The farmers are angry.
They demonstrate across France brandishing signs reading “Jacquou with us!”
.
We are in 1969 and, in the countryside, those who own a television follow with passion and emotion the six 90-minute episodes of Jacquou le Croquant broadcast on Saturday evenings on the first channel, from October 4.
In the concrete towns, parents and children do not fail to wipe away a few tears in the face of the courage and determination of Jacquou, 10 years old, who after seeing his mother die of exhaustion and his father condemned to the galleys, will devote his life to avenge them.
Considered the master of the local novel, Eugène Le Roy wrote this story in 1896, drawing inspiration from the poverty of the rural world at the time of the Restoration.
By adapting it, then directing it, Stellio Lorenzi signed the first miniseries in the history of the small screen.
He portrays this environment in its rurality as well as in its reality.
Madelen invites you to discover or rediscover the first images of a series whose scouting and then filming took place over nine months.
Lorenzi began by spending twelve weeks in Périgord to interview farmers and understand their living conditions, the rhythm of their daily lives and the problems they face.
He was particularly informed about sharecropping, this mode of exploitation which allows an owner to recover part of the production of the tenant of his land.
He thus transposed into the contemporary world a peasant revolt led two centuries earlier, that is to say a “jacquerie”.
She wasn't the first.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, their ancestors had already rebelled.
We called them the “crunchies”…
Back in Paris, Lorenzi begins looking for the child who could play Jacquou, in the first part of the story.
He places an ad in the newspapers and receives a few days later a photo of a child named Éric Damain.
The expressions on his face perfectly match the character he imagined.
He calls the father.
He works at Renault, like his wife, who sent this photo out of curiosity, without imagining for a single moment that he had the slightest chance of being chosen.
They didn't even tell their son about it.
In the evening, before dinner, they asked him if he would like to make films.
A little surprised, he agrees to shoot a test bit.
He has never played the slightest comedy scene, even at school, but displays a naturalness which earned him immediate attention.
He is offered the original book, he puts it in his library without having the courage to read it.
Ten million viewers
On the eve of his 10th birthday, Éric Damain, who only knows Boulogne-Billancourt, finds himself in Dordogne.
He will spend six months in the heart of a universe that is completely foreign to him.
Some days, subject requires, the atmosphere is particularly heavy.
He nevertheless keeps smiling, and proves to be a model actor.
Every evening, he learns with the greatest seriousness the scenes of the next day.
When, on set, he is asked to cry, he thinks of something particularly sad, and the tears begin to flow.
He endures others, more personal, at the end of long evenings during which he continues his studies thanks to a tutor hired by the production.
The success is immense.
Almost all of the ten million sets recorded in homes are switched on at the time of broadcast.
Eric's parents do not have a television, so the family discovers each of the 90-minute episodes at the neighbors' house.
A few days earlier, the preview screening of one of them in Périgueux was an event.
At the end, Éric Damain received a standing ovation from the public and signed his first autographs.
He will return there for the release of the novel based on the series.
This is how he found himself on the front page of television magazines.
Jacques Chancel devotes one of his
Radioscopies
to him .
He had agreed to play the role of Jacquou to please his parents, convinced that his career would go no further.
Until the end of the 1970s, he would appear in other TV films, record a series of records, and make appearances in the cinema, in particular in
The Black Flag Floats on the Pot
, directed by Michel Audiard.
He then moved back into production.
Fifteen years after their broadcast, the 9 hours and 40 minutes of
Jacquou le croquant
, shot in black and white, were colorized.
Ideal for making this pioneering series a classic that has continued to cross generations.