Montmartre: Bohemia Performs Itself

While official Paris staged expositions, Montmartre created its own alternative world's fair. The hilltop village, annexed by Paris in 1860 but retaining its windmills and gardens, became synonymous with bohemian life. Here, the Belle Époque's contradictions played out nightly in cabarets and studios.

The Moulin Rouge, opened in 1889 by Joseph Oller and Charles Zidler, turned working-class entertainment into international sensation. Its cancan dancers—La Goulue, Jane Avril, Nini Pattes-en-l'Air—became celebrities whose high kicks and lifted skirts shocked tourists while delighting regulars. But these women were more than sexual spectacles. They were athletes, entrepreneurs, and artists who negotiated their own contracts and controlled their images.

Louise Weber, known as La Goulue (The Glutton) for her habit of draining customers' drinks, earned more than government ministers. She invested in property, supported her extended family, and retired wealthy. Jane Avril, daughter of a courtesan and an Italian nobleman, transformed childhood trauma into mesmerizing dance. Toulouse-Lautrec's posters made her immortal, but she made herself through discipline and innovation.

The Chat Noir, Rodolphe Salis's shadow-puppet theater and cabaret, offered more intellectual pleasures. Here, poets declaimed symbolist verses, composers premiered experimental songs, and political satire pushed legal boundaries. Its journal, distributed nationally, spread Montmartre irreverence across France. When authorities threatened closure over anti-government songs, fashionable society rallied to its defense. Censoring the Chat Noir would admit that jokes could threaten the state.

But Montmartre was more than entertainment. In the Bateau-Lavoir, a ramshackle building named for its resemblance to Seine laundry boats, the future of art was being invented. Picasso, Modigliani, and Braque lived in poverty while revolutionizing vision. Kees van Dongen painted portraits to buy bread. Juan Gris theorized Cubism between commercial illustrations.

The neighborhood's women artists fought for recognition in this masculine bohemia. Suzanne Valadon, former model turned painter, raised her son Maurice Utrillo alone while developing her bold, unflinching style. Marie Laurencin, associated with the Cubists but following her own path, painted dreamy female figures that critics dismissed as "feminine" but that captured psychological states her male colleagues missed.