May 21, 2014 • 24 mins
Joseph Oller was an entrepreneur with an incredible head for business. He revolutionized gambling practices as a young man, and also opened the most famous burlesque house of all time -- The Moulin Rouge. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Molly Fry and I'm Tracey Vie Wilson. And normally,
when a person revolutionizes not one, but two industries, you'd
(00:21):
think they would become a household name. And that's not
really the case with today's topic. Uh, this isn't exactly
a globe trotting tale. Uh. He's spent most of his
life in just a couple of cities. Uh, the person
that we're primarily talking about, but elements of his life
story are certainly known the world over and in his
his home, Mary is that he's quite well known. And
so this is about a man, it's about gambling, it's
(00:44):
about burlesque as well as other forms of entertainment. But
you don't need to worry is kids safe unless you
do not want them exposed to the concept of betting
on animals, which has its own ball of problems. But
what it's about, sort of above everything else, is entrepreneur
a real spirit. And uh, we're gonna be talking about
the entrepreneurial spirit of one man in particular, whose name
(01:06):
was Joseph Ull. So start at the beginning. Joseph Uley
was born in Terrassa, Spain, on February nine, and his
father worked in the family business, which was textiles, although
it apparently did not particularly suit the elder ule. His
name was Francois, but when Joseph was born, his father,
(01:26):
who was twenty five at the time, had already moved
to Paris to work with his cousin and his textile mills,
so he didn't want to run this small family business,
but he was okay with staying in textiles, and Francois
I feel like we should point out had not abandoned
his family to go to Paris. He moved there intending
to set up a stable situation so that he could
(01:46):
then send for um his wife, Marie Taures and their
new baby. Two years after Joseph was born, Marie Tarez
and her toddler child made the move to Paris, and
Francois and his wife expanded their family with two more children,
Alexandra and Jean, and growing up, Joseph worked for his
father in Paris, but eventually France Swab became concerned that
(02:09):
his son, who had been born in Spain and was Catalan,
had never learned to speak Spanish, so when Joseph was seventeen,
he was shipped off to Billboo, Spain as a sort
of immersion plan, although that they speak a very different
language in Bilbao than uh, you know the Catalan would
normally speak. Uh, So that was a little bit weird,
but it ended up being important for him. It's here
(02:31):
attending cock fights that Joseph witnessed a number of betting
disputes among the spectators and it's likely that this kind
of planted the seed in his young mind that would
germinate later. Yeah, and he participated in the betting from
a very early age, like he was into gambling. And
I just feel like we should say, as a sidebar personally,
I will give my own opinion on this. Cock fighting
(02:52):
is horrible and terrible and I don't think of it
as a sport. And it is sort of troubling to
me that people bet on animals fighting, but just have
to included as part of the historical record. But after
he returned to Paris or they became a fan of
horse races and the betting that went on there, uh,
and horse racing was really becoming extremely popular in Paris,
(03:13):
particularly in the eighteen sixties and on, and he attended
races all over the city because tracks were basically popping
up everywhere, and he would witness these wagers that were
struck between you know, men of means, like just personal
wagers between two men um But he really became super
interested in the concept of these sort of like smaller
(03:35):
potatoes bet makers, like this concept of the betting pool.
And in this instance, this is where multiple gamblers with
smaller amounts of cash to wager, they couldn't make the
big bets that wealthier men could, would basically purchase random
tickets and those tickets would be assigned to specific horses,
and the holder of the ticket associated with the winning
(03:58):
horse would take the pool, so it was kind of
a randomized betting pool. In eighteen sixty five, he opened
a business to take advantage of the popularity of this
pool system, and he also had a mobile office, which
was a gambling wagon that he would park in the
shawn to the marsh with other mobile offices all ready
to take bets. Uh. It's sort of like a food
(04:18):
truck park, but with gambling instead of sesame fries. Yeah,
like not the delicious food, but all of these little
mobile gambling trucks would show up and they would all
you know, be available to take bets for these betting pools,
and pool gambling was extremely popular, as you can imagine, uh,
but it was a little bit problematic. Um gambling on
(04:39):
games of chance was actually illegal in Paris at this time,
and Ull was concerned that he could be shut down
for his enterprise because he sold random ticket assignments. So
it was basically a huge game of chance. And this
whole dilemma led to a complete shift in the way
sports betting was handled. So before we get into how
he kind of revolutionized betting, let's take a quick ad
(05:02):
from a sponsor. Okay, So back to Joseph Ude and
his gambling methodology. So to combat this problem of this
previous method of betting being purely chance based, they came
up with a betting system that put the gambler's knowledge
to work, and this became known as the peri mutuel system.
So his new approach to betting required the gambler to
(05:25):
select the horse they believe would win, and for regular betters,
this made gambling into something of a science because they
would benefit from learning about the racing horses, both in
general and in the specific sense of tracking a particular animals.
Animals performance sounds sort of self explanatory today. Yeah, I mean,
they're it's so common now to just hear even like
(05:47):
friends or like co workers discussing like a person's batting
average and how that's going to affect the team in
their likelihood, or when they pick fantasy football, like they
everybody has all the stats, and that's really This was
the birth of that idea and that approach to betting
on sports with Joseph Hule. And so this new business venture,
(06:08):
being brand new, you would think would have been a
gamble in and of itself, but it was not in
the least. It paid off immediately and uh he I mean,
he just immediately had people ready to place bets. And
I think it's also part of the sort of that
human spirit where you like to put your knowledge to
work a little bit. So it was very appealing on
a different level than just gambling. And he even started
(06:29):
publishing the Bulletin de Course, which was in effect the
first racing form where it would include the stats on
horses and any information about them, and he even started
offering betting for races that were taking place not just
in France but also in Great Britain, so he was
kind of expanding the betting options for people. The first
(06:50):
year of this off course UH betting business was the
same year that Paris hosted Napoleon the third pet Project,
the Paris Exhibition, and this meant the in addition to
his regular Parisian customers, he was getting some international travelers
in the mix as well, which contributed to his success
and the rapid growth of his business. And the way
(07:11):
he was making money off of all of this was
that he was taking a commission for taking and managing
all of these bets, and he was getting five to
ten percent of the money. So if it was a
really big pool, he would only take five percent. If
it was smaller, he would take ten. Uh. But there
was so much cash flowing through his office and there
were so many races, especially once he had expanded the
(07:33):
race offerings into other countries into being able to bet
on races in other countries, that he amassed a small
fortune rather quickly. In the late eighteen sixties, French authorities
really cracked down on gambling and this could have just
put him out of business, but his switch away from
pool betting had proved to be a really wise move. Yeah,
(07:55):
Perry Mutuel kind of saved him in the end. The
Court of Casassion, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, which is
the highest court in France, had was examining this idea
of you know, how, uh, gambling and betting should be
handled in what was going to be legal and what wasn't,
And they didn't indeed decide that pool gambling was illegal
(08:15):
in a ruling that was made on June six of
eighteen sixty nine. But Pari Mutual was determined to be
safe from this judgment as it was not considered a
game of chance because it relied on people's intellect and knowledge.
This doesn't mean that his enterprise just failed right along, though.
Outside of the gambling world, there were other events unfolding
(08:36):
that made Paris of related tumultuous place to live. Uh. Yeah.
So during the winter of eighteen seventy eighteen seventy one, Prussians,
which were leading several independent German states that France had
been at odds with, surrounded Paris and they eventually defeated
France uh in the Franco Prussian War. Right on the
(08:56):
heels of that defeat. As Napoleon the Thirds government was
crumbling in a peace treaty with Germany was being negotiated,
the people of Paris rose up against the French government,
and the events of their resistance, known as the Paris Commune,
lasted from March eighteenth to May eighteen seventy one, and
those could easily be topics in and of themselves for
(09:17):
full podcast, but I just wanted to give you a
quick kind of here's what was going on and why.
Joseph Huley had in fact gotten out of Paris for
a while. He fled to London before the Prussian invasion
even happened. But once the political turmoil of UH the
winter of eighteen seventy in the first half of eighteen
seventy one had died down, he returned to Paris UH
(09:39):
and he picked his business right back up where he
had left off, and it was immediately successful again. So
after he came back to France, wholly modernized his bookmaking
business by printing out tickets mechanically, and this proved to
be another boost to sales. But at this point his
growth became a detriment his five billion francs a year
business and auto printed tickets were now viewed was illegal
(10:00):
gambling by the French government, Yes, since he was automatically
generating some of the tickets. I think my understanding is
that it then kind of got a little fuzzier in
terms of no, no, this isn't always a scientific process,
like people aren't always relying on their research. And lay
actually tried to negotiate a deal with the authorities where
the government would take control of parimutuel betting, but this
(10:23):
kind of fell on deaf ears. They were not willing
or ready to create a whole new sort of government
office to handle that, and he ended up going to
trial uh in eighteen seventy five for his illegal business.
And this trial did not go well. Par mutuel gambling
joined betting pools as an illegal enterprise and Ula was
(10:44):
sentenced to jail time of eighteen days. His whole betting
business was shut down. So after uh Ulla had you know,
gone to jail and served his time, which apparently was
very upsetting for him, as you can imagine, he really
felt like that was a mark of failure to some degree.
Uh He went back to his life, but he he
(11:07):
really wasn't beaten down by that incident. Uh He did
continue to have a hand in the racing and gambling
world even after his imprisonment in the legal areas of it,
but he primarily moved on to other money making enterprises.
Uh He apparently when he had been in London that
brief time during the political Timilton Paris, he had been
introduced to the theater and the idea of entertainment in
(11:29):
that arena, and so he turned his betting office that
he had had into a cafe in a theater, and
this actually kicked off a series of ventures in entertainment
that he uh established, one of which was called Lenuvo Cirque,
which actually featured circus shows during the winter, like in
cooler months, it was an indoor circus, and then in
(11:50):
warmer months it transitioned and became a pool and swimming center,
so it's kind of a multi use facility. But his
most famous entertainment and of her was the creation of
a venue that's still entertaining crowds today. So to set
the scene, in eighteen eighty nine, Paris was deep in
the Bellepoch, during which France was full of optimism. There
(12:12):
was so much growth in the areas of art and
science and at this point, the middle class began to
enjoy sort of the leisure activities that had once been
reserved exclusively for the wealthy, and as a consequence, the
entertainment industry really boomed. Cabarets became an ever more popular
form of entertainment, and they were popping up all over
the city. La chat Noir and Le Folle Bergere and
(12:35):
we're just two of the establishments that were attracting crowds
and making money. Yeah, he had really switched his sort
of focus as an entrepreneur over to entertainment at exactly
the right time. And as this entertainment industry grew, he
had become, you know, pretty experienced in opening and running
these sorts of venues. And he decided again in eighteen
(12:57):
eighty nine that he was going to partner with a
man named Charls Ziddler. And he was a showman who
would be able to run the day to day operations
of a dance hall and sort of bridge the gap
between the business side of it and the artists. And
if his name sounds familiar, by the way, Jim Broadbent's
character Harald Zidler in Boslerman's Mulin Rouge is based at
(13:18):
least partly on him, although there are some historians that
say that really Harold Zidler is a combo of Ulla
and Charles Zidler. The two of them bought this dilapidated
dance hall called the White Queen and it was a
mess with a crumbling for thode. They renovated the building.
They put a huge windmill on top and painted it
red and this of course became a Paris icon. Yeah,
(13:41):
it was an extremely ambitious plan for a really crappy
looking building. It would be like, We're gonna make a
fabulous palace out of this old shack. But it worked. Uh.
And although there were a lot of renovations kind of
constantly going on, and Ulan Ziddler really kind of shot
for the stars and all of their planning. Uh, they
weren't done with everything on time, but Lay was pretty
(14:04):
adamant that they stick to their schedule. So even though
there were still sort of transition renovations going on and
things were not complete, they opened the doors as scheduled
on October six of eighteen eighty nine, promptly at eight pm.
The Moulin Rouge drew crowds right out of the gate,
but Ulay and Zidler weren't content to simply coexist with
(14:26):
the other dance halls. They wanted to outdo them all,
so they started hiring the top acts away from other venues,
including Louise Webber, better known as La Gulu or the
Glutton because of her endless thirst for alcohol. Webber was
outrageous in every way, and during the Bellipop that was
a huge draw. And then they also bought the mammoth
wooden elephant from the n World's Fair and they moved
(14:49):
it into the garden which surrounded their dance hall, and
they built a stage inside the elephant that offered semi
private shows for men only, so it was a little
bit more adult in their So all of these famous
icons that we associate with Paris Uh and particularly the
Mulan Rouge, were really the ideas of Charles Didler and
Joseph Hule. The history of the Mulan Rouge is full
(15:12):
of stories and scandal and drama which could become podcasts
all on their own, But the important thing for the
scope of this episode is to note that Ull devoted
a great deal of time, money, and energy into making
it spectacular. In his eyes, he was making a theater
of the highest order, even if the acts were often
pretty raunchy. Uh. He likely never could have anticipated the
(15:36):
historical fame of the Mulan Rouge, but he was always
aiming as high as he could with it. Yeah, he
was sort of a man who um created success. So
not only had he revolutionized betting, but he really kind
of raised the bar in the entertainment industry and made
it about like always plussing it and you know, never
to be content. You could always be building more, you
(15:56):
could always be bringing in more audience, You could always
make the crowd. Morris Down did, So those sorts of
concepts really were kind of born with him, which I
think is fabulous. Uh. It is worth noting that while
Ulla had been focusing on entertainment from the eighteen seventies on,
I mentioned earlier that he did still have a hand
in the legal aspects of betting, although to a much
(16:17):
lesser degree. But France did eventually implement a version of
Uley's peri mutuel betting system as sort of a government
run operation. And this was in eighteen eighty seven, and
Uley did get a piece of the action. Uh, the
government involved him and he worked with government agency that
was set up to run the system, so he kind
of advised and managed some aspects of it. And he
(16:40):
also patented a machine that could issue and keep track
of the sales of tickets, and sometimes you'll actually hear
the word pari mutuel used to refer to machines that
generate tickets in betting establishments. In October nine, Carmen Kalo,
who was ULI's wife since eighteen sixty nine, and he
(17:00):
moved out of their home next to the Jardin de Paris,
which encircled the Mulan Rouge, and into an apartment and
he lived there the rest of his life, although he
traveled to coach Zur in the winter months each year.
And La died on April nineteenth of nineteen twenty two,
and his grave in Perlches who several other topics people
that have been topics of podcasts that we talked about
(17:22):
are also buried there, and his grave bears the inscription
since which translates to his intelligence equals his heart. So
it's interesting to me because that's one of those people
that again I think most French citizens would know about him,
and perhaps Spanish as well, since he was originally from Spain,
(17:43):
but we never hear about him here certainly, and I
would bet many other countries never hear his name. Yeah. Well,
and having even heard a lot about the Mulan Rouge
and having studied French, which I'm sure no one can
tell from the way I ever pronounced French words on
this podcast, that's it's not a name that I was
familiar with at all before doing this episode. No, and
(18:03):
you'll sometimes see, uh, like people pop up questions on
the Internet about whether or not Harold Ziddler was based
on a real person or if you ever was a
real person, and sometimes those will mention like the answers
to those will be like, no, there was a man
named Charles Zidler that he's sort of based on, but
they don't always mention ule, even though he was really
sort of the mastermind behind a lot of it. So
(18:24):
I thought it was time he gets a little moment
in the sun. Uh. And like I said, I would
love to do a whole long podcast on La Rouge
history because that is a rich and deep pool. Uh.
So one day it's on the list, and in the
meantime I have listener mail. This is one of my
favorite kinds of listener mail listener mail about clothes. Uh,
(18:46):
it's from our listener, Laurie, and she says, dear Tracy
and Holly. Uh. She thinks us for the podcast, and
she says, I currently live in Hong Kong, where I
teach English and French to small kids, and my brain
is semi melted by both my audience and the temperature.
I have an hour long commute up and down, and
your podcast keeps me alert and informed. So thank you.
We are happy to do that for you, Laurie, and
(19:08):
she says, I've been meaning to write for a long time,
but your episode on Rose Belt Tom made me realize
I had no excuse not to anymore. I trained as
a museum conservator, and a couple of years ago I
had the chance to work on a dress that I'm
sure you would be interested in. She is absolutely correct,
by the way. Uh. She goes on to safe from
what we know, it was originally an early eighteenth century
French court dress in blue silk, entirely embroidered with flowers.
(19:30):
The original shape has meant to minimize the waist and
emphasize the hips which had pennie, which are the basket
type undergarments that made the hips wide. Uh. The the
whole thing weighs an absolute ton even without all the
jewels and the gold thread of a coronation gown. Because
of the amount and quality of fabric used, this dress
would have been worth a huge amount of money at
the time and was certainly an investment for a lady
(19:52):
of the French court. Usually, though these kinds of dresses
would have been recycled, the fabric would very likely have
been reused for a new dress. Trims and ribbons would
have been added to stick to fashion as much as
possible without having to buy an entirely new outfit. As
an aside, We talked about that a little bit in
the Rose Breton episode that part of her job as
a milliner was to kind of refit outfits for the
(20:13):
next season so that they could get a little style refresh.
Laura goes on to say, you will see in the
pictures which she sent this that the shape looks a
bit loose and some parts of the outfit look a
bit discolored. This dress was eventually used during the Victorian
era as a costume dress, but by a rather larger
lady than its original owner, so the waist had to
be loosened considerably in the skirt lengthened. The Victorian bits
(20:35):
were nowhere near as good in quality as the original
garment and discolored, while the blue silk looks just as
striking as when it was made. Though I feel rather
annoyed at the additions which don't do anything for the
dress and which we can't remove as they are historical repairs,
which is conservative jargon for but it's there. It's part
of the objects history and if I take it away,
I will take away part of the object's history. Uh.
(20:55):
I am very glad that the stress wasn't taken apart
or thrown away when French court fashion is no longer needed.
So thank you fat Victorian lady. And then I will Uh.
I'm not reading her whole thing because it's a bit lengthy.
She also goes on with a ps that I love,
which is we just got our annual passes to Disneyland,
Hong Kong, and though they have no haunted mansion, they
have something called Mystic Manner, which is based on early
(21:16):
designs for a museum of the supernatural. It finally happened,
and Danny Alfman composed the music as a museum person,
former cast member and Dannie Altman fanatic. That sounds like
a dream come true. Uh yeah, I've heard many times about,
particularly in the Victorian era, existing historical garments really got
used in all kinds of ways. And part of it
was just a costume ball popularity surge, and part of
(21:39):
it was that Victorian era kind of went through this
thing where they were fascinated with history and other cultures
and kind of trying to integrate them a little bit
into their, uh, day to day lives. And so that's
why you'll see a lot of uh, you know, like
fabrics from the Orient making their way into your the
Orient as it was called in the Victorian era, making
their way into Victorian clothes. One interesting thing about these
(22:03):
types of gowns that she's talking about from the Rococo
area era is that they had like a lacing in
the back. Even though they usually buttoned or hooked down
the front, they had a lacing in the back so
you could have a little bit of ease and give
so that if the wearer, because they were very expensive,
you know, lost weight or gained weight, they could still
keep the dress for quite a while. But apparently in
this case it transcended the ability of the dress to expand,
(22:25):
and they had to add in these additional pieces. The
pictures are absolutely beautiful and as firmistic manner. I'm very jealous,
but that was an awesome letter Laurie and I love
looking at those pictures. She even sent us beautiful pictures
of like the hem of the dress so we could
see where the wear and tear was and it's quite spectacular,
So thank you. UH. If you would like to write
(22:46):
to us and talk to us about historical clothes or
Disneyland or Disneyland, Hong Kong, or really anything that we've
talked about, our relates to things we've talked about, you
should do that at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
You can also connect with us at Facebook dot com
slash missed in History, on Twitter at misst in history
at misston history dot combler dot com, and on pinterest
(23:08):
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your your way to our still fairly young website, which
is missed in History dot com, or you can find
all of our episodes and show notes and UH. If
you would like to learn more about what we've talked
about today, you can go to our parent page, which
is how stuff Works dot com and UH do a
(23:29):
search for the term gambling and you will turn up
two articles which struck me as funny because they list
one right after the other. One is ten quick ways
to make money and it mentions gambling is potential way,
and the other is ten ways people rack up debt
and also speak so gambling, so it's a double edged sword.
If you would like to learn more about that, or
just about anything we've talked about today or on other podcasts,
(23:51):
you can research that at our website, which is how
stuff works dot com, Moral, this, and thousands of other
topics because the housetop works dot com. MMM
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Molly Fry and I'm Tracey Vie Wilson. And normally,
when a person revolutionizes not one, but two industries, you'd
(00:21):
think they would become a household name. And that's not
really the case with today's topic. Uh, this isn't exactly
a globe trotting tale. Uh. He's spent most of his
life in just a couple of cities. Uh, the person
that we're primarily talking about, but elements of his life
story are certainly known the world over and in his
his home, Mary is that he's quite well known. And
so this is about a man, it's about gambling, it's
(00:44):
about burlesque as well as other forms of entertainment. But
you don't need to worry is kids safe unless you
do not want them exposed to the concept of betting
on animals, which has its own ball of problems. But
what it's about, sort of above everything else, is entrepreneur
a real spirit. And uh, we're gonna be talking about
the entrepreneurial spirit of one man in particular, whose name
(01:06):
was Joseph Ull. So start at the beginning. Joseph Uley
was born in Terrassa, Spain, on February nine, and his
father worked in the family business, which was textiles, although
it apparently did not particularly suit the elder ule. His
name was Francois, but when Joseph was born, his father,
(01:26):
who was twenty five at the time, had already moved
to Paris to work with his cousin and his textile mills,
so he didn't want to run this small family business,
but he was okay with staying in textiles, and Francois
I feel like we should point out had not abandoned
his family to go to Paris. He moved there intending
to set up a stable situation so that he could
(01:46):
then send for um his wife, Marie Taures and their
new baby. Two years after Joseph was born, Marie Tarez
and her toddler child made the move to Paris, and
Francois and his wife expanded their family with two more children,
Alexandra and Jean, and growing up, Joseph worked for his
father in Paris, but eventually France Swab became concerned that
(02:09):
his son, who had been born in Spain and was Catalan,
had never learned to speak Spanish, so when Joseph was seventeen,
he was shipped off to Billboo, Spain as a sort
of immersion plan, although that they speak a very different
language in Bilbao than uh, you know the Catalan would
normally speak. Uh, So that was a little bit weird,
but it ended up being important for him. It's here
(02:31):
attending cock fights that Joseph witnessed a number of betting
disputes among the spectators and it's likely that this kind
of planted the seed in his young mind that would
germinate later. Yeah, and he participated in the betting from
a very early age, like he was into gambling. And
I just feel like we should say, as a sidebar personally,
I will give my own opinion on this. Cock fighting
(02:52):
is horrible and terrible and I don't think of it
as a sport. And it is sort of troubling to
me that people bet on animals fighting, but just have
to included as part of the historical record. But after
he returned to Paris or they became a fan of
horse races and the betting that went on there, uh,
and horse racing was really becoming extremely popular in Paris,
(03:13):
particularly in the eighteen sixties and on, and he attended
races all over the city because tracks were basically popping
up everywhere, and he would witness these wagers that were
struck between you know, men of means, like just personal
wagers between two men um But he really became super
interested in the concept of these sort of like smaller
(03:35):
potatoes bet makers, like this concept of the betting pool.
And in this instance, this is where multiple gamblers with
smaller amounts of cash to wager, they couldn't make the
big bets that wealthier men could, would basically purchase random
tickets and those tickets would be assigned to specific horses,
and the holder of the ticket associated with the winning
(03:58):
horse would take the pool, so it was kind of
a randomized betting pool. In eighteen sixty five, he opened
a business to take advantage of the popularity of this
pool system, and he also had a mobile office, which
was a gambling wagon that he would park in the
shawn to the marsh with other mobile offices all ready
to take bets. Uh. It's sort of like a food
(04:18):
truck park, but with gambling instead of sesame fries. Yeah,
like not the delicious food, but all of these little
mobile gambling trucks would show up and they would all
you know, be available to take bets for these betting pools,
and pool gambling was extremely popular, as you can imagine, uh,
but it was a little bit problematic. Um gambling on
(04:39):
games of chance was actually illegal in Paris at this time,
and Ull was concerned that he could be shut down
for his enterprise because he sold random ticket assignments. So
it was basically a huge game of chance. And this
whole dilemma led to a complete shift in the way
sports betting was handled. So before we get into how
he kind of revolutionized betting, let's take a quick ad
(05:02):
from a sponsor. Okay, So back to Joseph Ude and
his gambling methodology. So to combat this problem of this
previous method of betting being purely chance based, they came
up with a betting system that put the gambler's knowledge
to work, and this became known as the peri mutuel system.
So his new approach to betting required the gambler to
(05:25):
select the horse they believe would win, and for regular betters,
this made gambling into something of a science because they
would benefit from learning about the racing horses, both in
general and in the specific sense of tracking a particular animals.
Animals performance sounds sort of self explanatory today. Yeah, I mean,
they're it's so common now to just hear even like
(05:47):
friends or like co workers discussing like a person's batting
average and how that's going to affect the team in
their likelihood, or when they pick fantasy football, like they
everybody has all the stats, and that's really This was
the birth of that idea and that approach to betting
on sports with Joseph Hule. And so this new business venture,
(06:08):
being brand new, you would think would have been a
gamble in and of itself, but it was not in
the least. It paid off immediately and uh he I mean,
he just immediately had people ready to place bets. And
I think it's also part of the sort of that
human spirit where you like to put your knowledge to
work a little bit. So it was very appealing on
a different level than just gambling. And he even started
(06:29):
publishing the Bulletin de Course, which was in effect the
first racing form where it would include the stats on
horses and any information about them, and he even started
offering betting for races that were taking place not just
in France but also in Great Britain, so he was
kind of expanding the betting options for people. The first
(06:50):
year of this off course UH betting business was the
same year that Paris hosted Napoleon the third pet Project,
the Paris Exhibition, and this meant the in addition to
his regular Parisian customers, he was getting some international travelers
in the mix as well, which contributed to his success
and the rapid growth of his business. And the way
(07:11):
he was making money off of all of this was
that he was taking a commission for taking and managing
all of these bets, and he was getting five to
ten percent of the money. So if it was a
really big pool, he would only take five percent. If
it was smaller, he would take ten. Uh. But there
was so much cash flowing through his office and there
were so many races, especially once he had expanded the
(07:33):
race offerings into other countries into being able to bet
on races in other countries, that he amassed a small
fortune rather quickly. In the late eighteen sixties, French authorities
really cracked down on gambling and this could have just
put him out of business, but his switch away from
pool betting had proved to be a really wise move. Yeah,
(07:55):
Perry Mutuel kind of saved him in the end. The
Court of Casassion, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, which is
the highest court in France, had was examining this idea
of you know, how, uh, gambling and betting should be
handled in what was going to be legal and what wasn't,
And they didn't indeed decide that pool gambling was illegal
(08:15):
in a ruling that was made on June six of
eighteen sixty nine. But Pari Mutual was determined to be
safe from this judgment as it was not considered a
game of chance because it relied on people's intellect and knowledge.
This doesn't mean that his enterprise just failed right along, though.
Outside of the gambling world, there were other events unfolding
(08:36):
that made Paris of related tumultuous place to live. Uh. Yeah.
So during the winter of eighteen seventy eighteen seventy one, Prussians,
which were leading several independent German states that France had
been at odds with, surrounded Paris and they eventually defeated
France uh in the Franco Prussian War. Right on the
(08:56):
heels of that defeat. As Napoleon the Thirds government was
crumbling in a peace treaty with Germany was being negotiated,
the people of Paris rose up against the French government,
and the events of their resistance, known as the Paris Commune,
lasted from March eighteenth to May eighteen seventy one, and
those could easily be topics in and of themselves for
(09:17):
full podcast, but I just wanted to give you a
quick kind of here's what was going on and why.
Joseph Huley had in fact gotten out of Paris for
a while. He fled to London before the Prussian invasion
even happened. But once the political turmoil of UH the
winter of eighteen seventy in the first half of eighteen
seventy one had died down, he returned to Paris UH
(09:39):
and he picked his business right back up where he
had left off, and it was immediately successful again. So
after he came back to France, wholly modernized his bookmaking
business by printing out tickets mechanically, and this proved to
be another boost to sales. But at this point his
growth became a detriment his five billion francs a year
business and auto printed tickets were now viewed was illegal
(10:00):
gambling by the French government, Yes, since he was automatically
generating some of the tickets. I think my understanding is
that it then kind of got a little fuzzier in
terms of no, no, this isn't always a scientific process,
like people aren't always relying on their research. And lay
actually tried to negotiate a deal with the authorities where
the government would take control of parimutuel betting, but this
(10:23):
kind of fell on deaf ears. They were not willing
or ready to create a whole new sort of government
office to handle that, and he ended up going to
trial uh in eighteen seventy five for his illegal business.
And this trial did not go well. Par mutuel gambling
joined betting pools as an illegal enterprise and Ula was
(10:44):
sentenced to jail time of eighteen days. His whole betting
business was shut down. So after uh Ulla had you know,
gone to jail and served his time, which apparently was
very upsetting for him, as you can imagine, he really
felt like that was a mark of failure to some degree.
Uh He went back to his life, but he he
(11:07):
really wasn't beaten down by that incident. Uh He did
continue to have a hand in the racing and gambling
world even after his imprisonment in the legal areas of it,
but he primarily moved on to other money making enterprises.
Uh He apparently when he had been in London that
brief time during the political Timilton Paris, he had been
introduced to the theater and the idea of entertainment in
(11:29):
that arena, and so he turned his betting office that
he had had into a cafe in a theater, and
this actually kicked off a series of ventures in entertainment
that he uh established, one of which was called Lenuvo Cirque,
which actually featured circus shows during the winter, like in
cooler months, it was an indoor circus, and then in
(11:50):
warmer months it transitioned and became a pool and swimming center,
so it's kind of a multi use facility. But his
most famous entertainment and of her was the creation of
a venue that's still entertaining crowds today. So to set
the scene, in eighteen eighty nine, Paris was deep in
the Bellepoch, during which France was full of optimism. There
(12:12):
was so much growth in the areas of art and
science and at this point, the middle class began to
enjoy sort of the leisure activities that had once been
reserved exclusively for the wealthy, and as a consequence, the
entertainment industry really boomed. Cabarets became an ever more popular
form of entertainment, and they were popping up all over
the city. La chat Noir and Le Folle Bergere and
(12:35):
we're just two of the establishments that were attracting crowds
and making money. Yeah, he had really switched his sort
of focus as an entrepreneur over to entertainment at exactly
the right time. And as this entertainment industry grew, he
had become, you know, pretty experienced in opening and running
these sorts of venues. And he decided again in eighteen
(12:57):
eighty nine that he was going to partner with a
man named Charls Ziddler. And he was a showman who
would be able to run the day to day operations
of a dance hall and sort of bridge the gap
between the business side of it and the artists. And
if his name sounds familiar, by the way, Jim Broadbent's
character Harald Zidler in Boslerman's Mulin Rouge is based at
(13:18):
least partly on him, although there are some historians that
say that really Harold Zidler is a combo of Ulla
and Charles Zidler. The two of them bought this dilapidated
dance hall called the White Queen and it was a
mess with a crumbling for thode. They renovated the building.
They put a huge windmill on top and painted it
red and this of course became a Paris icon. Yeah,
(13:41):
it was an extremely ambitious plan for a really crappy
looking building. It would be like, We're gonna make a
fabulous palace out of this old shack. But it worked. Uh.
And although there were a lot of renovations kind of
constantly going on, and Ulan Ziddler really kind of shot
for the stars and all of their planning. Uh, they
weren't done with everything on time, but Lay was pretty
(14:04):
adamant that they stick to their schedule. So even though
there were still sort of transition renovations going on and
things were not complete, they opened the doors as scheduled
on October six of eighteen eighty nine, promptly at eight pm.
The Moulin Rouge drew crowds right out of the gate,
but Ulay and Zidler weren't content to simply coexist with
(14:26):
the other dance halls. They wanted to outdo them all,
so they started hiring the top acts away from other venues,
including Louise Webber, better known as La Gulu or the
Glutton because of her endless thirst for alcohol. Webber was
outrageous in every way, and during the Bellipop that was
a huge draw. And then they also bought the mammoth
wooden elephant from the n World's Fair and they moved
(14:49):
it into the garden which surrounded their dance hall, and
they built a stage inside the elephant that offered semi
private shows for men only, so it was a little
bit more adult in their So all of these famous
icons that we associate with Paris Uh and particularly the
Mulan Rouge, were really the ideas of Charles Didler and
Joseph Hule. The history of the Mulan Rouge is full
(15:12):
of stories and scandal and drama which could become podcasts
all on their own, But the important thing for the
scope of this episode is to note that Ull devoted
a great deal of time, money, and energy into making
it spectacular. In his eyes, he was making a theater
of the highest order, even if the acts were often
pretty raunchy. Uh. He likely never could have anticipated the
(15:36):
historical fame of the Mulan Rouge, but he was always
aiming as high as he could with it. Yeah, he
was sort of a man who um created success. So
not only had he revolutionized betting, but he really kind
of raised the bar in the entertainment industry and made
it about like always plussing it and you know, never
to be content. You could always be building more, you
(15:56):
could always be bringing in more audience, You could always
make the crowd. Morris Down did, So those sorts of
concepts really were kind of born with him, which I
think is fabulous. Uh. It is worth noting that while
Ulla had been focusing on entertainment from the eighteen seventies on,
I mentioned earlier that he did still have a hand
in the legal aspects of betting, although to a much
(16:17):
lesser degree. But France did eventually implement a version of
Uley's peri mutuel betting system as sort of a government
run operation. And this was in eighteen eighty seven, and
Uley did get a piece of the action. Uh, the
government involved him and he worked with government agency that
was set up to run the system, so he kind
of advised and managed some aspects of it. And he
(16:40):
also patented a machine that could issue and keep track
of the sales of tickets, and sometimes you'll actually hear
the word pari mutuel used to refer to machines that
generate tickets in betting establishments. In October nine, Carmen Kalo,
who was ULI's wife since eighteen sixty nine, and he
(17:00):
moved out of their home next to the Jardin de Paris,
which encircled the Mulan Rouge, and into an apartment and
he lived there the rest of his life, although he
traveled to coach Zur in the winter months each year.
And La died on April nineteenth of nineteen twenty two,
and his grave in Perlches who several other topics people
that have been topics of podcasts that we talked about
(17:22):
are also buried there, and his grave bears the inscription
since which translates to his intelligence equals his heart. So
it's interesting to me because that's one of those people
that again I think most French citizens would know about him,
and perhaps Spanish as well, since he was originally from Spain,
(17:43):
but we never hear about him here certainly, and I
would bet many other countries never hear his name. Yeah. Well,
and having even heard a lot about the Mulan Rouge
and having studied French, which I'm sure no one can
tell from the way I ever pronounced French words on
this podcast, that's it's not a name that I was
familiar with at all before doing this episode. No, and
(18:03):
you'll sometimes see, uh, like people pop up questions on
the Internet about whether or not Harold Ziddler was based
on a real person or if you ever was a
real person, and sometimes those will mention like the answers
to those will be like, no, there was a man
named Charles Zidler that he's sort of based on, but
they don't always mention ule, even though he was really
sort of the mastermind behind a lot of it. So
(18:24):
I thought it was time he gets a little moment
in the sun. Uh. And like I said, I would
love to do a whole long podcast on La Rouge
history because that is a rich and deep pool. Uh.
So one day it's on the list, and in the
meantime I have listener mail. This is one of my
favorite kinds of listener mail listener mail about clothes. Uh,
(18:46):
it's from our listener, Laurie, and she says, dear Tracy
and Holly. Uh. She thinks us for the podcast, and
she says, I currently live in Hong Kong, where I
teach English and French to small kids, and my brain
is semi melted by both my audience and the temperature.
I have an hour long commute up and down, and
your podcast keeps me alert and informed. So thank you.
We are happy to do that for you, Laurie, and
(19:08):
she says, I've been meaning to write for a long time,
but your episode on Rose Belt Tom made me realize
I had no excuse not to anymore. I trained as
a museum conservator, and a couple of years ago I
had the chance to work on a dress that I'm
sure you would be interested in. She is absolutely correct,
by the way. Uh. She goes on to safe from
what we know, it was originally an early eighteenth century
French court dress in blue silk, entirely embroidered with flowers.
(19:30):
The original shape has meant to minimize the waist and
emphasize the hips which had pennie, which are the basket
type undergarments that made the hips wide. Uh. The the
whole thing weighs an absolute ton even without all the
jewels and the gold thread of a coronation gown. Because
of the amount and quality of fabric used, this dress
would have been worth a huge amount of money at
the time and was certainly an investment for a lady
(19:52):
of the French court. Usually, though these kinds of dresses
would have been recycled, the fabric would very likely have
been reused for a new dress. Trims and ribbons would
have been added to stick to fashion as much as
possible without having to buy an entirely new outfit. As
an aside, We talked about that a little bit in
the Rose Breton episode that part of her job as
a milliner was to kind of refit outfits for the
(20:13):
next season so that they could get a little style refresh.
Laura goes on to say, you will see in the
pictures which she sent this that the shape looks a
bit loose and some parts of the outfit look a
bit discolored. This dress was eventually used during the Victorian
era as a costume dress, but by a rather larger
lady than its original owner, so the waist had to
be loosened considerably in the skirt lengthened. The Victorian bits
(20:35):
were nowhere near as good in quality as the original
garment and discolored, while the blue silk looks just as
striking as when it was made. Though I feel rather
annoyed at the additions which don't do anything for the
dress and which we can't remove as they are historical repairs,
which is conservative jargon for but it's there. It's part
of the objects history and if I take it away,
I will take away part of the object's history. Uh.
(20:55):
I am very glad that the stress wasn't taken apart
or thrown away when French court fashion is no longer needed.
So thank you fat Victorian lady. And then I will Uh.
I'm not reading her whole thing because it's a bit lengthy.
She also goes on with a ps that I love,
which is we just got our annual passes to Disneyland,
Hong Kong, and though they have no haunted mansion, they
have something called Mystic Manner, which is based on early
(21:16):
designs for a museum of the supernatural. It finally happened,
and Danny Alfman composed the music as a museum person,
former cast member and Dannie Altman fanatic. That sounds like
a dream come true. Uh yeah, I've heard many times about,
particularly in the Victorian era, existing historical garments really got
used in all kinds of ways. And part of it
was just a costume ball popularity surge, and part of
(21:39):
it was that Victorian era kind of went through this
thing where they were fascinated with history and other cultures
and kind of trying to integrate them a little bit
into their, uh, day to day lives. And so that's
why you'll see a lot of uh, you know, like
fabrics from the Orient making their way into your the
Orient as it was called in the Victorian era, making
their way into Victorian clothes. One interesting thing about these
(22:03):
types of gowns that she's talking about from the Rococo
area era is that they had like a lacing in
the back. Even though they usually buttoned or hooked down
the front, they had a lacing in the back so
you could have a little bit of ease and give
so that if the wearer, because they were very expensive,
you know, lost weight or gained weight, they could still
keep the dress for quite a while. But apparently in
this case it transcended the ability of the dress to expand,
(22:25):
and they had to add in these additional pieces. The
pictures are absolutely beautiful and as firmistic manner. I'm very jealous,
but that was an awesome letter Laurie and I love
looking at those pictures. She even sent us beautiful pictures
of like the hem of the dress so we could
see where the wear and tear was and it's quite spectacular,
So thank you. UH. If you would like to write
(22:46):
to us and talk to us about historical clothes or
Disneyland or Disneyland, Hong Kong, or really anything that we've
talked about, our relates to things we've talked about, you
should do that at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
You can also connect with us at Facebook dot com
slash missed in History, on Twitter at misst in history
at misston history dot combler dot com, and on pinterest
(23:08):
dot com slash missed in History. You can also make
your your way to our still fairly young website, which
is missed in History dot com, or you can find
all of our episodes and show notes and UH. If
you would like to learn more about what we've talked
about today, you can go to our parent page, which
is how stuff Works dot com and UH do a
(23:29):
search for the term gambling and you will turn up
two articles which struck me as funny because they list
one right after the other. One is ten quick ways
to make money and it mentions gambling is potential way,
and the other is ten ways people rack up debt
and also speak so gambling, so it's a double edged sword.
If you would like to learn more about that, or
just about anything we've talked about today or on other podcasts,
(23:51):
you can research that at our website, which is how
stuff works dot com, Moral, this, and thousands of other
topics because the housetop works dot com. MMM
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