Although the cabaret as form of art and entertainment might have found its more meaningful form of expression in Germany during the Weimar Era, it was actually born in France. Already in the 1400s there were in France wine cellars that offered both drinks and performances. These were already called cabarets, a word that also means a type of pub, but also tray that holds a variety of different food or drinks and so suggested the idea of ‘a bit of everything’.
The pub would offer short performances of balladeers, jugglers, the whole retinue of out-of-season carnival performers, while an enterprising host introduced every performer and invited the audience to join in the songs and plays.

It was during La belle époque, in the second half of the 1800s, that cabaret as we understand it today emerged. From its beginning, the cabaret was a more intellectual, self-consciously artistic form that expressed itself through laughter and entertainment. Cabarets became places were poets, writers and artists meet to exchange works and ideas with one another and where the popular satirical or protest song was adopted as a tool of entertainment and commentary.
From that moment, the cabaret was marked by these two elements: It was either a workshop, a testing ground for young artists who often presented themselves as an avant-garde, or a satirical commentary of contemporary morals, politics and culture. In the best instances, it was both.

Le Chat Noir

Le Chat Noir (or Cabaret Artistique as it was initially called) is generally considered the first true cabaret. It was founded in 1881 by Rodolphe Salis, an artiste manqué turned tavern keeper. Salis settled in Montmatre, then an outlying area which still retained its country character. Winding dirt roads led up to the ‘mount of the martyrs’ and the squat pilgrimage centre, Sacré Coeur, built just a few years previously on the site of one of the bloodier Communards’ confrontations. Montmatre’s population then consisted of the canaille, the rabble, a term they proudly applied to themselves. Like other artists, Salis had moved to this slightly treacherous environment because he could not afford the rising cost of the Latin Quarters (the artists’ district), and in so doing he forever united in the public’s mind the canaille with the artistic bohemia.

Because he was a would-be artist himself, Salis invited other artists to perform in his cabaret every night and when he noticed the clientele showed to appreciate, he increased this offerings, becoming the masters of ceremonies who would welcome the audience and present the artists. Salis reaped the profit by selling drink and food to the audience, but even if they received little or no money, this was a way for young artist to advertise themselves. Advertisement that became increasingly more effective as Le Chat Noir became more popular and came to attract the likes of Claude Debussy and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Soon, it outgrew its original premises on Boulevard Rochechouart and moved to larger quarters in 1885.

 Le Mirlinton

The original venue of Le Chat Noir was taken over by Aristide Bruant, an imposing figure who composed and sang argot songs with a strong populist bent. He renaimed it Le Mirliton, a word that can mean either a reed flute or doggerel verse, and soon it became a place where the audience could pretend to engage in social and cultural slumming.

Bruant was the quintessential conférenciér. He was abusive of his bourgeois audience, he would cover them in insults on the behalf of the working class and sing them protest songs of the same subject. They loved him.
Bruant’s venue was where politic really entered the cabaret… but it was also its swan song – at least with regard to the French experience. Bruant closed down Le Mirliton in 1895 and Salis died two years later. The cabaret went back to its old ‘pub’ self – or evolved into a lavish new incarnation.

 Le Moulin Rouge

Le Moulin Rouge is still today the ideal model for any cabaret. It was founded in 1889 by Joseph Oller, a Spanish entrepreneur who resided in Paris for most of his life. The Moulin Rouge was outrageously glamorous, with plush scarlet sofas, velvet curtains and glittering chandeliers with a towering, heavily-bejewelled elephant sculpture in its garden. Although it kept offering cabaret-like entertainment, with songs, short play, skits, acrobatic stunts and the like, Le Moulin Rouse mostly lost the political and social cut of Salis’s and Bruant’s venues.

That heritage was taken up by the Berliner Kabarett of the Weimar Era.

RESOURCES

Musical101 – A Hitory of Cabaret by John Kenrick
History and Developement of Dance – The Roots of French Cabaret: where it all began
Culture Trip – A Brief History of Paris’s Dazzling Cabaret

Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret. Harvard University Press, Harvard, 1993
Lisa Appicnanesi, The Cabaret. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1975/1984