The surveillance of the early cancan by the Parisian police in the 1820s and 1830s left a range of archival traces, including instructions, ordinances and memos, as well as journalistic accounts of the trials of arrested cancan dancers in legal newspapers. In such sources, the cancan and associated dances emerge as physical battlegrounds for negotiating the terms of liberalism and in/decency on which the new post-Revolutionary social order would rest. This paper argues that each of these sources preserves a different narrative of this danced dispute, all of which are necessary to understand its
polysemic complexity.