Gigogne s'en va-t-en guerre

But who, then, invented the theatre? Perhaps, without meaning to in the slightest, those who once sought to smother this child in its cradle.

Beset by the rebuffs and attacks of the licensed theatres, the fairground players tried, at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, to survive. By inventing or reinventing the most varied acting techniques, by combining gibberish or grommelot with pantomime, by resorting to marionettes when the rulings of the Parlement of Paris had taken speech away from them, by resigning themselves at times to placards, those emblematic ancestors of silent cinema, by calling on the Princes, only too happy to be accomplices of this new form of subversion, or again by joining forces with the Royal Academy of Music to win the right to sing vaudevilles, the entrepreneurs of the Saint-Germain and Saint-Laurent Fairs wrote, within a few decades, one of the most brilliant pages in the artistic and literary life of the 18th century.

Through the mishaps of a performance of Pierrot-Cadmus, endlessly interrupted by the tribulations of the company's members and the unexpected visits of the commissioners of the Châtelet, we shall live the droll and pathetic adventures of these new players of the Art.

Finally, let us never lose sight of the fact that, if censorship made itself cruelly felt under the Ancien Régime, it never entirely disappeared; that if it has grown more polished in our contemporary societies, it remains present and subject to new diktats! Fashion and a certain renown grant a new power to new cultural elites… which they are quick to exercise.