The Cabaret and the Music Hall: The Paris the Whole World Wanted to Be (1880–1960)

The cabaret and the music hall were the institutions that channeled that freedom. They were not the same: the cabaret was small, intimate, literary — the space where Aristide Bruant insulted the rich who came to see him and the rich applauded — while the music hall was large, spectacular, populist, designed for massive audiences who wanted artistic nudes, acrobats, famous singers, and the feeling of being at the center of the world.

The two great venues that defined the era of the Parisian music hall were the Moulin Rouge — inaugurated in 1889 on the Boulevard de Clichy, with its red sails and its can-can that scandalized Victorian Europe — and the Folies Bergère — open since 1869 on the Rue Richer, with its sumptuous revues where women paraded in states of semi-nudity before audiences of Parisians and tourists who came specifically for that.

Manet painted the bar of the Folies Bergère in 1882 — one of the most important paintings of Impressionism — as if he wanted to record for history a world he knew was temporary: the expressionless waitress in front of the mirror reflecting the tumult of the place, the bottle of champagne, the bustle of a city that entertains and forgets.

The Roaring Twenties: The World Celebrates Surviving

The First World War killed nine million people and left Europe in a state of collective shock. What followed — the twenties, the années folles, the roaring twenties — was the response of a generation that had survived the unimaginable and decided to celebrate it with an intensity that frightened the more conservative: more dancing, more music, more champagne, more nudity, more speed.

Paris was the center of that celebration. The city attracted artists, writers, and musicians from all over the world — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Gertrude Stein — who found in it a creative freedom that their home countries did not offer. And over that Paris of the années folles, the music hall reigned as the most popular, lively, and representative form of entertainment of the spirit of the era.

Mistinguett: The Queen Who Insured Her Legs

Jeanne Florentine BourgeoisMistinguett — was born in Enghien-les-Bains in 1875 and arrived on the stages of the Parisian music hall at the beginning of the 20th century as a dancer and singer with an energy and charisma that quickly made her the most popular artist in France.

In 1912, during a performance at the Folies Bergère, Mistinguett danced with a young music hall artist who would be the love of her life: Maurice Chevalier. Together they danced the valse chaloupée — an acrobatic waltz where they literally intertwined with each other — and the artistic and romantic couple they formed for a decade was the phenomenon of the Parisian show during the interwar years.

Her legs were legendary — they were said to be the most famous in Paris — and Mistinguett insured them for a million francs, in one of the first acts of personal marketing in the history of show business. The songs that made her famous — "Mon Homme", "La Java", "Ça c'est Paris" — were songs of the neighborhood, of the street, of the people who worked and loved and suffered in popular Paris, sung with a voice that was not beautiful in the operatic sense but had the authenticity of someone who comes from below and knows it.

Maurice Chevalier: The Boater Who Conquered Hollywood

Maurice Auguste Chevalier was born on September 12, 1888, in Ménilmontant — the same Paris neighborhood where Piaf would be born twenty-seven years later — into a working-class family. He was a circus acrobat, an impersonator in the neighborhood's café-concerts, and a singer in the cabarets of Montmartre. In 1909, he became the artistic partner of the great music-hall star Fréhel, who secured his first important contracts. Then came Mistinguett.

What Chevalier built from that foundation was a unique and inimitable character: the Parisian boulevardier — the man of the street who knows his worth, who wears the straw hat tilted to one side, who walks with a cane, who smiles with that smile of someone perfectly comfortable with himself and the world. An image of Paris that the whole world found irresistible because it contained everything Paris promised: elegance without solemnity, humor without vulgarity, love without drama.

In 1925, he premiered "Valentine" at the Casino de Paris — his first major song, with slightly risqué lyrics that had to be censored in the American version, although Chevalier always pointed to his nose at the exact moment so the audience would understand what couldn't be said — and that song launched him to stardom.

In 1928, Hollywood called him. Ernst Lubitsch directed him in "The Love Parade" (1929) alongside Jeanette MacDonald, in one of the most sophisticated musical comedies American cinema had produced until then. "Louise" — sung in that film — became one of his most beloved songs in the English-speaking world. He spent seven years in California, filming with the best directors of the golden age of Hollywood, while his French accent and boater made him the living symbol of what the world imagined a Frenchman to be.

When his American star faded and he returned to France in 1935, it was the young Charles Trenet who wrote his first hits of the second stage: "Y'a d'la joie" was originally a Trenet song that Chevalier premiered, before Trenet himself reclaimed it for his solo career.

Chevalier continued performing until he was eighty years old. He died on January 1, 1972, the last survivor of the generation that had invented the Parisian music-hall.

Joséphine Baker: The Ebony Venus Who Chose France

On October 2, 1925, a company of African American dancers and musicians arrived in Paris to perform at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The production was called "La Revue Nègre" and among its members was a nineteen-year-old dancer from St. Louis, Missouri, who had grown up in the extreme poverty of the black neighborhoods of the American South and had lived through the East St. Louis racial pogroms of 1917 — when a white mob destroyed the black neighborhood and killed dozens of people — as an eleven-year-old girl.

Freda Josephine McDonaldJoséphine Baker — arrived in Paris as part of a chorus and became the biggest star in Europe overnight. The French audience discovered her in the Danse Sauvage — a dance number in which she and her partner Joe Alex performed an African-inspired dance with an energy and sexuality that the European public hall had never seen — and the impact was immediate, total, and irreversible.

The following year, the Folies Bergère hired her for the revue "La Folie du Jour" (1926), where Baker danced with a skirt made of sixteen plastic bananas and little else. The performance was a sensation. Picasso, Hemingway, Le Corbusier, E.E. Cummings admired her. They called her "the Ebony Venus," "the Black Pearl," "the Siren of the Tropics." She was the highest-paid artist in Europe.

What Baker did with her body on stage was, according to critics who tried to analyze it, an impossible-to-calculate mix: eroticism and humor at the same time, physical energy of an intensity that frightened and fascinated at the same time, a presence that made the stage seem small even if it was the largest stage in Paris.

Baker chose France as her country. She became a naturalized French citizen in 1937. And when the war broke out, that choice was total: she joined the French Resistance as a spy, using her fame and international contacts to transport confidential information hidden in her musical scores — with invisible ink — throughout occupied Europe. She put her life at risk on every trip. General Charles de Gaulle personally awarded her the Legion of Honor and the War Cross.

After the war, she adopted twelve children of different ethnicities and nationalities whom she called her "Rainbow Tribe" — an experiment in universal family that she herself described as the demonstration that human fraternity was possible. In the 1960s, she actively supported the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King in the United States — the country that had expelled her with racism and to which she returned to tell it what she thought.

She died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1975, in Paris, two days after her last performance on stage — a gala show to celebrate the fifty years of her arrival in France. She was sixty-eight years old. Twenty thousand people lined the streets of Paris to watch her procession pass by. In 2021, the French government symbolically transferred her remains to the Panthéon — the mausoleum of the great French — making her the first black woman to receive that honor.

Charles Trenet: The Singing Madman and "La Mer"

If the music hall was the show of the twenties and thirties, Charles Trenet was the artist who in the forties connected that world with the most poetic and luminous chanson. Born in Narbonne in 1913, with the unrestrained energy of a comedian and the sensitivity of a poet, Trenet wrote "La Mer" in 1945 — during a train journey between Montpellier and Perpignan, according to legend, in twenty minutes while looking at the Mediterranean through the window.

"La Mer" is the most covered French song in history: Bobby Darin recorded it in English as "Beyond the Sea" in 1959 and reached the Top 10 in the United States. The Japanese state radio network adopted it as a jingle. It has been covered in dozens of languages. It is perhaps the piece of French music that most people in the world have heard without knowing it was French.

Trenet died in 2001, at the age of eighty-seven, the last of the great generation of music hall and interwar chanson — the bridge between the world of Chevalier's boater and the world of Brassens' acoustic guitar.

The Paris that Invented the 20th Century

What the cabaret and music-hall of Paris produced in the period from 1880 to 1960 was not just entertainment: it was a specific way of relating to the body, to freedom, to the mix of classes and cultures, to sexuality as a matter of art, which influenced everything that came after in Western popular culture.

The can-can of the Moulin Rouge, Joséphine Baker's banana skirt, Chevalier's boater hat, Mistinguett's voice singing "Mon Homme" — all these images circulated around the world and built the myth of Paris as a city of freedom, of intelligent pleasure, of art that does not fear scandal. It is a myth that exaggerates and simplifies, like all myths. But it is a myth that these artists built with real work, with real risk, with lives they lived without asking for permission.

Editorial note: Joséphine Baker crossed Nazi-occupied Europe with intelligence information hidden in musical scores, written with invisible ink. She was the most famous artist in Europe and no one seriously inspected her at the borders — her fame was her cover. There is something extraordinarily literal about that: a woman who had used performance as a tool for survival since childhood, now using it as a tool of resistance. The body that the music-hall had turned into an image became a weapon. The same person, the same stage, completely different purposes.