She was often called a soubrette − a flirtatious or frivolous woman − known for her eye-catching outfits, frisky movements, suggestive demeanor, and for her rendition of the popular "cakewalk dance," which in her own style included "negro" rhythms and paces.

[3] She should not be confounded with the frequenter of the French demi-monde also named Eugénie Fougère although the two knew each other, mixed in the same circles and even lived in the same street in Paris for a while.

After the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, her father, who had spent twenty-one years in the army, came to Avignon in Southeastern France with the Strasbourg pontonniers regiment,[15] accompanied by his concubine and daughters.

Originally from Alsace-Lorraine, Eugénie became a naturalised French citizen after the Franco-Prussian War (when Alsace and northern Lorraine were annexed to the new German Empire in 1871), shortly after her parents' marriage.[18][n.

[6][7] Fougère became a popular excentric singer (gommeuse[22]) and dancer that performed in famous theatres, such as the Folies Bergère, Alcazar d'Été, La Scala (fr) and L'Olympia.

Raising their voluminous skirts, they cavorted and contorted their bodies with epileptic gestures and movements, they "shook, leapt around, twisted, and stuck their tongue out.

"[22]The "frenzied divette" was, in the art of music hall, a precursor, introducing songs and dances of all countries, long before that became fashionable in the café-concert circuit, while wearing the most unlikely toilets, bedecked with paradoxical colours.

[30] The lyrics interconnected African and American dance, monkeys and epilepsy[31] – reflecting the racist and colonial attitudes that prevailed at the time.

[33] While describing a revue at La Cigale near Place Pigalle in Paris in 1920, where she appeared in the costume of an American negro, Rae Beth Gordon, a professor in French literature, notes that "at least in this original fantasy, she told the journalist, 'I felt my old self again.'

"[34] The 'audacious' Fougère made her debut in the United States on 7 September 1891 at Broadway's Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York – the gayest night spot in town at the time – where her "scandalously risqué" performance quickly became "the craze of the hour".

[37] Not everyone was impressed; theatre critic Leander Richardson called her "the most daring interpreter of indecency" and wrote that she dealt "in just plain sexual dirt, and looks the part".

She has returned to us again, after a visit to her dear Paree, and once again we can treat ourselves to the spectacle of a woman who can turn her clothes inside out practically, dress and undress before an audience, and do various other things with a sang-froid and a rapidity that take away one's breath and leave the weak-minded in a state of total collapse.

In October 1907, while she was performing at the Gaiety Theater[48] in Washington DC, she was brought to the police station where she had to pay a "cash security of $50 to insure her good behavior."

[64] Fougère had many real or supposed romances that were widely reported in the media at the time, including with the American professional boxer James J. Jeffries[13] (who denied ever having met her[65]) and the Italian comic actor Vincenzo Scarpetta (it), scion of a famous Neapolitan theatre family, whose father Eduardo Scarpetta only barely prevented him from going to Paris with Fougère.

[73] During World War I, she performed with a music hall and café-concert troupe in Spain called Los Aliados (The Allies) and in Havana (Cuba), where she sang for the French Red Cross.

[34] That year, she is said to have introduced the rumba in France with the Cuban dancer Enrique Ruíz Madrid at a World Championship in Modern Dancing, organised by the literary and artistic paper Comœdia, after a long stay in Cuba.

[76] In an interview with Maurice Hamel (fr) for Comœdia in 1925 she complained she had no engagements anymore and about her lost fortune; jewelry worth FF 275,000 had been stolen from her.

[77] In a retrospective in 1934, Hamel recalled her small apartment in Paris in which the walls were covered with photographs, as if she had created her own museum, in which she reminisced about her rich career.

[78] In 1937 she played a vieille coquette in the film The Pearls of the Crown (French: Les Perles de la couronne) directed by Sacha Guitry.

While residing at 5 rue du Mont-Dore in the 17th arrondissement, she died at the age of 75 under the name Eugénie Fougère on 6 February 1946 at the Salpêtrière hospital[2] and was buried a week later in the Parisian cemetery of Thiais (14th division).

[7][86] After the erroneous news of her being murdered in 1903, which also made the front pages of newspapers in the U.S., a somewhat premature obituary said that "many of her songs were insults to people of refinement, but they were clever and sparkling, and her ability to express charmingly shades of more than doubtful meaning was unquestioned.

In a letter in 1899, he wrote: "On the first evening of my stay here, I was in Folies Bergêre, saw Eugenie Fougère, a little wild, but didn't take the opportunity to renew our acquaintance.