page_title: Cercle Funambulesque
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Cercle Funambulesque / Background
caption_attribution_description: Photo of mime Charles Deburau
context_page_description: The Cercle Funambulesque —roughly translatable as "Friends of the Funambules"—was a Parisian theatrical society that produced pantomimes inspired by the Commedia dell'Arte, particularly by the exploits of its French Pierrot. It included among its approximately one hundred and fifty subscriber-members such notables in the arts as the novelist J.-K. Huysmans, the composer Jules Massenet, the illustrator Jules Chéret, and the actor Coquelin cadet. Among its successes was L'Enfant prodigue, which was filmed twice, first in 1907, then in 1916, making history as the first European feature-length movie and the first complete stage-play on film.
context_section_description: From about 1825 to 1860, the theater-goers of Paris were witness to a Golden Age of Pantomime.  At the Théâtre des Funambules, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, called by the eminent poet and journalist Théophile Gautier "the most perfect actor who ever lived", created, in his celebrated mute Pierrot, a legendary, almost mythic figure, immortalized by Jean-Louis Barrault in Marcel Carné's film Children of Paradise (1945).  After his death, his son Charles, playing at the same theater, revived for the grateful enthusiasts of the genre his father's agility and gaity; and Charles's rival Paul Legrand, who reinvented Pierrot as the sensitive soul so familiar to post-nineteenth-century devotees of the figure, earned warm admiration from his public (including Gautier) for his performances at the Folies-Nouvelles.  But, by the early 1860s, interest in the pantomime, at least in the capital, had begun to flag, and both Legrand and Deburau fils had to seek out audiences elsewhere.  Deburau died young, in 1873, having taken his art to Marseille and Bordeaux, where he founded a so-called school of pantomime.  Legrand, after working in Bordeaux and abroad, found employment in the 1870s at the Tertulia, a Parisian café-concert, and in the late 1880s, at the end of his career, at a children's theater, the Théâtre-Vivienne.  Both venues represented a considerable step down from the Folies-Nouvelles.  One of the historians of French pantomime, Robert Storey, writes that Legrand, in these years, "seems to have been forgotten by his public, the pantomime itself suffering death-throes at the capital while struggling for rebirth in the south of France."  When the mime made an appearance, around 1880, in a pantomime at the Variétés, he struck Paul and Victor Margueritte, rare admirers of his art, as "a survivor of a quite distant epoch."
  It would be the self-assumed task of one of those brothers, Paul Margueritte, to revive the pantomime.  In 1882, Paul sent his just-published Pierrot assassin de sa femme (Pierrot, Murderer of His Wife), a pantomime he had devised the previous year for the audiences of his amateur theatricals in Valvins, to several writers, hoping to renew interest in the genre.  It apparently found a receptive spirit in Jean Richepin, whose Pierrot assassin, also a pantomime, appeared at the Trocadéro in 1883.  (It would hardly go unnoticed: Sarah Bernhardt was its titular Pierrot.)  And other forces were at work to promote the pantomime with the general public.  In 1879, the Hanlon-Lees, a troupe of English acrobatic mimes, had performed to great acclaim at the Folies-Bergère, inspiring J.-K. Huysmans, the Naturalistic novelist and future creator of the arch-aesthete Des Esseintes, to collaborate on a pantomime with his friend Léon Hennique.  Their Pierrot sceptique (Pierrot the Skeptic, 1881) presented its readers with a dandified Pierrot even more savage than Margueritte's or Richepin's assassin: for he not only murders his tailor and executes a mannikin he has lured to his chambers, but also sets fire to the rooms themselves to obliterate all evidence of his crimes.  Such waggish ferocity delighted the young Jules Laforgue, who, upon reading the pantomime, produced his own Pierrot fumiste (Pierrot the Cut-up, 1882), in which Pierrot is guilty of similar (if not homicidal) enormities.
  While these writers were refining an art that elevated Pierrot to criminal heights, others were imagining a pantomime animated by a much more conventional Pierrot.  The Petit Traité de pantomime à l'usage des gens du monde (1887), by the mime and scenarist Raoul de Najac, championed the pantomime as a recreation for the salons—and reminded its readers that, in devising such an entertainment, "One must ... not forget that one is in good company."  Najac's ideal Pierrot, consequently, is innocent of all "indecent or funereal ideas," like those that motivate Pierrot sceptique.  Such also had been the pure-hearted Pierrot of Legrand, a collection of whose pantomimes was published—in the same year as Najac's treatise—by two fraternal men of the theater, Eug
caption: Nadar: Charles Deburau as Pierrot, c. 1855.  Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
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