Inside the Moulin Rouge

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To bring you free confidence training, get the pleasure you deserve from the incredible things you do. Take the training today. Search Galaxy Chocolate, the Unhumble Project. Hello my lovely betwixtas, 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, other adults, but adulty things, an adulty way of covering 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. Well fancy seeing you, hippetwixtas. 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 in Paris at the height of the bellapok 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? Hello and welcome back to Betwixta 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 making no mistake. They didn't call it the bellapok, 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, absinthe. So it was the perfect setting for the moulin rouge but what really went on inside? Taking us there today is the wonderful micropoor, author of City of Light, City of Shadows, Paris in the Bellapok. 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 fame.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 Betwixta Sheets, it's only like report, how are you doing? How are you Kate? Well thank you, you're doing good. Looking forward to our chat. 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 Bellapok. So as a first question then Mike, what brought you to studying Paris at this era? 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 of science, of progress, of glamour, of fashion, a little bit of raunchiness and sexuality, but there was also 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. Holy moly Mike, wow you go big don't you? 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 labour of love because it got me walking around Paris which is a good job if you can do it. Oh that sounds glorious. What does belapok mean and when was that? The Americans have a term for it, they call it the Gilded Era of 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 you know what have we lost, you know 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 romanticise 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 was also periods of kind of a lot of deal of material progress although that progress was shared very unequally. Did the people living in the belapok, did they have a sense that they were living in a particularly unique time or is this all kind of retrospective appreciation? 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 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. You know all these things like is this going to lead? Yeah, I mean that's a really good striking parallels today, you know we're worried about mass media today, you know understandably and quite rightly, but you know 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 health, on people's health and well-being and actually the development of human beings, you know in an evolutionary sense. There was all kinds of ideas of this document, so it was also a period of great anxiety. 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 baguettes and they live in studio apartments and paint naked women and it's all amazing, but why Paris? Well I would say that's a really good question because first of all Paris isn't the only place which has a belle époque, you know Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Prague, all these other wonderful places around Europe have their own versions of the belle époque. Britain does of course, London, Glasgow where I teach, yeah I mean you have you know this is a period of Charles Rene 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 époque, 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, Hausmann, his prefect of the Seine created the boulevards that we know today, street lighting was introduced, electricity, all these sorts of things, electricity a bit later not under Hausmann, but the meetings we associate with the modern city were being introduced from Hausmann onwards, so Paris becomes this epicenter of what people began to think of as modernity, I stress the kind of the anxiety this caused 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, you know La Bohème, some people on the left bank of Paris in the 1830s, so some sort of students and artists and intellectuals who thought about art and so on being outside your 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 by 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 kind 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 has its own taste, 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 you know the Bateau Lavoie where Picasso lived and all that, it looks lovely now, but these areas are pretty much slums back then. 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 this impoverished artist to lose La Trek, hanging around at boarding houses and the kind of the artists all banding together. Was that true or is that a myth? It's actually there's a lot of truth in it, it's interesting you mentioned to lose the Trek, to lose the Trek was one of the few, I mean I love to lose the 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 skier of aristocracy, so he could afford to do this, well you know he has a very difficult life, exactly. So I mean don't be wrong, I mean I love his artwork, but yeah we mentioned Montmartre, the Louvre Lattein was a café down on Plas Pigalle, 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 were cheap, the boot, the hill of Montmartre was one of the areas where housemenization, this modernization had bypassed because of its topography, it's very steep-sided hill and all that, and so it got avoided by housemen and so the rents remained quite cheap, it was a very poor part of Paris, but nonetheless it had a pretty, had a cohesion as a community, 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. And this is Montmartre, is it? Yes, that's right. All right, so who's hanging around Montmartre then? If you went walking around Bellapok, Paris, Montmartre, who might you see? 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 in Montmartre, yeah, not too far from the Sacré-Cœur, where the Sacré-Cœur was being built during the Bellapok, there was an anarchist kind of, I would say hi to it, everybody knew it was there, but it was a place where anarchists could come and crash if they needed to, and there was a 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 in 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, that's Suzanne Valadon, that's Suzanne Valadon, she may have been the model for the Balançois, the swing, and you can see a replica of that in the garden of the Musée de Montmartre, which is well worth a visit by the way. Very saucy. Yeah, so yeah, Suzanne Valadon was lovely, her museum is Musée Renoir Valadon, and she produced some great modernist artworks herself. Her son, Molly Citrio, was famous for drawing, you know, these kind of very kind of almost like pen and ink style drawings and paintings of Montmartre as well. Herse Renoir lived there for a while, Van Holf lived there for a while, the Rue Le Pique, lots of different people gathered there to lose the trek we've mentioned, Degas down just below the boulevard and so on. A few American artists as well, it was quite a community. I'll be back with Mike after this short break. They told her to go to hell. She went on her own terms. The afterlife isn't what Lily expected, coffee shops, fey, and a job at the gates of Hades. There she meets Belle, a demon general with a dangerously tempting voice, dark magic, forbidden love, and a fight for the future await in this fiery romantic scene from Hellsbell's book talk sensation, J.C. Lynn. For whom the bell tolls, out now in paperback and audiobook. What if you could feel more confident? Finally, go after that promotion and feel great about inspiring other women. It all starts by recognizing your worth and talking about your wins with confidence. That's why Galaxy Chocolate has created the Unhumble Project, in partnership with the charity Young Women's Trust. To bring you free confidence training, get the pleasure you deserve from the incredible things you do. Take the training today. Search Galaxy Chocolate, The Unhumble Project. All right, let's talk another big name. Mulan Ruiz. Good gosh, here we go. 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. I'm going to assume actors and actresses were there as well. Whose idea was the Mulan Ruiz? Who said, let's build a giant windmill and put dancing people in it? Where did he even come from? First of all, the people involved was a guy called Oscar Zidler and Joseph Vollar. They've made a mix, the first time so except. 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've done stuff over Paris in the past. Now, Zidler in particular realized 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. They're going slumming. Exactly. This is the sort of thing that was happening in late Victorian London as well. I think they would go and travel into the West East End rather to witness the poverty for themselves. But anyway, so Zidler 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 Zidler drew on this as well for the idea, but also in terms of the dancers, that people are going to actually be the attractions in the Montmartre route. Because Montmartre, apart from artists, anarchists, poverty and all these other things, Montmartre was also famous for its dance halls, its cafe-cassell. So up on the hill, you can still see it. It's called the Moulin de la Gallette, 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's Gallette and it produced a special type of biscuit called the Gallette, had its own windmill. And the Moulin de Gallette 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 Moulin de Gallette at night. And you could tell it was probably on the weekend because of the way the clientele are dressed. Their dress didn't topcoats, tails, that sort of thing, ties. And so this is probably weekend because that's when by and large, the more middle-class population of Paris went to enjoy dancing there. What's with all the 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, the Moulin were actually a landmark. If you look at the editions of Le Chat Noir, the newspaper, the famous nightclub, which is full of jokes and stuff and rivalry 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 Boutement Mâtre. And the darker side of all this is that the Moulin de Gallette, the windmill, was used when the Prussians entered Paris at the end of the war 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 that's a story which had a great deal of currency. Yes, so yes, there's a lot going on in Montmartre, not all of it good. 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 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. 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, 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. A garden? Yep, it had donkey rides. At one point, it had a small roller coaster, which... That wasn't in the film. No, exactly, which the French called, was the French called a Montaigne-Rouce Russian mountains because the Russians introduced the roller coaster when they occupied Paris with the Prussians in 1814. And it 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. There's plenty of stuff going on outside. This must have cost a fortune. Yeah, it was. But that was the... That was the other big difference, is the entrance fee for the Moulin Rouge, which is much, much more expensive than it was for these other dance halls like the Moulin de la Calette, the Elysee, Montmartre and others. So it's definitely aiming more at a middle-class clientele, definitely. Okay. Was it a big hit straight away or was it a slow burner? 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 like lots of the public dancing on the floor as a much more like the dance lines of uniformed dancers. It shifted much more than on the days just before the First World War. It 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 I 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. So if you were going to go to the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s, you've described some of the things going on there. But if 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 in charge of this at master of ceremonies? Was it just carnage with donkeys and opium and can-can girls everywhere? 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 drinking, they didn't introduce kitchens for place to eat until after the First World War, maybe even later. So it was basically a place we had a drink a bit later, sort of after this period 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 paid 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, especially in the business, both in the dance hall going around the kind of promenoir, 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 mysterious. I'm not sure how you would do this, but sex workers would solicit for business while riding donkeys. I guess you could show more ankle or something that way or more leg. But there we are. Yeah, it was raucous, but the original dance halls were as well. But this is what middle class Parisians wanted to go see safely. They didn't want to go to get potentially to run into 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. I'll be back with Mike after this short break. They told her to go to hell. She went on her own terms. The afterlife isn't what Lily expected. Coffee shops, Faye, and a job at the gates of Hades. There she meets Belle, a demon general with a dangerously tempting voice. Dark magic, forbidden love, and a fight for the future await in this fiery romantic from Hellsbell's book talk sensation, Jaycee Lynn, for whom the bell tolls out now in paperback and audiobook. Nothing beats a jet-two holiday. Right now, we've got some great deals available. Plus, you'll get the best choice of rooms and hotels. Book now with just a £60 deposit per person. Enjoy flexible monthly payments and go direct from London Gapwick. Nothing beats a jet-two holiday. Package holidays you can trust after an act of protected, subject to availability conditions. Let's talk about the can-can then, because that's what the Moulin Rouge is famous for. Now you're saying donkeys, opium, sex workers, food, drink, artists. Was the can-can the most famous thing about it, or was that the main event? Where did that even come from? The can-can came from a working-class Parisian dance called the Chahou, C-H-A-H-U-T, which basically involved a lot of kicking of the legs. It's very energetic, very boisterous, pretty unregimented. 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 Chahou itself apparently comes from a dance called the Quadril. Now, before I looked into this, I always thought the Quadril was a very genteel dance, a sort of thing you see in Jane Austen movies. Movies based on Jane Austen, or were they, they're all moving around in very well-disciplined circles and talking to each other about marriage and things like that, call each other misses and mists and so on. But the Quadril 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 kind of flamboyant. Again, like the Chahou, lots of high kicking and so on and so forth. Now, the can-can is kind of a finessing of all this, and 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 kind of be paid for what they did. And so, things like they had special moves. So, you had the pot dames, which literally means the kind of the shoulder arms, which literally meant that when you lifted, if you're one of the women dancers, well, the 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 grande car, 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 at 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 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, which, but one of the reasons Melairu's 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, oh, God, shocking, but I haven't seen such a terrible thing in all my life, but this is great, you know, but there's certainly some French writers who don't this. The Brits love this, but they pretend to be shocked, you know. 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 from now about Lagoel? Did she just say that it was invented by her? Lagoelou, which means the glutton, yeah, because of the way she kind of, she was so, so energetically kind of threw herself into it. Yeah, she was one of the kind of more professional dancers that Zidler recruited from Elisabeth Mardre 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 and gets brought in to kind of, to really kind of get the dancing going. So Lagoelou, there's also another enthusiastic amateur called Valentin Ledézossier, literally a Valentine the boneless one. He was actually very respectable middle class. He actually ran a wine shop in the center of Paris near the corn exchange. Yeah. Oh, who did the coquilleur? I used to walk past up who would look coquilleur and all my way to do my research in the Bibbata Ascienal 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. But Valentin Ledézossier was called the boneless one. Ledézossier was, or the deboned because he was so flexible in the way he danced, long and lanky. And he may have had an affair with Lagoelou. We're not sure. We know Dirty Bertie did, don't we? Oh, yes, he was there. We know the Prince of Wales was there having an affair with Lagoelou. Yeah. He was, Lagoelou at one point shouted at him, hey, Wales, Prince of 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 differences of class and so on were not really respected. And that's what people went for, 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. Jane Avril, she was the, she was the redhead in some of Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings, wasn't she? 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, 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 the 20th century, it had both male and female performers and acts which were either exclusively female or exclusively male or mixed. There was a Le Petumaine, wasn't there? The guy, the guy who could fart on cue. Le Petumaine. Oh my God. Yeah, I was kind of dreading this part of it, the conversation. Because I'm going to have to say, I'm going to have to say it, aren't I? This is a guy who claimed to have the word as aspirating anus. In other words, an anus that could actually suck in air, which meant that he could basically fart at will. Yeah. And to tunes as well, apparently. 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 Petumaine do his act, playing songs. And apparently the audience, I think the audience would love it today. They would. That would win Britain's Got Talent any day of the week. Like 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. Lavertry humour. So there's a wide variety of entertainment on offer then. So what starts to happen? I know that Will and 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? Well, what is, first of all, a bit of a cultural shift after the First World War. In the 1920s in particular, it became much more kind of a floor show because with lots of different acts on it and stars. One of them was Miss Dengue, who gave up also Jean Gabbard, 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 show called Sa Séparée, 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 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. 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 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. 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 years ago, one of the wings of the windmill fell off, too, so there was a bit of a had to be repaired and so on. And that happens, right? It happens anywhere. But yeah, its purpose shifts, its audience shifts, to some extent. Was it a big fire? This was in 1915, wasn't it? What happened? I'm not terribly sure what happened with the fire, but they had to kind of remodel it completely. The original decor, so it was done by an artist called Adolf Viet. It's a great painter, a great artist. I don't think I would have liked him very much as politics were very extreme, extreme on the right, anti-Semitic, all this kind of horrible stuff going on in the 1890s. Oh yeah, he sounds like a prick. 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. Did it ever close and then was reopened? Or has it been there the entire time still going? Like the moulin rues that exists today, that they did the film around, it's very exciting. But did it ever close down? Yeah, I mean, it's still in the same venue, right? Same building, which itself had been a dance hall that had fallen into disrepair, disuse. But yeah, did it close? Yeah, trying to read up on this. It shut for a period, I think in 1929, except 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 enclosure, I think it's been pretty much continuous. It's certainly now the longest, I think the longest surviving musical in France. Wow. Have you been to the moulin rouge, Mike? I was going to say no, I have not. And in fact, when I was preparing for the show, I looked up to Seattle Curiosity, how much tickets are, and I could realize, I realized there's probably a reason I've not been to the moulin rouge. Is it dead pricey still? Yeah, so it'll set you back a couple hundred euro, yeah, I think. Okay. For the whole thing. Okay. I bet they don't even have a man farting there anymore. No, they won't. No, somewhat regrettably, I think. As a final question there, Mike, what did you think of the film? Have you seen the film moulin rouge? Yes. 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. Jim Broadbent. Jim Broadbent, thank you. Thank you. That's right. Was absolutely superb with Zidler. 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. Seems to capture the madness of it pretty well. Yeah. And the frenetic energy of particularly at the start. Yeah, I know I enjoyed it. 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? University of Glasgow. Thank you so much. You've been fabulous. Well, thanks, Kate. Great conversation. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you. 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 Maki Desad 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 betwixtathistoryhitter.com. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodoreov and produced by Stuart Beckwith, the senior producer is Freddie Chick. Join me again on Betwixtor Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society, a podcast by History Hitted. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.