Bataclan

The building went up in 1863 and 1864 on the boulevard du Prince-Eugène in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, to a design by the architect Charles Duval; the address is now 50 boulevard Voltaire. It was conceived as a large café-concert in the Chinese manner, with the café and the theatre on the ground floor and a big dance hall above them at first-floor level, and it opened on 3 February 1865 as the Grand Café Chinois-Théâtre Ba-ta-clan. The name came from Ba-ta-clan, an operetta by Jacques Offenbach, and carried a second sense with it: tout le bataclan, the whole kit and caboodle, an expression whose oldest recorded use predates Offenbach by almost a century, in a journal entry of 11 November 1761 by Charles Simon Favart. The house was bought again almost at once and passed to the direction of André-Martin Pâris, whose own hall in the passage Vendôme, the Concert des arts known as the Concert du Géant, had burned in 1863. Concerts were given from the start, but the programme was best known for the vaudevilles of Eugène Scribe, Jean-François Bayard, Mélesville and Théophile Marion Dumersan.

During the war of 1870 the billiard rooms were used as "ambulances". In 1881 a Frenchman named Bigot invented the bigophone at the Ba-Ta-Clan for the comic Bienfait, who sang "Méli-Mélo" there; the instrument went on to enjoy immense celebrity in France and Belgium for more than fifty years, and hundreds of bigophone societies were founded and prospered. The first revue was staged in 1883 and operetta followed two years later. The singer Paulus bought the establishment in 1892, the year Buffalo Bill Cody appeared on its stage; Harry Fragson and Aristide Bruant also performed there. In 1897 Max Dorfeuil took the house over and brought in Dranem and Félix Mayol.

New fashions after 1910 brought the hall a fresh vogue, on the back of a restoration of the auditorium and a programme given over entirely to revues, in particular those mounted by José de Bérys. Madame Rasimi took over the direction of the Ba-Ta-Clan in 1910 and launched the formula of the large-scale revue there. Polaire, Colette, Raimu, Mistinguett, Maurice Chevalier and Gaby Deslys all made their debuts in the house; Chevalier had his first theatrical success there, and Édith Piaf performed in the hall as well.

From 1920 Rasimi mounted long foreign tours every year, to the United States in particular and to South America. The Latin American tour of 1926 was a commercial failure, running into local insurrections and other unforeseen obstacles, and she was obliged to give up her theatre. The auditorium was sold the same year and converted into a cinema.

It became a theatre again the following year under Henri Varna, then a cinema once more, showing talking pictures, in 1932. A fire the year after that destroyed part of the balconies. The original building was partly demolished in 1950 to bring it into line with the safety standards then coming into force, and in 1969 the cinema closed and the auditorium reverted to a salle de spectacle.

In that same year, 1969, the promoter Asaad Debs had the idea of putting the Bataclan back into use with a rock concert, booking the English group Soft Machine, and the night met with a certain success. On 29 January 1972 the Velvet Underground played there for the television music programme Pop 2, presented by Patrice Blanc-Francard; the performance by Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico circulated for decades as a bootleg before its official release in 2004 as Le Bataclan '72. The MC5 played the same year, and mobile gendarmes were called into the hall at the end of the concert after biker fans charged the crowd. When the New York Dolls appeared a few months later the concert ended in a brawl between the singers and members of the audience, which led ORTF to stop the filming and then to drop Pop 2 less than a year afterwards. Roxy Music, Beck, Bogert and Appice, Jane Birkin, Captain Beefheart, Can and Genesis all followed, and across the 1970s tickets grew steadily harder to come by. Talking Heads played on 18 January 1978, Iron Maiden on 21 March 1981, Motörhead on 27 October 1982 and UFO in 1983.

In 1982 Bernard Zekri and Europe 1 staged the New York City Rap festival in the hall, with Mick Jones, Futura 2000 and Afrika Bambaataa among those taking part. The stage director André Engel returned the Bataclan to its vocation as a salle de spectacle in 1983; the programme leaned to rock and the hall became a high place of post-punk, as Alain Pacadis described it. The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Stranglers played there during the 1980s, and Rachid Taha on 27 April 1987.

David and Cathy Guetta held their first nights as independent promoters at the Bataclan in the 1990s, renting the hall with their team from the Laloux brothers who ran it. After the concerts the room turned into a discotheque for the night, and hip-hop dancers came to dance at these day and night events, among them Bintou Dembélé; it took the couple several difficult months to establish their reputation before their nights became a Paris reference. Through the 1990s and 2000s, in a musical climate of grunge and the end of rock's golden age, the hall took Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Courtney Love, Jeff Buckley, PJ Harvey, Prince, who played in 1994, 1999 and 2002 and composed a piece called Bataclan, and Metallica in 2003. Dream Theater, Phish and Kraftwerk are among the many other performers to have played there since the venue began booking rock acts.

The Bataclan has been inscribed as a monument historique since 11 March 1991. Several live records were made in the hall: Jeff Buckley's EP Live from the Bataclan in 1995, Dream Theater's Once in a LIVEtime in 1998, Camel's The Paris Collection in 2001 and an MGMT EP, Qu'est-ce que c'est la vie, chaton?, in 2010, which was also carried as bonus tracks on certain versions of that band's second studio album Congratulations. In 2004 the company ABA, standing for Astérios, Bataclan and Alias and run by Jules Frutos and Olivier Poubelle, took over the direction and the management of the venue. The façade recovered in 2006 the original colours it had long since lost, though the pagoda roof no longer exists. In October 2006 the magazine Rock & Folk held its fortieth anniversary in the hall, with BB Brunes, Naast, Les Plastiscines, Marc Tobaly, Jacno, Daniel Darc and Yarol Poupaud.

The programme stayed deliberately mixed: concerts above all, but also spectacles, café-théâtre and club nights, with the hall serving on occasion as an exhibition space. Funkadelic played in July 2004, and Jane Birkin recorded a live album in the hall in 2006. Fauve gave twenty-three concerts there in the early 2010s, and comedians and rappers appeared alongside the rock bills. The Specials chose the hall in November 2014 for the return of ska after a long absence, and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu brought her Nanda Collection World Tour there in April 2014. In May 2015 the theatre staged Qui est Malcolm X?, with the rappers Médine, Kery James, Disiz and Faada Freddy, marking the publication of the autobiography of the defender of African American rights.

For forty years the Bataclan had Jewish owners, Pascal and Joel Laloux, who sold the theatre to new owners on 11 September 2015; that month Lagardère Unlimited Live Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Lagardère SCA group, bought 70 per cent of the Bataclan company, Frutos and Poubelle keeping the direction and the remaining 30 per cent. The venue was a target for anti-Zionist activists because it often held pro-Israel events. Between 2007 and 2009 it was reportedly threatened by extremist groups after conferences and galas given by Jewish organisations such as Migdal in support of the Israeli border police, notably during an Israeli army offensive in the Gaza Strip. A video posted on YouTube shows masked pro-Palestinian militant protesters at the Bataclan in 2008 stating: "We came here to pass along a small message. Be warned. Next time we won't be coming here to talk." In 2011 an extremist group calling itself the Army of Islam threatened the Bataclan because its owners were Jews, and in the same year, according to Le Figaro, Khaled Moustafa, regarded by the Egyptians as the head of al-Qaeda in Palestine, admitted that he had a plan for an attack in France against the Bataclan, the reason given by his Franco-Albanian friend Dodi Hoxha being that the owners were Jews.

On 13 November 2015, as part of a series of attacks across Paris claimed by Islamic State, three gunmen carried out a mass shooting in the theatre. The Austrian duo White Miles had completed their performance and the American band Eagles of Death Metal were in the middle of theirs when the three men, armed with assault rifles and wearing explosive belts, entered the building, fired into the crowd packed into the balconies and the pit, shot at people at random and took hostages. The gunmen were French nationals of Algerian descent. Police later stormed the theatre; two of the attackers killed themselves during the raid by detonating the suicide vests they were wearing, and the third was killed by police gunfire before he could detonate his. Two of them, Samy Amimour and Omar Ismaïl Mostefaï, were French citizens; the third, Foued Mohamed-Aggad, was carrying what was thought to be a stolen Syrian passport. Ninety people were killed in the hall, ninety-one by one count, and more than two hundred were wounded; the attacks of 13 November were the deadliest in France's contemporary history. The members of Eagles of Death Metal and most of their road crew escaped unharmed, but their merchandise manager, Nick Alexander, was among the dead. Witnesses reported that the attackers, amid various incoherent statements, invoked France's military action in Iraq and Syria in an attempt to justify the killings, and the Islamic State communiqué claiming the attacks named the Bataclan explicitly, as a place "where hundreds of idolaters were gathered in a feast of perversity". The evening before, on 12 November, the French musician St Germain had presented his new record in the hall, a mixture of electronic music and African voices including that of the Malian singer Nahawa Doumbia.

Members of the American band Deftones, who had been booked to play the Bataclan on the following nights, were in the audience for the Eagles of Death Metal show. U2 were due to give two concerts in Paris in the days after the attack, one of them to be broadcast live on HBO. The French government cancelled them, and the band went to the Bataclan the day after the attack to leave bouquets of flowers in memory of the victims, Bono offering condolences and the group pledging to reschedule its Paris shows. On 16 November the Bataclan's management issued a statement that the theatre was closed indefinitely: "No words suffice to express the magnitude of our grief. Our thoughts go to the victims, to the wounded and to their loved ones. Many of you have wanted to gather in remembrance at the Bataclan. Unfortunately, the authorities still need to work at the site." Eagles of Death Metal issued a statement of their own on 18 November, and White Miles offered their condolences the same day. Josh Homme, a founder of Eagles of Death Metal and the leader of Queens of the Stone Age, who was not at the Bataclan during the attack, organised a collection through his foundation for the families of the members of his staff who had been killed. On 8 December, nearly a month after the attack, Eagles of Death Metal returned to the Bataclan to pay their respects to the victims.

On 11 February 2016 the management announced that the theatre would reopen later that year after a renovation. In October the Île-de-France region announced a subsidy of 283,040 euros towards creation and digital distribution at the venue. Pete Doherty had been the first artist billed for the reopening, on 16 November 2016, but on 4 November the management announced instead an exclusive Paris concert by Sting on 12 November. The hall reopened that night, close to a year after the attack, with Sting and his musicians playing in aid of the associations of victims of the 13 November attacks, joined by the Franco-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf and, for the encore, by Henry Padovani, the French guitarist who co-founded The Police and who came on stage to perform Next to You; the audience was capped at 1,497 and included a thousand members of victims' families, and the evening was broadcast the next day on France 2. Concerts resumed from 15 November, and Damien Saez gave three of them on 21, 22 and 23 December, some of the songs, Les Enfants paradis among them, addressed directly to the events and the victims of the hall. The Pretty Reckless, on 26 January 2017, were the first American band to play the Bataclan since Eagles of Death Metal. Some artists refused to return: Francis Cabrel said that singing at the Bataclan again was beyond his strength, and Nicola Sirkis, who found the reopening of the hall disgraceful, said he would never play there again. In June 2018 the graffiti artist Banksy painted La Jeune Fille triste on an emergency door in tribute to the victims of 13 November 2015; the work was stolen in January 2019 and recovered in Italy in June 2020. In July 2018 Frutos and Poubelle sold their 30 per cent to the Lagardère group, which held the rest and wanted to revive the venue; artists still hesitated over the hall, and only about seventy concerts were programmed there in 2018. Médine, contested over the words of some of his songs by elected representatives of the right and the far right and by some associations of victims of the 2015 attack, announced on 21 September 2018 that his Bataclan concerts were cancelled and would be rescheduled at the Zénith in Paris in early 2019. Lagardère had put the hall up for sale in 2020, and in July 2021 it was bought by the city of Paris, which operates it through the Société anonyme d'exploitation du Palais omnisports de Paris-Bercy. In February 2022 the change of ownership brought new programming, a new visual identity and a new management; the operating company, by then renamed Paris Entertainment Company and owned 57 per cent by the city of Paris and 43 per cent by the producer AEG, which also takes in the Adidas Arena and the Accor Arena, set out to carry the Bataclan back to a rock identity.