In 1855 Offenbach secured his own tiny theater, the Bouffes-Parisiens, on the Champs-Elysées, the better to attract an international throng of visitors to the Paris Exposition. While the Bouffes-Parisiens shifted venue several times, Rossini's sobriquet, "the little Mozart of the Champs-Elysées," stuck. For the series of one-acters needed to keep his theater going, Offenbach developed a formulaic approach allowing rapid production, featuring the inevitable military send-up, a sentimental waltz or aria for the soubrette, and popular dances such as the polka, tyrolienne, can-can, or galop. As his popularity reached the court, powerful patrons, foremost the Duc de Morny, Napoléon III's half-brother, exerted influence to have the restrictions on his theater license removed. For Le mariage aux lanternes (October 10, 1857), Offenbach was allowed the use of a chorus—which he exploited to novel and charming effect—while Mesdames de la Halle, opening at the Bouffes-Parisiens on October 10, 1858, was the first work in which he used as many singers/actors as he pleased. His first two-act production, Orphée aux enfers, opening at the Bouffes on October 21, 1858, was not only a brilliant success but the first of Offenbach's half-dozen greatest comiques. But when he attempted to parlay his expanded capabilities into a similar success with the two-act Geneviève de Brabant (Bouffes, November 19, 1859), a lackluster libretto by Adolphe Jaime and Etienne Tréfeu, and music in which formulas are stretched thin, failed to win over audiences. The military satire, inherited from Donizetti's La fille du régiment, heard in Paris in 1840, exerted an influence running from Geneviève de Brabant through La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) to the end of Offenbach's career in La fille du tambour-major (1879), though it could not have been foreseen that the couplets for the Men-at-Arms, "Protéger le repos des villes," would metapmorphose into the "Marines' Hymn" ("From the halls of Montezuma..."). Offenbach entertained a naïve faith in Geneviève, adding a third act—fleshed out by Tréfeu and Hector Crémieux—for a revival at the Menus Plaisirs on December 26, 1867. The revised score is, in part, spun off from the brilliance of La vie parisienne, which opened on October 31, 1866. In an attempt to staunch the hemorrhage of money at his new theater, Offenbach, with Crémieux again pressed into service, mounted a five-act pantomime version of Geneviève at the Gaîté on February 25, 1875, which, despite lavish effects, fell flat. Curiously, Geneviève did quite well abroad, playing to enthusiastic audiences in Vienna, London, and New York.

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