 1814, she immediately began again to search for Ernestine, but she had died just a few months earlier.

So, have historians and biographers been too diverted, as indeed contemporaries were, by the question of the missing heir? I think so, and in doing so we’ve missed out on a wider picture of the royal family, and a more subtle understanding of Marie Antoinette. This adopted family was deliberately and continually, if impulsively, constructed. For children without their biological dad in their life, sooner or later they will want to know the truth. It lasted even into the difficult days of the Tuileries and was maintained financially, long after doing so became difficult and dangerous. Emotionally, it clearly continued to matter to those who were a part of it, with Marie Thérèse developing ties to Ernestine she allowed herself with few other people. Here’s hoping that this foundling family will soon get the research and attention it deserves.

Sources

  • Marie Antoinette by Philipe Huisman and Marguerite Jallut
    Of all the biographies I’ve come across, this offers the best information on this subject, and was the main source for this article. Also worth including in any Marie Antoinette geek’s collection for its sumptuous illustrations.
  • Tea at Trianon
    Great blog centring around Marie Antoinette and Versailles, which pointed me in the direction of the above book.
  • Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
    The best overall biography of Marie Antoinette, and the one that comes the closest to giving the reader a sense of what this complicated, enigmatic woman might actually have been like. I met Antonia Fraser recently, and babbled like a fool.