The windmills are back at the Moulin Rouge

The Moulin is back. The Rouge never left.

The Moulin Rouge, the famous Parisian cabaret, has restored its iconic windmill after its blades snapped and fell to the ground in April. Construction was completed just weeks before the Paris Olympics begin — and before the flame passes through Paris on its relay route on July 15.

“We wanted to be ready for this special moment,” said Jean-Victor Clerico, the director, whose family has run the cabaret since 1955, adding: “The Moulin Rouge without the knives? It’s not the same.”

The cabaret, whose name means “red windmill” in French, has remained open during the repairs. But it has been functionally topless since April, when parts of the lettering also fell down. No one was injured; a spokeswoman blamed a mechanical problem.

Sympathy poured in from around the world, Mr. Clerico said. Fans sent messages of support, he said. Some even wrote poems. For two months, the Moulin Rouge scrambled to reinstall the aluminum blades, forcing a metalworking company to work quickly to meet their deadline.

Finally, right on schedule, the cabaret club celebrated its full return to glory with a street show on Friday night. When the bright neon lights on the mill came back on, a crowd of about 1,500 people erupted in cheers, Mr. Clerico said.

Dancers performed the cancan — a symbol of the city and of the cabaret culture embodied by the Moulin Rouge — in blue, white and red costumes. They howled and kicked, rustled their ruffles and shook their skirts. Mr. Clérico said the open-air show was only the second time the cabaret had performed a cancan on the street. (The first was on its 130th anniversary in 2019.)

“There was a lot of pressure to be ready over the last two months,” Mr. Clerico said. “But a lot of people were happy to see the knives back.”

The restoration, however iconic, is just a small part of Paris’ push toward the Summer Games.

The sites are ready, but the Seine may still be too dirty for swimmers. There are still obstacles for people with disabilities. And Parisians have even taken to social media to warn tourists to stay away, worried about overcrowded public transport and a city overrun by millions of visitors. Meanwhile, the country, which went to vote on Sunday, is mired in political uncertainty.

But the Moulin Rouge has also helped Paris through other difficult chapters in its history.

Opened in 1889, the venue quickly became a hub for artists and writers in the bohemian 18th arrondissement, remaining open through world wars and waves of gentrification.

“It’s a symbol of life. It’s an icon,” said Gabriel P. Weisberg, professor emeritus of art history at the University of Minnesota and editor of “Montmartre and the Birth of Mass Culture.”

In its 135 years of existence, the Moulin Rouge has inspired artists from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whose paintings put it on the map, to Baz Luhrmann, whose 2001 film (“Moulin Rouge”) dusted off the spicy mystique for modern audiences. In 2021, a stage adaptation of the film even won a Tony Award for Best Musical.

The building itself isn’t just a sight to behold, says Richard Thomson, an art historian at the University of Edinburgh who focuses on late 19th-century French art. It’s also a kind of metaphor. If Notre Dame represents religion in Paris, and the Eiffel Tower is an expression of the city’s modernity and its embrace of ambitious technological experimentation, then the Moulin Rouge is a standard-bearer of popular entertainment.

“It suggests a spicy part of Paris, a slightly degenerate part of Paris, but an exciting part,” Professor Thomson said.

The site has been damaged before, most notably in 1915, when a fire destroys it. The cabaret was closed for almost ten years. But then, as the Moulin Rouge always did, it reopened.

“It became a symbol for the city of Paris and a symbol of a way of life,” Dr. Weisberg said, adding, “There was a sense of freedom that these artists and poets, writers and dancers could achieve at the Moulin Rouge.”

“That is very important: freedom,” he added. “The French are good at that.”