THE singer Aristide Bruant (1851-1925) was the very embodiment of the Montmartre café-concert scene. Among the most combative of performers, he delighted his audiences with his insulting and domineering treatment of them.

Every woman who entered his club, Le Mirliton, was escorted in with an audience chorus, led by Bruant himself, of "O how pale she is."

When the bourgeoisie came to spend money in his cabaret, he addressed them as "pigs" and worse. Bruant's songs celebrated the outlaw and the prostitute. He consciously sought out themes that would appeal to his audience, and support his carefully cultivated public image. Ever the self-promoter, the posters he commissioned and the songbooks he published helped establish his fame in his own time as well as posthumously.

A bourgeois by birth, the young Bruant was forced by his father's death into the world of the working class. When he discovered the cafés, he was initially shocked at the coarseness of popular conversation, slang, and jokes. Studying music in his spare time, he soon embraced the language of the streets and cabarets, turning what he heard into songs that were light and amusing early in his career, but ripened into scathing satire of the comfortable classes and sad laments on the struggles of the poor.

Working his way up from part-time singing jobs to ownership of his own café and engagements at upscale nightclubs, he eventually made a substantial amount of money. This allowed him to buy a farm and retire from the stage. He then devoted himself to writing, producing a dictionary of slang, some novels and journal articles. In 1924, at the age of seventy-three, he made a gramophone recording while staging a brief comeback at the Empire Theatre in Paris.

Posters featuring Bruant:

• Ambassadeurs: Aristide Bruant
• Eldorado: Aristide Bruant
• Aristide Bruant dans son cabare
• Le Deuxième Volume de Bruant
  

If you have any comments or suggestions, please use this form.
Copyright © 1996-2003 SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART