The Ridotto closed in 1774, and less than two dozen years later, the entire city of Venice would fall to Napoleon. By the turn of the 19th century, Italy was no longer the center of gambling sophistication. That honor would eventually fall to France, although the French did not pick up that mantle easily.
Between 1663 and 1777, 32 separate decrees were issued, making gambling illegal in France, but the practice could not be stamped out. In 1785, Louis Philippe Joseph I turned the four-story Palais Royale into a commercial establishment, with apartments on the upper floors and shops on the ground level. In the basement, he rented out space to restaurants and social clubs, many of which focused their socialising on games of chance. One estimate put the number of rooms devoted to gambling at more than 100.
The Directorate that governed France in the wake of the Revolution neither legalised nor banned gambling. Instead, a blind eye was turned to the five major game rooms of the Palais Royale, leaving Parisians an unbothered place to play. The Directorate did make one major change, however, symbolic of their triumph over the monarchy: they ordered that the “one” or “ace” in a deck of playing cards be ranked higher than the King, creating the so-called “French deck” now used in casinos the world over.
In the meantime, another European city was having no trouble whatsoever adopting gambling to its lifestyle—Monte Carlo. Back in 1655, French mathematician Blaise Pascal had been trying to create a perpetual motion machine with no success. One of his failures was a wheel that spun so smoothly, it was adopted by the gaming houses of Monte Carlo for an instant lottery-type attraction. By the late 18th century, “Roulette” had become the undisputed “King of Casino Games.”
In 1796, the French rediscovered their invention and roulette wheels started turning in Paris. The original Parisian wheel had 38 numbered slots, or pockets. Those included 18 red and 18 black numbers, plus a zero and a double zero that gave the house its advantage over players.
After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, this wheel was exported to French-influenced New Orleans. From there, it traveled up the Mississippi River to the “Wild West,” where the roulette wheel became a gambling hall institution. While the European wheel would evolve in Germany to a single zero layout in the late 19th century, the unchanged original would remain in the United States to become known as “American Roulette.”
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