ABSTRACT
Scholars have recently investigated the invention of mass culture in the nineteenth century. Peter Bailey, for example, designates the London Music-Hall as the site that captured “the world’s first mass entertainment audiences” (Bailey 141).1 For Vanessa Schwartz and others, mass culture was invented in France in the Belle Epoque, and at the center of this invention, stood – or rather, jumped and kicked – the cancan dancer. Certainly, I would agree, the cancan dancer comes to be emblematic of Belle-Epoque Paris, and is marketed as such to other European countries as well as to America in the Belle Epoque. But her skirts only partially hide from view the other types of spectacular performance genres at the MoulinRouge, the Folies-Bergère, and other music-halls. And it is these genres that take center stage in the present study… even if the cancan dancer makes a cameo appearance.
