The History of Roulette: From Paris Salons to Monte Carlo

Ask who invented roulette and the usual answer is Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century mathematician who supposedly built the first wheel while chasing a perpetual motion machine. Historians are far more cautious. The Swiss Museum of Games, in an exhibit hosted by the ETH Library in Zurich, says the Pascal claim probably stems from a misunderstanding and that roulette began to develop into its current form in France in the eighteenth century.

The better-documented story begins in the gaming rooms of Paris and runs through a pair of twin brothers, François and Louis Blanc, who left France after the capital closed its gambling houses, took over a casino in a small German spa town and made a deliberate change to the wheel. Their business decision, a single green pocket removed, shaped how roulette is played in Europe to this day. This article traces that path from the Palais-Royal to Bad Homburg and finally to Monte Carlo, where François Blanc built the casino resort that made his wheel famous, and it flags the points on which the sources disagree.

Hoca, Portique and the Paris Gaming Rooms

Roulette has no recorded inventor. Britannica describes it as a game derived in France in the early eighteenth century from the older games hoca and portique, in which players wager on which numbered compartment of a revolving wheel a small ball will come to rest in. The ETH Library exhibit lists some of the stories that have grown around the question: a ball-and-wheel idea carried to France from the Far East by missionaries in the sixteenth century, or a wheel devised by monks in Venice in the Middle Ages. It treats these as speculation and says it is fairly certain only that the game began to take its present form in eighteenth-century France.

The place where it matured was Paris. Historian Jared Poley describes the Palais-Royal, the Paris residence of the Orléans dynasty, as having grown by the early nineteenth century into a complex of commercial and leisure spaces open to the public, among them rooms for games and betting. He calls it the center of vice and gambling in both Paris and Europe, with casinos modeled on older forms such as those of Venice. The Palais-Royal’s dominance proved short-lived. After the July Revolution, Poley writes, King Louis-Philippe banned gambling in France, and the ETH exhibit notes that roulette was banned there for almost a century. Casinos and gamblers moved to Switzerland and the Rhineland, where gambling stayed legal.

The Blanc Brothers and the Single Zero

Encyclopédie Universalis, in an entry by games historian Thierry Depaulis, says François and Louis Blanc were twins born in 1806 at Courthézon in the Vaucluse to a modest family. They settled in Bordeaux in 1834 as exchange agents and used the Chappe telegraph, then reserved for the administration, to get market information ahead of everyone else. A conviction for corrupting an official in 1836 did little to dent their fortune, Depaulis writes. They arrived in Paris in 1837 just as the gaming houses were being closed, saw how profitable those houses had been and set out to open one of their own in Luxembourg.

In Luxembourg in 1838 they met the commander of the Prussian garrison, who was also the landgrave of the tiny state of Hesse-Homburg. In July 1840 they signed a contract with his successor, Landgrave Philipp, that tied them to the principality for thirty years: they would build a Kurhaus and pay an annual fee in exchange for running the games. Poley adds that Jacques Bénazet, the Paris gaming operator, had hired the twins to oversee operations at the Palais-Royal and had instructed them in running a gaming house.

The wheel was their selling point. Poley writes that François Blanc made the Homburg casino focus on roulette and trente et quarante, games played against the house, and eliminated the double zero so that he could advertise the best odds in Europe against rivals at Ems, Baden-Baden and Wiesbaden. Depaulis calls it a calculated decision to reduce the bank’s advantage by removing one of the two zeros; word spread, and the international gambling set made Homburg the most fashionable resort of the mid-nineteenth century. Depaulis notes it is the Roulettenbourg of Dostoevsky’s fiction.

Turning Points: Monte Carlo, 1863

Monaco legalized gambling in 1855, and Stanford historian Mark Braude, author of Making Monte Carlo, says the principality’s royal family saw it as the basis of a stronger economy. According to the Monaco government, Prince Charles III conceded the monopoly in 1856 to the Société des Bains de Mer, which was conceded in turn in 1863 to François Blanc. Early efforts had failed. When Blanc arrived in the spring of 1863 he found, in Stanford’s account of Braude’s research, three churches, a shabby hotel and a failing two-story casino.

The casino opened in spring 1863, according to the company’s own history, and a royal decree of June 1, 1866 renamed the area Monte Carlo. Braude argues Blanc’s insight was to build a town around the gaming rooms, with a train station, hotel, promenade and opera house, creating what he calls the first modern casino resort. He also says Blanc helped bring about industrial gambling, in which players bet against a faceless house rather than one another, and that roulette had not been especially popular until then. Monte Carlo’s casino, the company says, made European roulette its emblem from the day it opened.

Aftermath: One Zero or Two

The difference between the two main wheels is arithmetic. A straight-up bet pays 35 to 1, so each unit staked loses on average 1 in 37 on a wheel with 37 pockets and 2 in 38 on a wheel with 38.

The double-zero wheel did not disappear. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica says the Monte Carlo wheel had 37 compartments, while many other places used 38, with single and double zero, which it calls largely the rule in America. It adds that some houses went further and added a third house pocket known as the Eagle Bird. UNLV gaming historian David Schwartz, quoted by the Las Vegas Sun in 2010, said double-zero wheels were the worldwide standard until the mid-1800s, that Blanc used single-zero roulette to attract gamblers, and that Las Vegas grew up outside the European tradition and therefore standardized on double zero, with single zero reserved for high rollers.

Myths, Disputes and the Other Side

The Pascal legend is the most durable myth. The ETH Library exhibit says it probably stems from a misunderstanding, and Britannica traces the game instead to older French wheel and board games. Even the Blanc story has gaps. Depaulis describes the removal of the second zero without giving a year, and he, Poley and Braude do not all emphasize the same details, so readers should treat the popular tale of one brother singlehandedly reinventing the wheel with caution. Accounts also differ on roulette’s standing: the ETH exhibit says it soon became the most popular game in casinos, while Braude says it had not been especially popular before Blanc’s era.

The story has a darker side that the glamour tends to hide. Braude found anti-gambling pamphlets in French archives portraying Monaco as an immoral place where gambling losses broke up families, and critics said the principality’s culture threatened the moral fabric of France. The Blancs’ own path to casino ownership included the 1836 corruption conviction. Casino history is also a history of people who lost.

Timeline: Roulette and the Blancs

Dates from scholarly and official sources are listed below; the early origins of the game itself remain approximate.

What Comes Next in Casino History

Roulette is one chapter in a larger story about how casinos became destinations. The idea of the casino as one part of a resort, with hotels, entertainment and transport, runs from Blanc’s Monte Carlo through the casino towns of the twentieth century, a thread that leads straight to Las Vegas.

Roulette also belongs to the older family of chance games described in the history of dice. Another thread is the continuing split between European and American wheels, which Schwartz traces to the different traditions in which Monte Carlo and Las Vegas grew up. A third is the legal one: France’s century-long ban, the licensed spa casinos of the Rhineland and Monaco’s economic bet on gambling all show how law shaped where the wheel could turn. Each of these deserves its own story, and each begins with the same green pocket.

Sources & References

• Dan Glimne, Britannica — Roulette
• ETH Library and Swiss Museum of Games — Roulette (virtual exhibition)
• Jared Poley, Luck, Leisure, and the Casino in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
• Thierry Depaulis, Encyclopædia Universalis — Blanc, François et Louis
• Stanford Report — Stanford scholar explores the glitz and glamour behind Monte Carlo (2016)
• Government of Monaco — Economic miracle
• Monte-Carlo Société des Bains de Mer — History of the company
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 19 — Roulette (1911)
• Las Vegas Sun — Why not go single-zero roulette? (2010)