The first question is why one would want to become a cancan dancer in the 19th century. I'll answer this in the context of late 19th century France, but it's probably applicable elsewhere.

Life of a female stage performer

Being a female stage performer in 19th century France was not something that "honest" women did. In a society where an adult woman was only respectable if she was married, widowed, or a nun, stage was not a career that families - outside those in the show business - wanted their daughters to pursue. Women would be taught to sing and dance, but only as a hobby, not a profession. Upper classes maintained separate venues - entire private theatres in some cases - so that their sons and daughters could practice performing arts in front of their peers. But singers, dancers, and actresses were seen as barely more respectable as sex workers. Indeed, many had to turn to some kind of sex work to survive under the pressure of theatre managers who (mis)treated them like expendable and sexually available employees, and kept many of their artists in a state of indentured servitude with a system of fines and mandatory costs (costumes and jewlery were often bought by the actresses who had to go into debt for this). The quip of Bordenave, the manager of the Variétés theatre in Zola's novel Nana, who call his theatre a "brothel", was taken from a real-life anecdote collected by Zola. We can make exceptions for female artists willing to pursue careers in prestigious institutions like the Opéra, but even then they would be from artist families. The case of the School of Dance of the Opéra de Paris is characteristic of the situation: it did train children dancers, the famous Petits Rats - the little rats - celebrated by painter Edgar Degas, but a demographic study of this population in the 18-19th century shows that these children were from poor families and that working at the Opéra was an alternative to a factory job. Parents would expect their daughter to meet a "protector", and possibly a husband, at some point. For much of the 19th century, the Petits Rats were often hungry, badly paid, and generally miserable (Delattre-Destemberg and Glon, 2015).

The cancan

Let's talk about the can-can now. Also called quadrille exotique, quadrille naturaliste or chahut (depending on the period and on the place), it was the least reputable dance that one could imagine. Born in the early 19th century - its origins are hazy and disputed -, it started as a version of the 8-dancer quadrille - 4 men and 4 women, popular in public dancing halls and small open-air cabarets in the Parisian sububurbs, the guinguettes. By the 1830s, it was considered as an indecent dance, and subject to prohibition. A police manual of 1831 told officers to take chahut dancers to the next police station if they refused to stop dancing. From the 1830s to the mid-1840s, newspapers reported on numerous trials involving men and women accused of dancing a "dance whose name is filth": court proceedings included the expected amounts of jokes and innuendo. The chahut was part dance, part pantomime, spectacular, gross, frenzied, bacchanalian, often ending with a wild galop featuring exaggerated gestures like the high-kick, that became eventually, along with the jump split, the dance's signature move (Gasnault, 1986). In 1860, Auguste Vermorel wrote wrote in Ces Dames, a compendium of female dancers, "The cancan is the art of lifting one’s skirt, the chahut the art of lifting one’s leg." In 1872, the dictionary of music of Marie and Léon Escudier still defined the cancan as an "indecent dance prohibited by the police", and the chahut as an "indecent dance used in certain public balls".

In the early 1840s, a new type of dancing establishments opened their doors: the Bal Mabille, the Bal Bullier or the Jardin d'Hiver were larger and more luxurious venues than the guinguettes. They were fully dedicated to dancing, and they featured female dancers that quickly became celebrities, notably Elise Sergent aka the Reine Pomaré, and Élisabeth-Céleste Vénard aka Céleste Mogador, who were both dancers and courtesans. The chahut/can-can (mixed with new popular dances like the polka) followed, and it became predominantly a female dance, even though some male performers were still famous for it. This is at this point that the dance, which had been until now performed by members of the public, became a show, requiring (semi-)professional performers able to do high-kicks and splits (grand écart). In her memoirs (probably apocryphal), dancer Joséphine Durwend aka Finette explains that she took lessons at the Opéra, paid by her rich Armenian lover, and that she later trained with two famous dance masters, Henry Cellarius and Markowski (Maurice Mayer), who also trained dancers/courtesans Céleste Modagor, Rigolboche (Marguerite Badel) and Rose Pompon (Paillet, 2015). Markowski was more than a choreographer: he had to move his dance studio five times after he was accused of organizing wild balls. In her book, Finette says that Markowski gently, and regularly, gave her money. The world of dancing in 19th century France was intimately linked to that of prostitution, with all the people involved participating in it, as sex workers or as procurers.

During the Second Empire, the newfound popular success of the cancan resulted in the dance being exported to England in the early 1860s (after a brief attempt in 1842), where show business entrepreneur Charles Morton called it French Cancan, though his troupe was actually Hungarian. French and foreign dancers would later be featured in other countries, from Russia to the Americas.

In 1870, the Franco-Prussian war put an end to the "Imperial Feast" and to the (perceived) excesses of the Napoléon III regime, with its legions of diamond-clad, champagne-drinking courtesans. The cancan was forgotten for about 15 years (though the practice probably survived in small dancing halls). Many dancing venues closed down.

> Revival