Aristide Bruant

LC name authority rec. n83128059

LC Heading: Bruant, Aristide, 1851-1925

A former soldier and railway clerk, he sang in cafés chantants before opening his own cabaret Le Mirliton in 1885, where middle-class audiences flocked to be insulted by him (one refrain ran ‘All customers are swine!’) and hear his ‘realistic songs’. These ballads, couched in the authentic slang of the Parisian slums, hymn the desperate plight of the outcast and outlawed with sardonic impassivity. Bruant, a striking combination of apache and lion-tamer in his black sombrero, boots and red scarf, recorded by Toulouse-Lautrec, made a fortune and in 1900 retired to the bourgeois private life he had earlier attacked. LS ("Bruant, Aristide (1851 - 1925)". 2000. In The Cambridge Guide to Theater. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, accessed June 17, 2015. www.credoreference.com.)