The eagle swoops so low that the outstretched arms in the audience momentarily recoil. Up close, the bird is scarily large, and its beak seems fixed into a scowl. It settles down as a handler offers it a treat. There’s barely time to applaud before another comes our way.
On this sweaty June afternoon, French families and a few tour groups of seniors have packed out an arena decked in heraldic banners for a historically themed fantasy show with an avian twist. There’s a blonde damsel with long princess locks wearing a tunic with billowing sleeves. Another young woman in medieval finery is joined by several storks in an earthen pit below. The birds wander around gawkily, delighting a group of schoolchildren in fluorescent baseball caps in the front row.
An epic soundtrack pumps, as huntsmen in leather caps and knee-high boots dole out little slivers of meat to keep the birds on the move. By the time the crowd trundles out half an hour later, I’m unexpectedly enthralled by the spectacle at France’s wildly popular historical theme park, Puy du Fou.
Located about an hour’s drive from the city of Angers in western France, the park touts re-enactments instead of roller coasters. Visitors can watch episodes of ancient French history, from chariot races and gladiator fights in a Roman arena to musketeers crossing swords. The park is situated in the countryside of the Vendée region, surrounded by deep woods. When I remark on the size of the forest, a receptionist in a Gallic-style tunic informs me: “There were two million trees planted here over the years.”
As I start to wander the grounds, I’m struck by other cultivated details. Amenities include themed restaurants, where waiters encourage the guests to join in with hearty medieval singalongs. In a thatched hut on stilts, part of a carefully reconstructed fifth-century village where I’ll be staying for the night, it’s supposed to be AD481. An inscription in the toilet informs me that in this world, Clovis 1, the first Christian monarch to reign over the kingdom of the Francs, is king.
The park has been a cultural touchstone for some time in France. It was visited by the late Jacques Chirac on the presidential campaign trail in 1987. President Emmanuel Macron came in 2016, when he was still a government minister. So far this year, it has welcomed a record 2.5mn guests, making it the second-most-visited theme park in France, after Disneyland Paris.
When a friend with two young children recently paid a visit, he returned full of praise. The kids loved the shows, he said. But there was something else; moments in some of the productions when he began to sense a subtext, that Christianity drove the narrative of French history. “After a while you wonder, what’s going on here?”
Puy du Fou is the brainchild of Philippe de Villiers, a French politician known for his nationalist views, staunch Catholicism and criticism of Islam. His is one of the loudest voices espousing the anti-immigrant sentiment shared by the far-right’s Marine Le Pen and her rival Éric Zemmour, who was backed by de Villiers in last year’s election.
De Villiers founded a nationalist political movement in the 1990s and ran twice for the presidency, winning less than 5 per cent of the national vote each time. But he has cultivated a chimeric political persona. He is Puy du Fou’s founder and a one-time culture secretary in the late 1980s; an aristocrat who’s also a populist; a rabid anti-abortionist with wisecracks always at the ready. In recent years, he’s compared environmentalists to the Khmer Rouge, and claimed to have recovered from Covid-19 by drinking pastis. Macron “no longer has the courage, the audacity or the strength to say, ‘We’re going to save French civilisation,’” de Villiers said last week after a teacher was killed in northern France by a man of Chechen origin, who allegedly shouted “Allahu akbar!” during the incident.
Saving French civilisation seems to be de Villiers’ motivating force. Describing himself as “a little kid who ran around the countryside”, he has said he wanted to recapture that feeling with Puy du Fou. He began in the late 1970s by staging a history play showcasing the region he grew up in, one he identifies with the sound of “the cock, the anvil and the church bells”, as he wrote in a 280-page history that is sold at the park for €17.90.
The re-enactments at Puy du Fou offer to take visitors on a patriotic journey. One walk-through attraction is set in the trenches of Verdun. Things don’t end well for its main character Louis, an ordinary French soldier whose letters to his wife, Thérèse, guide us as we walk through rat-infested sleeping quarters and fake mustard gas. Soldiers pray by candlelight, a few crosses among their meagre possessions. Louis says his goodbyes with a “Vive la France!” that echoes as the audience exits and gazes at his grave.
Later, I come across King Clovis again, this time in a representation of his baptism around the year 500. Then there are shows that seem to border on religious fantasy, like one about a Viking invasion of a Gaulois village circa AD1000, which is halted by Saint Philibert rising from his sarcophagus.
The mood darkens at nightfall. The “Cinéscénie” show — with its assertion, disputed by many historians, that what took place during the revolutionary wars and killings in Vendée can be called a genocide — is Puy du Fou’s biggest draw, attended by some 13,000 people at a time.
We’re about an hour into the evening’s open-air spectacle when a hologram appears in the night sky. It’s a close-up of a little girl, no more than 10. She’s fleeing French revolutionaries in the 1790s. They’ve killed her family and are now hunting down any monarchists who resist. It’s a more anti-republican take on the revolution than I remember from my school days in a French lycée. But like the thousands of families around me, I find myself willing her on. Suddenly there’s a gunshot. Blood spurts from her chest and she’s dead.
“I’m not sure that was appropriate for children,” mumbles one mother on the way out. But overall the crowd is wildly enthused — though whether by the message or the spectacular pyrotechnics and cast of more than 2,000, all of them local volunteers, it is hard to say.
“In the end, the shows make up a pretty coherent discourse, one in praise of Catholicism, and in praise of the monarchy,” says medievalist Florian Besson, one of four historians who collaborated on a book, Le Puy du Faux, criticising the theme park last year. Besson argues that Puy du Fou subtly pushes ideological messages by repeating them in show after show. His chief concern is that Puy du Fou presents a historical continuum of the French nation, stretching back centuries. For him, this is inaccurate but also projects a political idea: that “the descendants of the Gauls are the true French”.
In a mock turn-of-the-century village, full of quaint bakeries and sweet shops, I meet Nicolas de Villiers, one of Philippe’s seven children, and the park’s chairman and artistic director.
Nicolas has been involved in the park all his life. He first appeared in one of his father’s spectacles as a baby in his mother’s arms and later performed acrobatics on horseback. Now he would rather talk about performing arts than politics. But, affable and enthusiastic, he’s clear that instilling some form of patriotic feeling is core to Puy du Fou’s raison d’être. “If you’re French and you have the feeling as you watch our shows that somewhere deep inside you . . . there’s a form of pride in who you are, our shows will awaken that, but in a luminous fashion,” he says.
The younger de Villiers is the developer of new projects for the park. These include a venture in Shanghai, now in doubt after construction was derailed by the pandemic. A Puy du Fou equivalent that Vladimir Putin wanted to erect in Crimea, after Russia annexed the Ukrainian region, never saw the light of day, though the Russian president invited Philippe de Villiers to a photo op in 2014. But a new offshoot in Spain has done well and could yet be followed by others in Europe, Nicolas says.
I’ve been wondering how much the park’s popularity tracks with a wider societal lurch towards more prevalent nationalist politics in France. Puy du Fou seems to mine the nostalgia that’s become a rich seam for rightwing politicians. Zemmour, in particular, latched on to the “decadence” of present-day France in his election campaign last year, lingering on the supposed former glory of the “country your parents told you about”. I ask Nicolas whether Puy du Fou is trying to promote heroes with specific traits, pious Christian ones, for example. I mention the praying soldiers in the trenches. “There are some historians waging an ideological battle who would want to erase this historical reality,” he cuts in.
During the two days I spent there, I was hard-pressed to find others who questioned Puy du Fou’s choices. Visitors are overwhelmingly from France, with only around 15 per cent foreign tourists. Many know who Philippe de Villiers is and that he’s connected to the park. Many are enthusiastic repeat visitors. “It’s a little biased maybe, a little anecdotal,” says Danielle Gauthier, a 77-year-old from the Paris region who has come on a seniors’ tour. “I didn’t come to revise history lessons,” she shrugs, tucking into a giant waffle with a friend.
As I make for the exit, I have to laugh as I pass a family trying to hurry their children along. The little boy is moaning. “No, you can’t! You’ve already thrown up once,” an exasperated parent says. It’s not clear if the debate is around a hot dog or an ice cream. But for a brief moment, it feels like just another theme park again.
Sarah White is a correspondent for the FT in France
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