Moulin Rouge: The Red Windmill of the Cancan

Why is it significant?

Here it is on boulevard de Clichy: the red windmill turning above the doors, the lights, the coaches unloading in front of the most famous cabaret in the world. Those sails have never ground a single grain of flour. From the very first day, they were pure advertising.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Here it is on boulevard de Clichy: the red windmill turning above the doors, the lights, the coaches unloading in front of the most famous cabaret in the world. Those sails have never ground a single grain of flour. From the very first day, they were pure advertising.

The Moulin Rouge opened on 6 October 1889, the year of the Eiffel Tower, when the world's fair had filled Paris with visitors. Its founders, Joseph Oller and Charles Zidler, wanted a palace of pleasure where workers and aristocrats could rub shoulders. In the garden stood a giant elephant, left over from the fair, and inside its belly, for gentlemen only, a dancer performed. On the dance floor, the star attraction was a wild version of an old quadrille, the cancan, all high kicks, splits and flying petticoats. The original building burned in 1915, and what you see was rebuilt after the war.

The queen of the floor was Louise Weber, La Goulue, the glutton, a nickname she earned by draining the glasses of the customers. She was said to be able to kick a gentleman's hat clean off his head with the tip of her shoe. Her partner was Valentin le Désossé, Valentin the Boneless, a tall, thin man in a top hat who danced like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

And at a table near the dance floor sat a man barely a metre and a half tall, sketching. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, heir to one of the oldest noble families in France, had broken both his legs as a teenager, and they never grew again. He became the eye of the Moulin Rouge. In 1891 his poster of La Goulue, a white whirl of petticoats in the middle of the dance floor, was pasted all over Paris, and it changed what a poster could be. He died in 1901, only thirty-six years old.

So there is the whole hill, in one walk: the nuns and the millers, the martyrs and the Communards, the hungry painters in the laundry boat, the singer in bronze and the dancers in petticoats. Montmartre was always the place where Paris came to escape from itself... and on this corner, long after you have gone home, the red sails will still be turning.