But the Moulin Rouge has seen Paris through other difficult chapters in its history.
The venue opened in 1889, and quickly became a hub for artists and writers in the bohemian 18th arrondissement. It stayed open through world wars and waves of gentrification.
“It’s a symbol of life. It’s an icon,” said Gabriel P. Weisberg, a professor emeritus of art history at the University of Minnesota and the editor of “Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture.”
Over its 135 years, the Moulin Rouge has inspired artists from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whose paintings helped put it on the map, to Baz Luhrmann, whose 2001 film (“Moulin Rouge”) dusted off its racy mystique for modern audiences. In 2021, a theatrical adaptation of the film even won a Tony Award for best musical.
The building itself is not only a landmark, said Richard Thomson, an art historian at the University of Edinburgh who focuses on late 19th-century French art. It is also something of metaphor. If Notre Dame represents religion in Paris, and the Eiffel Tower is an expression of the city’s modernity and embrace of ambitious technological experimentation, the Moulin Rouge is a standard-bearer of popular entertainment.
“It suggests a racy part of Paris, a slightly degenerate part of Paris, but an exciting one,” Professor Thomson said.
