Chat Noir: The First Cabaret

You've seen this poster in art shops and on walls. Did you know it referred to a real place: the first cabaret?

Le Chat Noir opened in 1881 in a tiny apartment in Montmartre. When it closed in 1897 (in a larger location) it was one of the most famous salons in the world. The Chat Noir created a new style of get-togethers and entertainment.

Paris fared well in 1880. France enjoyed peace and economic prosperity; the city was modern and a healthy middle class emerged--the bourgeois.

Like almost every prosperous period, that led to some people feeling alienated, disenfranchised, and anti-establishment. (Think how the placid 1950s led to the counterculture of the 60s)

The outlying Montmartre, with its windmills, and occasional farm animals roaming the dirt roads, was the poor district of Paris. Pickpockets, orphans, prostitutes, and the dregs of society lived there. By the 1880s, artists were moving in, as rents in other areas of Paris--the Left Bank and the Latin Quarter--became too expensive for them.

Rudolphe Salis was a poet and painter, but also the son of a wealthy brewer. He moved to Montmartre, and other artists, musicians, writers, and satirist (political satire was BIG then) gathered in his house to talk, smoke, and show each other their work. Salis provided drinks at these regular, weekly meetings, and began decorating his flat on the Boulevard Rouchecheouart with paintings by his friends, along with medieval armor and candlesticks.

Attending a Salis' party became trendy; all the wittiest and most creative men were there. Soon it overflowed into the building next door, and at that point Salis began to call his place Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat).

He called it a cabaret--a medieval word that meant a wine cellar or tavern. It was not what we'd call a cabaret today--no Liza Minelli, no tablecloths, nightclub acts, or fancy food, no house band.

Salis' cabaret was a meeting of artists and performers, who simply wanted to be with like-minded men (and it was almost all male), putting on their own shows for each other, trying out verses and songs, dishing the bourgeois louts, and solving the world's problems--well, Paris' problems--over a glass of wine.

By 1882, Chat Noir was publishing its own magazine, featuring the essays, poems, cartoons, and satires of of Salis' friends and patrons. They started putting on "shadow plays," with silhouette scenes cut out of paper.

Famous musicians and artists like Debussy, de Maupassant, Huysman, Massenet, and Gounod began dropping by. And--horrors--the bourgeois itself arrived, wanting to see what all the fuss was about. Given the neighborhood, fights and muggings were problems too.

Within five years, Le Chat Noir was forced to move to larger quarters. It went in style, with a big, moonlit parade led by uniformed Swiss guards (the kind that guard the Pope).

Once in the new digs, a young Erik Satie was hired as a pianist--but he quit after three months. The cabaret remained popular, though--in fact, imitations sprang up all over Paris, then in other cities like Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Vienna.

It's fair to say that Le Chat Noir made Montmartre the artistic center of Paris in the late 19th century. Since Paris already fancied itself the artistic center of the world, that's saying something.

The Chat Noir closed in 1897, and Salis--who had given up control of the cabaret only a couple years earlier, died that same year. A modern Chat Noir exists at a different site in Paris, and the name is popular with other bars all over the world.

The famous posters of the Chat Noir were drawn by Theophile Alexandre Steinlen., who also drew up pictures and posters for the theatrical performances there.