{"id":6473,"date":"2026-04-15T17:46:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T17:46:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/6473\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T17:46:25","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T17:46:25","slug":"past-perfect-by-nat-segnit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/6473\/","title":{"rendered":"Past Perfect, by Nat Segnit"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/p>\n

The entrance to the immersive show \u201cLa Renaissance du Ch\u00e2teau.\u201d All photographs of
Puy du Fou, November 2025, by France Keyser for Harper\u2019s Magazine \u00a9 France Keyser\/MYOP<\/p>\n

It\u2019s when the branches of the animatronic tree sprout swords and start swinging at Tristan that I think, Hang on. Puy du Fou is a theme park devoted to French history. Isn\u2019t King Arthur British? We\u2019re outdoors on a damp November morning, and although the mist has lifted a little, the actual, nonanimatronic fringe of leafless beeches above the cluster of turrets and half-timbered gable ends is still only semivisible through the ashen haze. Arthur\u2019s scheming half sister, the enchantress Morgan le Fay, has buried the Round Table at an undisclosed location. It is Tristan\u2019s quest\u2014nowhere to be found in the Arthurian canon, but then neither are heavily armed trees\u2014to find it. The Lady of the Lake appears like a fairy godmother on the ramparts. \u201cFrappe la souche du mal,\u201d she says, sonorously. \u201cEt tu vaincras.\u201d Strike at the root of evil and you will prevail.<\/p>\n

I recall, dimly, that the Arthurian cycle might be Anglo-French in origin, something I\u2019m able to confirm later, when, over a plastic cup of lager on the outskirts of a faux eleventh-century hamlet, I look it all up on my iPhone. The twelfth-century Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first to shape the jumble of older myth and pseudohistorical material into unified form, later developed by the French poet Chr\u00e9tien de Troyes and the anonymous French authors of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. What began as a miscellany of Welsh, Cornish, and other folktales about a questionably historical Romano-British leader cohered into legend largely as a function of cultural exchange. Arthur is myth: he belongs to all of us.<\/p>\n

Still, these Frenchies. After an acrobatic display of swordsmanship, including ducks, cartwheels, and the odd MMA-style roundhouse kick, Tristan thrusts his sword deep into the evil tree trunk. The tree has been guarding Excalibur, lodged nearby in a plasticky rock. \u201cMontre-nous la table ronde!\u201d he exclaims. Show us the Round Table! At which point almost the entire set\u2014a grassy, boulder-strewn hillside, twenty yards wide and ten deep\u2014is lifted on massive hydraulic pistons. Underneath is a lake, with what appears to be a vast sinkholelike well a few inches below the water\u2019s surface. With violent spurts, the well drains, exposing its mortared stone walls and, eventually, the missing Round Table. It\u2019s a bit slimy-looking, like unscrubbed decking in the rain.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no sign of the big guy. \u201cWe\u2019re too late,\u201d laments one of Tristan\u2019s companions. \u201cKing Arthur is no more.\u201d Then, magically, from some hidden dugout at the bottom of the well, the once and future king rides up from below the table astride a white horse. Tristan kneels and restores Excalibur to its rightful owner. \u201cYou have vanquished the evil that haunted this place,\u201d says Arthur, with the sort of aggressively enunciated portentousness I will discover is common to all the park\u2019s shows and that might usefully be referred to as \u201chistory voice.\u201d By way of a thank you, Arthur grants Tristan the hill and commands him to build a dwelling place upon it. \u201cAnd you will name it Puy du Fou.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\u201cL\u2019\u00c9p\u00e9e<\/p>\n

\u201cL\u2019\u00c9p\u00e9e du Roi Arthur\u201d<\/p>\n

It is the kind of half-solemn, half-mischievous meta moment that will come to seem characteristic of my weekend at France\u2019s second most popular theme park, after Disneyland Paris. A moment ago, the show\u2014\u201cL\u2019\u00c9p\u00e9e du Roi Arthur\u201d\u2014was breezily appropriating King Arthur for France. Now it\u2019s appropriating him for the park itself: Camelot is right here, if only we would let it be, under the bleachers and the friendly young ushers selling plastic swords and branded beanies.<\/p>\n

Puy du Fou occupies a wooded site in the largely rural commune of Les Epesses, thirty-five miles southeast of Nantes in the western department of the Vend\u00e9e. You\u2019d be forgiven for assuming that \u201cfou\u201d was a mildly self-congratulatory reference to its own wackiness, but in fact it derives from a local dialect term for beech tree. Puy du Fou means \u201cHill of Beeches.\u201d It differs from other popular French theme parks like Disneyland or Parc Ast\u00e9rix in that it has no rides. The attractions on offer consist, for the most part, of spectacular live shows reenacting an event or period in French history or myth, each lasting between fifteen and thirty-five minutes. I say reenacting when what I really mean is mounting a weird, camp, outlandishly high-budget, quasi-historical fantasia, standing in roughly the same relation to the actual event as the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular does to the Declaration of Independence.<\/p>\n

People go nuts for it. Visitor numbers hit three million last year. In 2021, an affiliated park, Puy du Fou Espa\u00f1a, opened near Toledo, applying the same sensibility to episodes in Spanish history. If planning permission is granted, a British park, in Oxfordshire, will open in 2029. The original Puy du Fou has twice won the Outstanding Achievement award at the Thea Awards, the Oscars of themed entertainment. It is regularly voted one of the world\u2019s favorite amusement parks in Tripadvisor\u2019s Travelers\u2019 Choice Awards. In 2024, Le Figaro pronounced it the best theme park in the world.<\/p>\n

It is also one of the most controversial. The strain of pious bombast typified by \u201cL\u2019\u00c9p\u00e9e du Roi Arthur\u201d has aroused the outrage of many scholars and commentators, who allege that the park smuggles in reactionary propaganda under the cover of family entertainment. Co-opting Camelot for France is one thing, but after a weekend of shows like \u201cLes Vikings,\u201d in which a fiery miracle converts marauding Norsemen to the Catholic Church, or \u201cMousquetaire de Richelieu,\u201d in which Louis\u00a0XIII appears as a kind of salvific superking, it\u2019s hard to shake the feeling that a fantasy version of French history, drenched in missionary zeal and longing for a lost monarchy, is being advanced at the expense of a secular, republican modernity construed as ruinous. As the anti-immigrationist far right continues to surge in French polls ahead of next year\u2019s presidential election, it seems reasonable to ask whether an authoritarian, ethnonationalist, fanatically Catholic conception of the past is reshaping the way the French think about the present or merely responding to a need. Can a theme park flirt with fascism and still be the best in the world?<\/p>\n

Philippe Marie Jean Joseph Le Jolis de Villiers de Saintignon, the founder of Puy de Fou, is a highly visible member of a social class that purports not to exist: the French nobility. The Le Jolis de Villiers family, originally from Cotentin, in Normandy, was ennobled in 1595 and has seen no shortage of its sons rise to prominent positions in public life. Philippe was born in Boulogne in 1949. After earning a law degree in 1971, he followed a path worn smooth by generations of France\u2019s political elite, studying at Sciences Po before moving on to one of the grandest grandes \u00e9coles of them all: the now defunct \u00c9cole Nationale d\u2019Administration. In 1977, aged twenty-eight, de Villiers came across the ruins of the Ch\u00e2teau du Puy du Fou, built in the sixteenth century on the remnants of a medieval castle. To raise funds for its restoration, de Villiers, with the help of hundreds of local volunteers, staged \u201cLa Cin\u00e9sc\u00e9nie,\u201d a son et lumi\u00e8re dramatizing the history of the region.<\/p>\n

To this day, \u201cLa Cin\u00e9sc\u00e9nie\u201d is a highlight of the Puy du Fou experience, featuring 2,550 actors on a fifty-seven-acre stage, along with horses, cattle, fireworks displays, the latest in 3D-projection techniques, and voice-overs by G\u00e9rard Depardieu and the late Alain Delon. It\u2019s a grandiose crowd-pleaser fueled by a residual sense of injustice. One of its focal points is the War in the Vend\u00e9e, the counterrevolutionary uprising that took place from 1793 to 1796. Many historians believe that the insurrection was prompted by the reactionary manipulations of the royalist aristocracy; others hold up the war as a glorious, peasant-led revolt against Republican oppression.<\/p>\n

\u201cLa Cin\u00e9sc\u00e9nie\u201d is firmly in the latter camp. Its championing of the Vendean cause set the tone for all the other shows de Villiers would go on to create: devoutly Catholic, monarchist, resistant to centralized power and to the Republic in particular. By 1989, the show had become so popular that the decision was taken to open the \u201cGrand Parc\u201d on a neighboring site. Over the years, the park continued to grow, as de Villiers devised new daytime material to flesh out the schedule before the after-dark spectacular of \u201cLa Cin\u00e9sc\u00e9nie.\u201d In 2004, he passed the day-to-day responsibilities of running the park to his son Nicolas, who was appointed its president eight years later. Today, Nicolas de Villiers presides over twenty \u201cexperiences\u201d distributed across 140\u00a0acres of woodland and interspersed with themed hotels, fast-food restaurants, and \u201cperiod villages,\u201d such as Font-Rognou, a medieval settlement complete with a Romanesque chapel, a street of historical shops selling trinkets and replica weapons, and a tavern offering \u201cVend\u00e9e garlic bread\u201d and something called \u201cArthur\u2019s platter.\u201d The shows span 1,400 years of French history, from the reign of the sixth-century Frankish king Clovis\u00a0I to the Nazi occupation.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The set of \u201cLes Amoureux de Verdun,\u201d an immersive dramatization of the First World War<\/p>\n

Some shows are immersive, like \u201cLe Myst\u00e8re de La P\u00e9rouse,\u201d which takes you belowdecks on an eighteenth-century ship caught in a storm en route to the tropics, actors in naval uniform studiously ignoring you as the deck heaves and water pours through the overheads. Others rely on a more traditional fourth-wall dynamic. \u201cLe Dernier Panache,\u201d the Vend\u00e9e War show, is staged in a huge hangarlike auditorium with a 360-degree rotating grandstand that seats 2,400 and weighs 530 tons. At outdoor shows like \u201cL\u2019\u00c9p\u00e9e du Roi Arthur,\u201d \u201cLes Vikings,\u201d and \u201cLe Bal des Oiseaux Fant\u00f4mes,\u201d you sit facing the elaborately landscaped sets on steeply raked wooden bleachers\u2014memorably so at the climax of \u201cLe Bal des Oiseaux,\u201d when 330 birds, including eagles, vultures, and spoonbills, are lured by a team of falconers to swoop directly over your head, clipping the occasional bald spot or fumbling the scraps of raw chicken tossed up as tidbits and dropping them onto the audience.<\/p>\n

It would take an effort of cynicism not to be won over. The shows are knockouts: ingeniously staged, technically virtuosic, pop-surreal in the most engaging, inclusive, forgivably cheesy way. It is a measure of the park\u2019s popularity, and the political clout that comes with it, that during the pandemic, Puy du Fou was twice granted an exemption to a ban on gatherings of more than 5,000 people, prompting accusations of presidential favoritism that were all the more striking for the ideological gulf between Philippe de Villiers and the centrist administration of Emmanuel Macron.<\/p>\n

The more persistent objections, however, relate to the park\u2019s ideological sleight of hand, what questionable goods are being sold in such attractive packaging. In 2022, a group of historians, including Guillaume Lancereau, then a fellow at the European University Institute, published Le Puy du Faux\u2014\u201cPeak of Falsehoods,\u201d or conceivably, \u201cBullshit Hill\u201d\u2014a book-length takedown of the park. For the authors, the version of the past presented in the shows is \u201cpure fiction, a fantasy that one may or may not subscribe to, but that has nothing to do with history.\u201d It is simplistic, clich\u00e9d, reliant on \u201cimages inherited from films, novels, and comic books,\u201d ignorant or contemptuous of the historical method, and riddled with inaccuracies, lazy caricatures, and in some cases outright falsehoods.<\/p>\n

More than that, Lancereau and his co-authors contend, these errors are intentionally and consistently made in the service of a political ideology that conceives of France as an \u201cancient and immutable entity.\u201d Its values\u2014the sanctity of village life and the Catholic Church, pride in a nation founded and sustained by heroic warriors and \u201cthe necessary opposition to dangerous enemies from without,\u201d and wistfulness for a lost monarchy coupled somewhat paradoxically with a hostility to unaccountable power\u2014are threatened not only by the external forces of globalization, secularism, and Islam, but by domestic voices that would question the scale of that threat in the first place.<\/p>\n

A case in point is a relic on display at the Ch\u00e2teau du Puy du Fou. In 2016, Philippe and Nicolas made the winning bid of slightly more than 375,000 euros for a ring that allegedly belonged to Joan of Arc. Visitors to the ch\u00e2teau are met by an actor in chain mail writing what he refers to as \u201cthe extraordinary tale of Joan of Arc\u2019s ring.\u201d But as Lancereau et\u00a0al.\u00a0point out, no such historical document exists. Experts including Olivier Bouzy, a former director of the Maison Jeanne d\u2019Arc in Orl\u00e9ans, believe the ring to be a forgery. Nonetheless, there the ring sits, on its royal-blue cushion, dramatically lit and dwarfed by its gilded display cabinet, with no mention of its dubious provenance. Its display is an act of pure assertion, of willed significance, and strikes you, in retrospect, as it struck the authors of Le Puy du Faux, as sneaky verging on manipulative, an experience whose immersiveness is shrewdly designed to keep you below the waterline of fact.<\/p>\n

\"https:\/\/wp.harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/CUT-25-scaled.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\n A street in Font-Rognou, a faux medieval village\n <\/p>\n

\"https:\/\/wp.harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/CUT-26-scaled.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\n A musical performance of \u201cLes Noces de Feu\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"https:\/\/wp.harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/CUT-27-scaled.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\n \u201cLe Dernier Panache\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"https:\/\/wp.harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/CUT-24-scaled.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\n \u201cLes Vikings\u201d\n <\/p>\n

The response you generally get from Puy du Fou apologists to accusations that the park is falsifying the historical record to serve a sinister right-wing agenda is: lighten up. This is pretty much the position taken by Nicolas de Villiers when I speak to him shortly after my visit to the park. How does he respond to his critics? \u201cI laugh,\u201d he tells me. \u201cThey see ideology everywhere.\u201d Nicolas is trim and youthful for his forty-six years, with light-brown, neatly cropped hair and the credible manner of precisely the kind of technocrat that the French, for all their inclination to extremity, still seem sorely tempted to elect. He is the Emmanuel Macron of attractions management. If the shows sometimes err on the fanciful side, Nicolas explains, that is only to be expected. It\u2019s a theme park; it\u2019s supposed to be fun. \u201cWe are not trying to change your mind,\u201d he tells me. \u201cWe just give you beautiful shows. And then you like it, or you don\u2019t like it.\u201d This could be the park\u2019s motto. When I ask Pierre-Augustin Totaro, a software engineer I meet outside the immersive First World War experience, what he thinks of the park\u2019s approach to French history, he gives it to me straight. \u201cSi vous n\u2019aimez pas, ne venez pas,\u201d he says. If you don\u2019t like it, don\u2019t come.<\/p>\n

Everything is peachy in the eleventh-century Frankish village until the Vikings show up and ruin it for everyone. Nearby Noirmoutier is on fire. Earlier, some monks in brown habits passed by, warning of \u201cdrunken, bloodthirsty monsters seizing the wafer boxes, burning the holy books, cutting the throats of all who resisted with axes.\u201d And now the monsters are here, in idyllic St.\u00a0Philbert le\u00a0Vieil, in their wolf pelts and curly-horned helmets, striding about in hypermasculine fashion with their arms not quite by their sides, driving a herd of cattle before them and, as if further proof were needed of their heathenry, contemptuously tossing the holy reliquary of St.\u00a0Philbert into the river.<\/p>\n

A forty-foot longship plunges down the hill to the left of the bleachers and launches with a splash into the water. Advance forces in black leatherwear somersault off the dragon-shaped prow and set fire to the Frankish watchtower. There is a lot of pretty convincing combat with axes and broadswords. It\u2019s momentarily distracting, from an immersiveness point of view, when a villager escapes the burning watchtower on a zip line, but there\u2019s too much going on to get pedantic about it. A man on fire rides past on horseback. To a discordant blare of horns, a second, much larger longship rises from beneath the river\u2019s surface. (There is a recurring preoccupation at Puy du Fou with the submerged, the inundated.) The ship is manned by what appear to be life-size model Vikings\u2014until, having evidently been holding their breath or relying on concealed scuba equipment, they spring to life and crack on with the pillaging.<\/p>\n

Soon the Vikings have set fire to a thatched hut and tipped a fifty-foot tower on its side. It\u2019s all over for the native Franks\u2014or would be, were it not for the sudden appearance of a huge blazing cross, sending a pulse of kerosene-scented heat across the bleachers and heralding the emergence of St.\u00a0Philbert himself from the waters. The Norsemen, instantly converted, lay down their arms. Their bearded chieftain goes weak at the knees with Marian piety. \u201cWe no longer have a taste for the profession of arms, queen of great peace and disarmament,\u201d he exclaims. \u201cWe will be an army of signs and crusaders. We will be founders, witnesses of the other world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quite a few other shows at Puy du Fou tell a similar story. In \u201cLe Secret de la Lance,\u201d set during the Hundred Years\u2019 War, Marguerite, a young shepherdess, defends the Ch\u00e2teau du Puy du Fou from the English and Burgundians with a magic lance entrusted to her by Joan of Arc, who herself received it from the archangel Michael, warrior saint and defender of the church. As Sudhir Hazareesingh, an Oxford historian of modern France, tells me, Puy du Fou \u201cseems to be about the monarchy, the nation, and Catholicism. Of these three, I think the Catholic element is perhaps the strongest, because that\u2019s what de Villiers passionately feels. It\u2019s int\u00e9griste [traditionalist] Catholicism as well. It\u2019s not the lighthearted version.\u201d<\/p>\n

Holy mysteries, Marian veneration, last-ditch conversions, burning crosses, and fiery spears: the park sacralizes the past with an ardency that is testament to its founder\u2019s faith and politics. After a brief career as a civil servant, Philippe de Villiers joined the liberal-conservative, pro-European Republican Party. He then served as France\u2019s secretary of state for culture for a short spell in the mid-Eighties, during one of the rare and uneasy periods of power-sharing known as \u201ccohabitations,\u201d when the Socialist president Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand was forced to appoint the center-right Jacques Chirac as his prime minister.<\/p>\n

An increasingly vocal Euroskeptic, de Villiers left the Republican Party and in 1994 formed Mouvement pour la France (MPF), a conservative sovereignist party opposed to further European integration, the primacy of E.U.\u00a0over French law, and, crucially, what it saw as the \u201cIslamization\u201d of France. In both the 1995 and 2007 presidential elections, de Villiers ran as the MPF candidate. He bombed both times, receiving just 2.23\u00a0percent of the vote the second time around.<\/p>\n

After his defection from mainstream politics, de Villiers drifted ever further to the authoritarian, ethnonationalist right. In 2014, just months after Russia\u2019s annexation of Crimea, he and Nicolas met with Vladimir Putin in Yalta to discuss plans to open a pair of Puy du Fou\u2013style historical theme parks in Crimea and Moscow called Tsargrad. Their investment partner was to be the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, who had recently been sanctioned by the United States and the European Union for bankrolling pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine. Philippe emerged from the meeting \u201chighly impressed\u201d by his host. Tsargrad would play a crucial role, he said, in promoting \u201cthe history of Crimea as a part of the long history of Russia.\u201d Reaching a deal would be \u201can act of peace,\u201d Nicolas said, not least because, in his father\u2019s words, \u201cEurope\u2019s future does not lie with the American continent.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. There is no future for Europe without Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Tsargrad parks were never built, but Philippe had made his affinities clear. \u201cI would gladly swap Hollande and Sarkozy for Putin,\u201d he told a German radio station after his meeting in Yalta. As for his own ambitions, the disappointing electoral fortunes of the MPF seem to have prompted his pivot from candidate to commentator. After losing all its seats in the National Assembly and the European Parliament, the MPF was dissolved in 2018. De Villiers has since become well known for his denunciation of Islam, supporting a ban on the construction of new mosques and decrying the \u201chalal-ization of minds.\u201d In the run-up to the 2022 presidential election, he endorsed \u00c9ric Zemmour, the leader of the far-right party Reconqu\u00eate! (\u201cReconquest!\u201d) and a leading proponent of the great replacement theory, which holds that a globalist liberal elite is conspiring to edge out the white populations of Western nations in favor of non-white immigrants. Zemmour is Jewish but, by his own admission, \u201csteeped in Catholicism,\u201d and insists that all non-Catholics assimilate into an \u201ceternal, Catholic France.\u201d<\/p>\n

De Villiers\u2019s latest book-length polemic, Populicide, was published this past October. It is laconically titled compared with his previous books, which include The Time Has Come to Say What I Have Seen (2015) and I Pulled on the Thread of the Lie and Everything Came Undone (2019). In Populicide, he accuses the French political class of pretending<\/p>\n

not to see that we are in the process of moving from a homogeneous society\u2014that of my youth\u2014with its codes, its connective tissues, its affective networks and neighborhoods, its art of living, to a tribal, multifractured, multiconflictual society, a pre\u2013civil war society.<\/p>\n

Populicide has been a hit; within three months of publication, it had already sold 185,000 copies.<\/p>\n

These days, every Friday at 7 pm, de Villiers appears on his television show, Face \u00e0 Philippe de Villiers, on CNews, the French equivalent of Fox News, where, with his young conservative co-host Eliot Deval, he regularly rails against the arrogance and totalitarianism of the E.U.\u00a0superstate. His project is the \u201cdefense of civilization\u201d against the \u201ceclipse of the national consciousness\u201d by the \u201cfamous globalized elite\u201d and the ignorance of a bien-pensant French bourgeoisie who believe in the fiction of an assimilable Islam. As with Zemmour, for Nicolas the only answer to the \u201cfundamental antagonism\u201d between the Muslim and Christian populations of France is either the full \u201cFrancization\u201d of the former\u2014that is, requiring all French Muslims to disengage with their religious culture, renounce the veil, and develop \u201ca taste for pork\u201d\u2014or \u201cremigration\u201d for those unwilling to adapt.<\/p>\n

\u201cC\u2019est comme \u00e7a,\u201d he says. It is what it is. Si vous n\u2019aimez pas, ne venez pas. \u201cOn est en France.\u201d We\u2019re in France.<\/p>\n

After the conversion of the Vikings, I return to my hotel for a lie-down and a shower. The Villa Gallo-Romaine is a reimagined Roman settlement with distressed ocher walls and amphorae stacked on the cobbled sidewalks. At the reception desk, you are greeted by staff in togas. The website promised my room would be \u201cdecorated with Roman javelins and furniture, combining authenticity, comfort, and modernity.\u201d My favorite combination of authenticity and modernity is the TV, which, although I can\u2019t turn it on, as the batteries in the remote have died, is housed in its own wall-mounted wooden temple, complete with pediment and Tuscan pilasters.<\/p>\n

Lying on the bed, I get the fleeting sense that I am a very confused, moderately successful Roman grain merchant coming round from a two-thousand-year nap. The appeal that Puy du Fou makes to the past\u2014and here I must also note the eco-friendly towel-reuse reminder in the en suite bathroom, engraved above a laurel wreath in capitalis monumentalis\u2014is essentially consolatory. Just before lunch on my second day, I meet Titem Amani, a production coordinator for a textile company, and her chauffeur husband, Ahmed Abdella, on the outskirts of St.\u00a0Philbert le\u00a0Vieil. This is their first visit to Puy du Fou. What brings you here, I ask?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s my dream,\u201d Titem says. She would have preferred to have been born in the Middle Ages. \u201cAny period other than this one,\u201d she laughs.<\/p>\n

This is pretty close to a universal sentiment among the roughly forty visitors I speak to over the weekend. France is \u201cune catastrophe.\u201d \u201cSimply put, our government is run by idiots.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s sad.\u201d \u201cWe feel a bit lost.\u201d From a certain perspective, the pervasive sense that France is on its last legs is nothing new. Simon Kuper, a columnist for the Financial Times and the author of Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century, tells me that \u201chysterical declinism has been part of French culture for a very long time.\u201d Hazareesingh, the Oxford historian, agrees. \u201cDe Gaulle himself kept repeating it: \u2018On est foutu.\u2019\u2009\u201d (\u201cWe are screwed.\u201d) \u201cAnd de Gaulle never believed his own rhetoric. It was what he felt the French needed in order to pull themselves out of this existential anxiety. That\u2019s why I think this is not a new story. It\u2019s just the French going round and round in circles.\u201d<\/p>\n

The difference this time is that the intensity of declinist sentiment looks as though it could propel the far right into power for the first time since Vichy. Kuper puts the chances of Jordan Bardella, of the far-right National Rally, winning the next presidential election at fifty-fifty. On the path to the Gallo-Roman arena, I meet Christophe M\u00e9rel, a mechanic from the Aisne, who is visiting the park with his beautician wife, M\u00e9linda, and their three children. Sometimes, Christophe tells me, they find their country unrecognizable. Who could take France back to the way it was, I ask?<\/p>\n

\u201cBardella,\u201d says M\u00e9linda, without hesitation. \u201cIt can change with Bardella.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nicolas de Villiers takes a similar sounding of the national mood. For him, an irony of the present crisis in French identity is that the liberal establishment seeks to address it by disavowing the past. Puy du Fou does the opposite. \u201cEvery country has its heroes,\u201d he tells me. \u201cWhy shouldn\u2019t we be proud of them? Why should we hide them to erase the past? It\u2019s stupid.\u201d In Nicolas\u2019s view, the pride that Puy du Fou expresses in the heroes of French history is a prerequisite for peaceful coexistence: \u201cI believe in shining pride,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you feel this shining pride, you feel at peace.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. If a country doesn\u2019t feel at peace with its past, it will go to war,\u201d he continues. \u201cAt war against other countries or at war with itself. And this is exactly what has happened in our countries in Europe.\u201d This is the function of a place like Puy du Fou, he says, to give its visitors a break, a vacation in partially restored patriotism, a measure of the pride that contemporary culture insists on denying them. His tone turns evangelical. \u201cThe reason people are coming more and more is to find not exactly the past\u2014because we are not historians, we are just artists\u2014but what could have been the past, what the past could say to us now.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a contradiction in Nicolas\u2019s argument, one that I didn\u2019t initially grasp. On the one hand, Puy du Fou dispenses with all the woke, revisionist hand-wringing in favor of a view of the past that is inherently less divisive for being celebratory. On the other, it owes its success to an appetite for escapism stimulated by grim expectations. In this respect, France is no different from the rest of the liberal West. Having destroyed our faith in the future, our quarter century of catastrophe\u2014September\u00a011, COVID-19, the climate and financial crises\u2014has delivered us whimpering into the arms of nostalgia, to the fireside crackle of, as Nicolas sees it, \u201cHarry Potter, or Game of Thrones: all the movies and series that are based on a fantasy past.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the core of Puy du Fou\u2019s appeal. By Nicolas\u2019s own admission, the setting of \u201cMousquetaire de Richelieu\u201d and \u201cLe Secret de la Lance\u201d is \u201cnot exactly the past\u201d but what it \u201ccould have been.\u201d Like Harry Potter, the shows are comforting fantasies.<\/p>\n

\"\u201cLe<\/p>\n

\u201cLe Mime et L\u2019\u00c9toile\u201d<\/p>\n

So which is it? Pride in a past that has been falsified by revisionist historians, or pure escapism? You can\u2019t have it both ways: pride in something that didn\u2019t happen is tough to justify. At times, Nicolas\u2019s evasiveness on the subject seems indistinguishable from his ideological indeterminacy. Does he share his father\u2019s views, or is he merely a shrewd businessman, sitting on the overstuffed suitcase of his political inheritance? At several points during our talk, he betrays a certain fogyism\u2014about \u201cbeautiful places\u201d in Paris disfigured by modern sculpture, or the failure of the current generation of parents to teach their kids basic manners\u2014that might hint at a disposition that he is too savvy to express openly. Is his nod to civil war not an unambiguous tell? After the meeting in 2014, Nicolas spoke of Putin\u2019s \u201csweet eyes and sweet words\u201d and defended Malofeev, the oligarch, as a man of \u201cgreat moral power.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet: the studied neutrality. Nicolas waves off any whiff of partisanship. \u201cWe don\u2019t deal with current political issues, because we stay in a very past history.\u201d Again, any difficulties are resolved by an appeal to commonsensical levity. Lighten up. It\u2019s a theme park. We\u2019re just here to make people happy.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo the journalists or the few people from Paris, who say\u201d\u2014and here Nicolas puts on the wheedling voice of the pre-offended bobo\u2014\u201c\u2009\u2018Oh my God, you make bad shows because of blah blah blah,\u2019 I say, \u2018Come to see us.\u2019\u2009\u201d Nicolas laughs. \u201cAnd when they see the shows, they say, \u2018I\u2019m sorry, I made a mistake. You are not reactionary, you are not dangerous, you are not, like, oh l\u00e0 l\u00e0, you are not at war against anybody.\u2019 No, we are not. We just want to heal the pain of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe he has a point. After \u201cLe Secret de la Lance,\u201d I go to see \u201cLe Mime et L\u2019\u00c9toile,\u201d an indoor show set in a silent-movie studio in 1914. The set, a Belle \u00c9poque street lined with caf\u00e9s, boutiques, and butchers, fifty feet high and over a mile long, glides past us as the actors proceed on a hidden moving walkway in the opposite direction, so the impression is of an extended tracking shot. The storefronts are rendered with a mix of traditional set design and state-of-the-art, black-and-white projection mapping. It\u2019s glorious\u2014technically astonishing, gracefully choreographed, affectingly scored, and like the best of the silent romances that inspired it, sentimental without a hint of schmaltz.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a nice spectacle,\u201d admits Hazareesingh. \u201cAnd presumably if you\u2019re not thinking about it in ideological terms, it\u2019s entertaining.\u201d Lancereau takes a similar view. \u201cWe enjoyed it very much when we went there,\u201d he tells me\u2014this from the guy whose co-author received a death threat after Puy du Faux was published. Even if the history is tendentious bullshit, so what? No one\u2019s going to have their political bearings reset by a couple of days at a theme park. For Lancereau, the shows at Puy du Fou are far less likely to influence people\u2019s political views than what they read and watch every day. A visit to Puy du Fou is a special occasion, and \u201cexceptional moments are less important than repetition.\u201d If anything, support for the far right is more cause than effect of the popularity of nostalgic historical reconstructions. As Lancereau puts it: \u201cI vote for A, so I\u2019m going to consume B.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even then, the notion of Puy du Fou as a bellwether depends, perhaps, on a level of ideological engagement not habitually applied to a family day out at an amusement park. Maybe Puy du Fou is just the air we breathe, a measure of what it is acceptable to say. When I ask Titem and Ahmed whether, as Parisians of Arab descent, they think the traditional values promoted at Puy du Fou are representative of modern France, I get a Gallic shrug. \u201cI really like it,\u201d says Ahmed. \u201cI didn\u2019t know it would be so good.\u201d<\/p>\n

On my last afternoon at Puy du Fou, I take my stone seat in the Gallo-Roman amphitheater, where it quickly becomes apparent that I have been allocated a side. I\u2019m with the Gauls. The show is called \u201cLe Signe du Triomphe.\u201d It is the fourth century. The empire is crumbling. Undeterred by Diocletian\u2019s persecutions, the plucky Christians of Gallia are in a defiant mood. A rebel chieftain in a gray tunic, oatmeal cloak, and fur mantle leads us in an oafish chant. \u201cGAUL-OIS, GAUL-OIS, GAUL-OIS!\u201d On the opposite side of the arena\u2014oval like the one at N\u00eemes, and 125 yards from end to end, with room for 7,000 spectators\u2014the Roman governor is having none of it. \u201cSilence!\u201d he thunders. \u201cThere is no more Gaul. There is only the empire.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"https:\/\/wp.harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/CUT-30-scaled.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\n \u201cLe Signe du Triomphe\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"https:\/\/wp.harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/CUT-31-scaled.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\n \u201cLe Signe du Triomphe\u201d\n <\/p>\n

A parade is put on to keep the rabble happy. To a fanfare of horns, a centurion on horseback leads the six vestal virgins, a bronze Capitoline wolf carried on a litter, goats, camels, a carnival-float bacchanal drawn by oxen, and a flock of waddling geese in flying-wedge formation greeted by the audience with a gasp of biophilia. (\u201cPeople need to gather and to feel something very real,\u201d Nicolas tells me later. \u201cNot only beautiful stories, but also real stories, with real horses onstage, real birds, all these things that you can\u2019t touch anymore in the big cities.\u201d)<\/p>\n

It turns out that Damien, the Gallo-Roman centurion, must defeat the three greatest charioteers of the empire in a Ben-Hur\u2013style race to save his Christian girlfriend, Soline. Our God-fearing hero is very much in white: white plume on his galea, white chariot pulled by four white horses in white harnesses. His opponents are decked out in blue, red, and green. After a few laps around the arena, the blue chariot loses a wheel. The red one collapses entirely, leaving its driver dragged by his horses on a fragment of side panel. The green chariot falls behind on the home stretch. White wins. But the despotic, elitist, out-of-touch governor tricks Damien: the Gauls must face yet another, even harder trial. The Gaulish stands erupt in boos.<\/p>\n

Soline makes a rousing speech. \u201cDon\u2019t you see, representative of the last Caesar, that this world is sick, old, out of breath, that your empire is cracking everywhere, that an imminent crisis is brewing, that new and unknown things are going to happen? This world of which you speak\u2014it is collapsing.\u201d The governor announces the final trial: a naumachia, a mock naval battle. The large stage in the center of the arena unfolds to become a trireme spurting fire from its gunwales. A massive sword fight breaks out on deck, although, spoiled as I have become by the rotating grandstands and hoisted hillsides, I\u2019m a little disappointed not to see the arena fill with water.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a squeaker. The gunwales are ablaze. The plucky Gauls prevail, again, but the governor, refusing to admit defeat, stands amid the flames gesturing megalomaniacally at the sky. As ever, it\u2019s not looking good for honest, upstanding Christendom until, after a disorienting pause, there\u2019s a choral bloom of celestial music and the fires go out. The governor\u2019s soldiers turn on him. He is banished, and in a tonal lurch from Quo Vadis to Life of Brian, his robes fall off as he runs across the sand. The governor has no clothes. A white dove flutters down and lands on Soline\u2019s forearm as Damien, the muscular, reproductively viable Christian hero, submits to the will of the people: to succeed the globalist, Jupiterian bully as their leader. Damien raises a fist. Evil has been vanquished. The old order is dead. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The entrance to the immersive show \u201cLa Renaissance du Ch\u00e2teau.\u201d All photographs ofPuy du Fou, November 2025, by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6474,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[275,5440,4116,5441,5442,5443,36,430,1859,5444,5,5445,5446,607,5447,3954,5448,5449,5450,5451,5452,5453,286,158],"class_list":{"0":"post-6473","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-amusement-park","9":"tag-anglo-french","10":"tag-catholicism","11":"tag-catholics","12":"tag-center-right-french","13":"tag-conservative","14":"tag-emmanuel-macron","15":"tag-european-union","16":"tag-far-right","17":"tag-fascism","18":"tag-france","19":"tag-france-keyser","20":"tag-francois-mitterrand","21":"tag-french","22":"tag-jacques-chirac","23":"tag-jordan-bardella","24":"tag-la-renaissance-du-chateau","25":"tag-mouvement-pour-la-france-mpf","26":"tag-philippe-de-villiers","27":"tag-pro-european","28":"tag-puy-du-fou","29":"tag-puy-du-fou-chateau","30":"tag-tourism","31":"tag-travel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}