One of the stranger facets of the deeply controversial Paris Olympics opening ceremony is the apparent agreement by its creators that part of its purpose is to refute — of all things — a French theme park and its traditionalist approach to national history.
The fact one of France’s most popular tourist attractions is a theme park celebrating French history appears to be an annoyance that lives rent-free in the head of some, with the park repeatedly cited as a key driving force to make the Paris Olympics opening ceremony last week as anti-“heroic” as possible. When discussing the controversial ceremony, its creative team don’t seem to be able to stop talking about the place.
But what is this tourist attraction, apparently so powerful that it influenced France’s Olympic games opening ceremony?
Puy du Fou is a theme park in the Loire in Western France, founded among the ruins of a historic Chateau in 1978 by, as he is described by the left in French media, the “ultra-rightist” businessman and politician Philippe de Villiers. As disapprovingly noted in some reports about him, de Villiers is a “royalist… a Eurosceptic nationalist who has been criticised for his anti-Islam and anti-abortion views.”
The park eschews the rollercoasters most commonly associated with theme parks and instead treats guests to vast theatrical productions exhibiting French history. This is no niche concern either: this theme park without rides pulls millions of visitors a year and is easily one of the largest tourist attractions in France, snapping at the heels of Disney World.
Among the spectacles are a Roman Amphitheatre staging gladiatorial battles and a recreation of a Vikings raid, including a longship. The highlight of the park, a show it claims is the largest theatre production in the world, sees 2,500 actors changing through 28,000 costumes to tell the story of France from the Medieval era to the Second World War. The park hit headlines in 2016 after it bought a medieval ring said to have belonged to French heroine Joan of Arc, which had spent 600 years in England.
Given the deeply conservative views its founder and the self-professed mission to “honour ancestral knowledge,” the existence and popularity of Puy du Fou has long irked left-wing thinkers – which has apparently created a very deep-seated desire to, pretty weirdly, repudiate a theme park and prove it “wrong”. Indeed, several of the top members of the creative team which produced the controversial opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics last week – already disowned by sponsors and even its own Youtube channel – found themselves unable to avoid talking about it.
Presumably comfortable to be speaking her true feelings to the French Communist Party-backed newspaper L’Humanité, French media celebrity screenwriter Fanny Herrero, who co-wrote the Olympic ceremony, cited it as an example of what the creative team strove to avoid, saying their vision was a “counterexample” to the park. She explained that, in her view, the idea of France portrayed to tourists there is “a frozen, heroic, virilized look at history. We [instead] describe a movement, the idea that the French spirit is the effect of influences, collisions, accidents.”
L’Humanité, which refers to the park as a “reactionary circus”, reflected of the remarks in their editorialisation and said: “All this makes particular sense, going against a ‘national romance,’ made up of great men, great dates and long Christian roots, so popular with the right.”
An article this week explained how Paris’s River Seine inspired the multicultural vision of ceremony artistic director Thomas Jolly, saying the constant movement of the water is a “beautiful image for a portrait of country’s identity, which is constantly changing and being renewed.”
Jolly also wrote for national newspaper Le Equipe in 2021, outlining then his core vision for the Olympic display he would go on to direct in 2024. Here, even in the earliest days of the conception of that performance, that traditionalist theme park is already looming large. In a whole section of the essay titled “Let’s not do a Puy du Fou project,” Jolly stated:
Each ceremony, and this is what I find very beautiful, tries to take a picture of the country and its place in the world at the moment of the Games. What does France have to say to the world?… Let’s not do a Puy du Fou project that retraces the history of France.
[…]
Let’s take the major chapters of the history of France and turn them towards the future…. I would not make a show to the glory of France’s past and its heritage, it’s dead! It must be a show of a new humanism, where each person in their singularity, in their culture, their sexuality, their language, their skin colour, their religion, feels in a respected and respectful place within society.
Consulting the show-producing team was French historian Patrick Boucheron, who cited other past productions and said his idea for the Olympic ceremony was one that “thwarted national stereotypes and was not afraid to advocate global crossbreeding.” The event should be the opposite of the Beijing Olympics of 2008, “an ode to greatness and a demonstration of strength,” and so be “the opposite of a virile, heroic story” instead, he said.
French conservative newspaper Le Figaro, which calls Boucheron an “activist historian,” noted he has his own obsession with Puy du Fou, having railed against that “favourite target” as a “hostile environment” and the “key location in the cultural battle led by the reactionary right.”
The deep loathing for this theme park may not, paradoxically, be something the French Olympic committee may necessarily strongly agree with their opening ceremony team on. Indeed, the Olympic Torch relay route taking it from Greece to Paris this year saw the flame take a stop at Puy du Fou, where it was paraded around the Roman amphitheatre.
And to be clear, the loathing is not all one sided. The Olympic opening ceremony was castigated by Christians and cultural conservatives world-wide. Indeed, Puy du Fou park founder Philippe de Villiers had his own words for the Olympic opener last week, writing in Le Journal du Dimanche that ” everything was ugly, everything was woke … It was wild, crazy, deformed, unsightly. We acted out before the whole world the suicide of France.”
Obsessions aside, it is not above some in the French left to leverage Puy du Fou to their advantage, too. In 2016, then-French Finance Minister Emmanuel Macron travelled to the park and stood alongside its conservative owner, the first French left-wing politician to have ever done so.
While there, he posed on a Roman chariot in the park’s amphitheatre and declared himself to not be a socialist. That same year, Macron founded his personal political party and declared his intention to run for President.
The rest, as they say, is history.
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