Elysée Montmartre

About the venue

At 72 boulevard de Rochechouart (18th arrondissement), the Élysée Montmartre opened in 1807 as an open-air dance hall at the foot of the Montmartre hill. The venue's own history places the invention of the French cancan there in 1882, by La Goulue and Valentin le Désossé. The café-concert became firmly established there in 1894, with the construction of the Trianon-Concert. In 1899 the hall reused the structure of the France Pavilion of the 1889 Universal Exhibition, designed by Gustave Eiffel; a fire ravaged the hall in the night of 17 to 18 February 1900.