The story of Philippe de Villiers is deeply rooted in a peasant France à la Vincenot, where in his words
"he ran around the countryside and unknowingly picked the flowers of civilization"
.
The Vendéen confides:
"The Puy du Fou was the ultimate way to retain childhood"
.
The bells of the Angelus, the anvil of the village and the crowing of the rooster punctuate the day there.
The ground is fertile since from Puy du Fou, voted the best amusement park in the world, men from the region emerged well before those from the County (
The Lord of the Rings)
, providential heroes like the naval officer Charette de la Contrie,
'salt-blood man'
long before the Half-Blood Prince (
Harry Potter
), longships rising from the waters before the
Vikings
series was born or Merlin the enchanter before Gandalf appeared on our screens... Historical epics whose power is capable of cutting cruppers for the heroes of heroic fantasy.
Le Puy du Fou told by Philippe de Villiers
, broadcast on Saturday November 12 on C8, takes us on a passionate and fascinating story made up of poetry, romanticism and amusing anecdotes.
The former MEP invites his son, Nicolas de Villiers, president of Puy du Fou, and the creators of the first hour.
He likes to return to family homes with modesty and verve as his banner.
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A hymn and a requiem for the Vendée
The subject, however, takes on poignant accents when the Vendéen remembers his discovery, as a child, of the plaques of the tortured in the chapel of Petit-Luc, then the stained glass windows of the church of Lucs (Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne) illustrating this atrocious death. families in the fire at the place of worship.
Le Puy du Fou is both
“a hymn and a requiem”
, specifies Philippe de Villiers.
"At 18, I was surrounded by two intimate urgencies: a duty of gratitude, of homage to a happy childhood, to my father and my mother, who were wonderful, to say thank you to my pantheon of illiterate characters of high culture and a duty of reparation for an injustice committed against the Vendée, of these children who did not have the right to an official burial”.
Long represented in the park by
Le Chemin de mémoire,
this sunken path that can be mistaken for a Great War trench, the Vendée martyrdom gave rise to a more powerful creation,
The Last Panache
.
In an original theater setting designed for him unlike a Greek amphitheater, instead placing the public at the heart of a huge central revolving stage, the show presents the terrible repression of which the Vendeans were victims during the French Revolution. .
He was rewarded by the giants of American entertainment and around the world, during the Thea Awards 2017.
Philippe de Villiers Pallas Television
“We wanted justice to be done, for there to be at the heart of Puy du Fou an evocation of what was a mass extermination.
But we are French of tenderness, we assume our own bitterness but we do not make it an occasion for resentment.
»
Philippe de Villiers
Despite the publication of the collective book
Le Puy du Faux
which seeks to denounce the slightest freedom taken with History in the park,
Le Dernier Panache
responds by unfolding the text to the word of the decree of the Convention and quoting the terrifying harangue of the rapporteur Barère.
In the documentary account of C8, Philippe de Villiers specifies:
“We display on the screen the famous decree, exterminator from August 1, 1793. It is a mass extermination, there is not a historian to dispute it.
Order is given to "depopulate" the Vendée, to raze the houses, the barns and the farms, to burn the woods and to put the women here in Epesses in ovens.
We wanted justice to be done, for there to be at the heart of Puy du Fou an evocation of what was a mass extermination”.
The former MEP, however, mitigates his remarks:
“We are French people of tenderness, we assume our own bitterness but we do not make it an occasion for resentment.
This show is beautiful because it is peaceful and people love it for that”.
"The incredible epic of Charrette: Conquer or die", the film
From December 8, Puy du Fou Films presents a preview, throughout France, of its first feature film "Vaincre ou Die", inspired by the show "The Last Panache" of the Vendée park, which has already brought together more than 12 million spectators.
The official release of the cinematographic work is scheduled for January 25, 2023. The hero of the story is François-Athanase Charette de la Contrie, the youngest officer of the Royal Navy of France at 24, hero of the war of America and the Battle of the Saintes.
He lives in retirement at his home in Vendée when the anger of the peasants viscerally attached to their Catholic faith rises.
A second heroic life then begins for the one who will be shot in Nantes on March 29, 1796, at the age of 33,
for having valiantly defended his religion and his identity in the face of the murderous madness of the Committee of Public Safety.
The ambushes in the sunken lanes, his specialty, will allow the Vendeans to stand up to the Blues (soldiers of the revolutionary army) for three years.
With panache he will organize his own execution battalion.
Philippe de Villiers had already published in 2012 a fictionalized biography of the young Vendée general, “Le roman de Charette” with Albin Michel.
The film is co-distributed by Studiocanal and Saje, to whom we owe the series' distribution in France.
Philippe de Villiers had already published in 2012 a fictionalized biography of the young Vendée general, “Le roman de Charette” with Albin Michel.
The film is co-distributed by Studiocanal and Saje, to whom we owe the series' distribution in France.
Philippe de Villiers had already published in 2012 a fictionalized biography of the young Vendée general, "Le roman de Charette" with Albin Michel.
The film is co-distributed by Studiocanal and Saje, to whom we owe the series' distribution in France.
The Chosen
.
In front of the romantic ruin of Puy du Fou
But all is not dark, far from it, in this documentary story, savory through language and evocations.
Like that day in June 1977 when the brilliant student boasting of doing the ENA truant - feet size 44 curled up in torn boots loaned by the grumpy owner of the place - discovered such Chateaubriand, the romantic ruin of the Puy du Fou castle and its superb, misty pond bordered by gorse, bramble and hawthorn.
The former president of the general council of Vendée, confides:
“The power of the place marks me, this secular silence, the great beeches struck down, forming a giant shadow on the pond, an ink mirror.
This charred castle, with painful twinges, speaks to me.
There is here the weight of history and tragedy.
At the same time, there is an aesthetic of
.
In the now abandoned little house where he lived then, he consults volume 1 of the history of the military Vendée and comes across the image of Jacques Maupilier, weapons in hand, game warden at Puy du Fou!
"I imagine then that this Maupilier belongs to a peasant dynasty which begins in the Middle Ages and which leads us to a Jacques welcoming refugees from the Ardennes in the 1940s"
.
If he holds his place, his character and his script, Philippe de Villiers, pressed by his studies which will soon bring him to a Prefecture far from Vendée, has only one year to create his show which will become the famous Cinéscénie.
The voice of Belphegor
He recounts in detail the journey strewn with pitfalls, the idea of convincing Jean Piat to record a short extract of his story on a small tape recorder, the lighting of the castle with car headlights, the unraveling system and the conviction pegged to the body which finally spreads like wildfire.
Later, against all odds, he obtains his thousand volunteers, his 500 kilometers of electric cables, a totally innovative sound system and his grid at the water's edge to make the actors dance on the waves thanks to the imagination of the local blacksmith.
An amusing episode recounts his infiltration into the Comédie Française to convince François Chaumette (the voice of Belphégor), Michel Duchaussoy, Suzanne Flon, Catherine Salviat and Nicolas Silberg, these superb and generous lords of the stage, to
“François Chaumette is living tenderness, one of those voices that come from the depths of the earth,”
he breathes.
Faced with so many good fairies bent over the Puyfolais cradle, the Vendéen laid the foundations for a solemn and unprecedented commitment:
"No copyright, no subsidy, never an external patent and never a dividend because the living source, voluntary work , remains the backbone of the association”.
Philippe de Villiers, fire-eater
Another tasty passage takes us to Beaubourg where Philippe de Villiers learns to spit fire, discovering his innate talent as a vaporizer!
This is called going to coal for a student destined for the highest functions of the State.
The day before the premiere, there is panic:
“The actors trip over the cables, the horses' hooves cause sparks, the proud male steeds chase the mares and end up in the water.
I had a presentiment of the berezina.
The 2,500 notables arrive and find themselves with their bottoms soaked by the spongy wooden benches, their cars stuck in the mud of the field…”
And there the miracle!
The show runs flawlessly.
"For one night, I knew what the happiness of a creation was",
confides Philippe de Villiers who has transposed, out of passion, the ENA into a national artistic school!
The panache and the audacity again and again that are undeniable during the second part of the C8 documentary telling how this sound and light show attempted in 1977 has become one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, combining know-how and available today in England, Spain, the Netherlands and soon in China and the United States.