It’s the early 1960s, and the single French TV channel, state run RTF is desperately looking for attractive new programming. The general feeling in France is that its cinemas and TV screens are invaded by Hollywood movies and Anglo-American TV productions, to the point where the best time spot for large audiences, 7:20 pm on Sunday, was taken by a wildly successful UK series, Ivanhoe, loosely based on Walter Scott’s 1819 bestseller novel. While the plot of the series was not directly critical of France or the French, all four of the Norman French nobles featured were allies of the treacherous Prince John, and the voices of all actors, including a dashing Roger Moore as Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, were dubbed for the French audience.
That the British ITV network produced Ivanhoe as one of their first entertainment series, and that France’s RTF network showed it in a dubbed version despite its somewhat pro-English plot demonstrates that the Middle Ages were seen as constitutive of the national heritage and identity of each country. Winston Churchill, in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, invoked “King Arthur and his noble knights, guarding the Sacred Flame of Christianity and the theme of a world order, sustained by valour, physical strength, and good horses and armour,” as those who, like the British soldiers in World War II, “slaughtered innumerable hosts of foul barbarians and set decent folk an example for all time.”
Similarly, Charles de Gaulle used the Cross of Lorraine, which was associated with Joan of Arc, as a symbol for the Free French Forces during the war. After the war, he often invoked the Capetian dynasty and Louis XIV as evidence of a long-standing unified and enduring French national identity. Even left-leaning French TV producers supported this idea of France’s unique national heritage, especially when it offered a chance to combat the world-wide supremacy of Anglo-American media.
It is in this climate that screenwriter and actor Jean-Claude Deret (birth name: Claude Breitman) created a medievalist TV series, entitled Thierry la Fronde, that would celebrate the French national tradition. RTF officials were so enamored with Deret’s creation that they immediately moved it to the coveted Sunday evening spot heretofore occupied by the British Ivanhoe. From 1963 through 1966, the series, situated during the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, attracted some of the largest audiences of any program broadcast. The show’s immediate success in France and Belgium got the attention of TV corporations around the world: Australia, The King’s Outlaw; Canada, Thierry la Fronde / The King’s Outlaw; Poland, Thierry Smialek / Thierry the Daredevil; Netherlands, Thierry de Slingeraar / Thierry the Sling. The series also became one of the first true twentieth-century transmedia narratives, generating sets of action figures, an illustrated novelization, a comic book series, soundtrack recordings, and dozens of articles in magazines geared toward young adult and general audiences.
In France, the full impact of the show permeated all walks of life: Teachers had to confiscate self-made slings (the series protagonist’s favorite weapon) in schoolyards and playgrounds; the hero’s name, Thierry, a relatively rare French first name of medieval origin, quickly peaked as the country’s most popular boys’ name between 1965 and 1967; and parents across the country praised the show for finally offering a home-grown story to rival foreign productions.
Ironically, Jean-Claude Deret and RTF were poaching another wildly successful British TV series to create what to their Francophone audiences felt like a typically French story. Between 1956 and 1959, the 143 half-hour episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood, had been watched by some thirty million viewers in Britain and the United States. Robin returns from the Crusades to find that his ancestral lands are in the greedy hands of a Norman nobleman. Framed for the nobleman’s murder, Robin becomes an outlaw and fights against Prince John and his despicable Normans, and for English freedom.
Deret and his French collaborators turned the UK narrative into their own outlaw story. Thierry de Janville, a young Sologne nobleman who had fought gallantly against the English occupation of French territories during the Hundred Years’ War, loses his title and land due to the machinations of his treacherous steward, Florent of Clouseaules, who works for the greedy King of Navarre. Supported by a small cohort of anti-English citizens and loyal outlaws, including his fiancée Isabelle, he defies Florent, the King of Navarre, and the English troops commanded by Edward, the Black Prince. Through 52 episodes of 26 minutes each, Thierry represents an unblemished ideal of medieval knighthood and service to his king and country.
Here is a comparison between the French adaptation and English model:
Attractive male lead
The Belgian actor Jean-Claude Drouot was only 24 years old when he started playing Thierry de Janville. Drouot’s youth and physical fitness connected more easily with a young adult audience than Richard Greene, who was already 37 when he began playing Robin.
Maid Marian
Unlike Robin’s Lady Marian Fitzwalter, a noblewoman, Isabelle is an orphaned commoner, which underlines Thierry’s reaching across the boundaries of social class. Played by French-Canadian actress Céline Leger (screenwriter Deret’s wife), Isabelle is there to witness and admire Thierry’s feats. Both series limit the relationship between the protagonists to family-friendly infatuations.
Merry outlaws
As in The Adventures of Robin Hood, whose writers gleaned some of its plot from Disney’s 1952 The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, Thierry’s compagnons are selected to show their leader’s popular support. There is a traveling actor, whose performance of the role of Judas Iscariot in morality plays makes audiences suspect him to be a Jew; a cooper, definitely a nod to French winemaking, who is as irascible as Robin’s Little John; a former cut-purse; a mild-mannered man with memory loss who is taken in by the outlaws; a minstrel similar to Alan a Dale who satirizes the English overlords; and an abbot, who helps Thierry and his friends, but unlike Friar Tuck does not live among them.
Sling instead of longbow
Deret copied Robin’s social status as knight and had Thierry trained professionally as a swordsman, to increase the level of authenticity during swashbuckling scenes. However, Robin’s signature weapon, the longbow, was simply a bridge too far when considering the role that weapon played during the Hundred Years’ War. Deret therefore made the shepherd’s sling Thierry’s weapon of choice and had the French villagers teach him the use of David’s weapon against Goliath. This was another move to demonstrate Thierry’s closeness to his supporters from the lower ranks.
Plot, scenes, sequences and historical backdrop
It would take a long time to list all the plot elements, scenarios, sequences, and production techniques the producers of Thierry la Fronde gleaned from The Adventures of Robin Hood (and from Ivanhoe, too). The most consequential change Jean-Claude Deret made was to transpose the action from twelfth-century England, after the Third Crusade, to 1359, the final year of the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War and three years after Edward the Black Prince had captured the French King Jean II (1319-1364) and some of his nobles at Poitiers. The writers and producers consulted with historians about some of the backdrop of their stories, but historicity was not a major concern for Thierry la Fronde, just as it wasn’t for its English model.
The Hundred Years’ War, continued…
If French TV program directors, screenwriters, and the general audience felt invaded by Anglo-American media in the 1950s and 1960s, associations with the historical invasions of France during the Hundred Years’ War were not uncommon. Therefore, by situating the show during the Hundred Years’ War and having a French freedom fighter resist the English invaders via the inversion of the most English of outlaw narratives was an attractive writerly form of cultural resistance. This sentiment trickled down into individual episodes: In La fourche du diable (episode 48), Thierry frees King Jean’s cook, who had decided to travel to English-occupied territory without a military escort to save the palates and stomachs of the French knights imprisoned by the English. The cook is also shown to introduce the uncultured English to the use of the fork, thus confirming the French audience’s proverbial biases against English culinary culture. There is evidence that ORTF leadership was aware of these continuations of the Hundred Years’ War in modern media. They canceled the broadcast of Thierry la Fronde on the day of Winston Churchill’s state funeral, on January 30, 1965.
Red Robin Hood and Red Thierry
At the latest since the 1953 scandal surrounding the Indiana Textbook Commission’s demand to have the Robin Hood narrative (even in its gentrified versions) removed from schoolbooks because its members felt it promoted Communist doctrine, the story of the English outlaw has been the subject of political suspicion. After all, he is known to take from the rich and give to the poor, the classical tale of a redistribution of wealth. Fascinatingly, the hunt for Communists during the McCarthy era is also what forced left-wing producers and screenwriters to leave the United States for Britain. One of them was Hannah Weinstein, the producer behind The Adventures of Robin Hood. Weinstein supported blacklisted US screenwriters by offering them gainful employment to write for the UK show. Small wonder the show featured social justice issues, pilloried the exploitation of medieval peasants by their overlords, showed a liberal attitude towards minorities, and minimized Robin’s status as an aristocrat.
In France, entertainment and the arts (unlike the news) were in the hands of the political left, and so it is unsurprising that the French retelling would pick up and even underline the “red” aspects of its British model, especially since Jean-Claude Drouot, who played Thierry, was a self-declared Marxist. Though a member of the nobility, Thierry has a love relationship with a commoner and treats his compagnons (synonymous with camérades, i.e., members of the Communist party) as his equals; prefers an unknightly weapon, the shepherd’s sling; protects cultural and religious others (the Rabbi Jacob and the Muslim doctor Zakaria in episode 4, Le fléau de Dieu); resists nobles who exploit their privileges; and fights religious superstition. Perhaps all these features were also the reason why Polish TV program directors, then behind the Communist Iron Curtain, felt they could safely air both Thierry la Fronde and The Adventures of Robin Hood to bolster their programming for young audiences.
One can only wonder what the screenwriters and producers in the 1950s and 1960s would have done had they been familiar with the medieval representations of Robin Hood. While they would have been enthusiastic about Robin’s depiction as a yeoman (a small independent landowner), they might have found Robin’s devotion to the Virgin Mary (for example in Robin Hood and the Monk) more difficult to feature. Most modern Robin Hood movies and TV series show him as a disinherited nobleman, a gentrification of the character begun by Anthony Munday’s influential Elizabethan plays, The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington (c. 1598-1601), both written to appeal to upper-class audiences.
Individual episodes of Thierry la Fronde are available on YouTube and on various streaming services. Sets of the individual seasons as well as the entire 52 episodes are available on DVD.
Richard Utz is Professor of Medievalism Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.
By Richard Utz
It’s the early 1960s, and the single French TV channel, state run RTF is desperately looking for attractive new programming. The general feeling in France is that its cinemas and TV screens are invaded by Hollywood movies and Anglo-American TV productions, to the point where the best time spot for large audiences, 7:20 pm on Sunday, was taken by a wildly successful UK series, Ivanhoe, loosely based on Walter Scott’s 1819 bestseller novel. While the plot of the series was not directly critical of France or the French, all four of the Norman French nobles featured were allies of the treacherous Prince John, and the voices of all actors, including a dashing Roger Moore as Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, were dubbed for the French audience.
That the British ITV network produced Ivanhoe as one of their first entertainment series, and that France’s RTF network showed it in a dubbed version despite its somewhat pro-English plot demonstrates that the Middle Ages were seen as constitutive of the national heritage and identity of each country. Winston Churchill, in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, invoked “King Arthur and his noble knights, guarding the Sacred Flame of Christianity and the theme of a world order, sustained by valour, physical strength, and good horses and armour,” as those who, like the British soldiers in World War II, “slaughtered innumerable hosts of foul barbarians and set decent folk an example for all time.”
Similarly, Charles de Gaulle used the Cross of Lorraine, which was associated with Joan of Arc, as a symbol for the Free French Forces during the war. After the war, he often invoked the Capetian dynasty and Louis XIV as evidence of a long-standing unified and enduring French national identity. Even left-leaning French TV producers supported this idea of France’s unique national heritage, especially when it offered a chance to combat the world-wide supremacy of Anglo-American media.
It is in this climate that screenwriter and actor Jean-Claude Deret (birth name: Claude Breitman) created a medievalist TV series, entitled Thierry la Fronde, that would celebrate the French national tradition. RTF officials were so enamored with Deret’s creation that they immediately moved it to the coveted Sunday evening spot heretofore occupied by the British Ivanhoe. From 1963 through 1966, the series, situated during the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, attracted some of the largest audiences of any program broadcast. The show’s immediate success in France and Belgium got the attention of TV corporations around the world: Australia, The King’s Outlaw; Canada, Thierry la Fronde / The King’s Outlaw; Poland, Thierry Smialek / Thierry the Daredevil; Netherlands, Thierry de Slingeraar / Thierry the Sling. The series also became one of the first true twentieth-century transmedia narratives, generating sets of action figures, an illustrated novelization, a comic book series, soundtrack recordings, and dozens of articles in magazines geared toward young adult and general audiences.
In France, the full impact of the show permeated all walks of life: Teachers had to confiscate self-made slings (the series protagonist’s favorite weapon) in schoolyards and playgrounds; the hero’s name, Thierry, a relatively rare French first name of medieval origin, quickly peaked as the country’s most popular boys’ name between 1965 and 1967; and parents across the country praised the show for finally offering a home-grown story to rival foreign productions.
Ironically, Jean-Claude Deret and RTF were poaching another wildly successful British TV series to create what to their Francophone audiences felt like a typically French story. Between 1956 and 1959, the 143 half-hour episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood, had been watched by some thirty million viewers in Britain and the United States. Robin returns from the Crusades to find that his ancestral lands are in the greedy hands of a Norman nobleman. Framed for the nobleman’s murder, Robin becomes an outlaw and fights against Prince John and his despicable Normans, and for English freedom.
Deret and his French collaborators turned the UK narrative into their own outlaw story. Thierry de Janville, a young Sologne nobleman who had fought gallantly against the English occupation of French territories during the Hundred Years’ War, loses his title and land due to the machinations of his treacherous steward, Florent of Clouseaules, who works for the greedy King of Navarre. Supported by a small cohort of anti-English citizens and loyal outlaws, including his fiancée Isabelle, he defies Florent, the King of Navarre, and the English troops commanded by Edward, the Black Prince. Through 52 episodes of 26 minutes each, Thierry represents an unblemished ideal of medieval knighthood and service to his king and country.
Here is a comparison between the French adaptation and English model:
Attractive male lead
The Belgian actor Jean-Claude Drouot was only 24 years old when he started playing Thierry de Janville. Drouot’s youth and physical fitness connected more easily with a young adult audience than Richard Greene, who was already 37 when he began playing Robin.
Maid Marian
Unlike Robin’s Lady Marian Fitzwalter, a noblewoman, Isabelle is an orphaned commoner, which underlines Thierry’s reaching across the boundaries of social class. Played by French-Canadian actress Céline Leger (screenwriter Deret’s wife), Isabelle is there to witness and admire Thierry’s feats. Both series limit the relationship between the protagonists to family-friendly infatuations.
Merry outlaws
As in The Adventures of Robin Hood, whose writers gleaned some of its plot from Disney’s 1952 The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, Thierry’s compagnons are selected to show their leader’s popular support. There is a traveling actor, whose performance of the role of Judas Iscariot in morality plays makes audiences suspect him to be a Jew; a cooper, definitely a nod to French winemaking, who is as irascible as Robin’s Little John; a former cut-purse; a mild-mannered man with memory loss who is taken in by the outlaws; a minstrel similar to Alan a Dale who satirizes the English overlords; and an abbot, who helps Thierry and his friends, but unlike Friar Tuck does not live among them.
Sling instead of longbow
Deret copied Robin’s social status as knight and had Thierry trained professionally as a swordsman, to increase the level of authenticity during swashbuckling scenes. However, Robin’s signature weapon, the longbow, was simply a bridge too far when considering the role that weapon played during the Hundred Years’ War. Deret therefore made the shepherd’s sling Thierry’s weapon of choice and had the French villagers teach him the use of David’s weapon against Goliath. This was another move to demonstrate Thierry’s closeness to his supporters from the lower ranks.
Plot, scenes, sequences and historical backdrop
It would take a long time to list all the plot elements, scenarios, sequences, and production techniques the producers of Thierry la Fronde gleaned from The Adventures of Robin Hood (and from Ivanhoe, too). The most consequential change Jean-Claude Deret made was to transpose the action from twelfth-century England, after the Third Crusade, to 1359, the final year of the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War and three years after Edward the Black Prince had captured the French King Jean II (1319-1364) and some of his nobles at Poitiers. The writers and producers consulted with historians about some of the backdrop of their stories, but historicity was not a major concern for Thierry la Fronde, just as it wasn’t for its English model.
The Hundred Years’ War, continued…
If French TV program directors, screenwriters, and the general audience felt invaded by Anglo-American media in the 1950s and 1960s, associations with the historical invasions of France during the Hundred Years’ War were not uncommon. Therefore, by situating the show during the Hundred Years’ War and having a French freedom fighter resist the English invaders via the inversion of the most English of outlaw narratives was an attractive writerly form of cultural resistance. This sentiment trickled down into individual episodes: In La fourche du diable (episode 48), Thierry frees King Jean’s cook, who had decided to travel to English-occupied territory without a military escort to save the palates and stomachs of the French knights imprisoned by the English. The cook is also shown to introduce the uncultured English to the use of the fork, thus confirming the French audience’s proverbial biases against English culinary culture. There is evidence that ORTF leadership was aware of these continuations of the Hundred Years’ War in modern media. They canceled the broadcast of Thierry la Fronde on the day of Winston Churchill’s state funeral, on January 30, 1965.
Red Robin Hood and Red Thierry
At the latest since the 1953 scandal surrounding the Indiana Textbook Commission’s demand to have the Robin Hood narrative (even in its gentrified versions) removed from schoolbooks because its members felt it promoted Communist doctrine, the story of the English outlaw has been the subject of political suspicion. After all, he is known to take from the rich and give to the poor, the classical tale of a redistribution of wealth. Fascinatingly, the hunt for Communists during the McCarthy era is also what forced left-wing producers and screenwriters to leave the United States for Britain. One of them was Hannah Weinstein, the producer behind The Adventures of Robin Hood. Weinstein supported blacklisted US screenwriters by offering them gainful employment to write for the UK show. Small wonder the show featured social justice issues, pilloried the exploitation of medieval peasants by their overlords, showed a liberal attitude towards minorities, and minimized Robin’s status as an aristocrat.
In France, entertainment and the arts (unlike the news) were in the hands of the political left, and so it is unsurprising that the French retelling would pick up and even underline the “red” aspects of its British model, especially since Jean-Claude Drouot, who played Thierry, was a self-declared Marxist. Though a member of the nobility, Thierry has a love relationship with a commoner and treats his compagnons (synonymous with camérades, i.e., members of the Communist party) as his equals; prefers an unknightly weapon, the shepherd’s sling; protects cultural and religious others (the Rabbi Jacob and the Muslim doctor Zakaria in episode 4, Le fléau de Dieu); resists nobles who exploit their privileges; and fights religious superstition. Perhaps all these features were also the reason why Polish TV program directors, then behind the Communist Iron Curtain, felt they could safely air both Thierry la Fronde and The Adventures of Robin Hood to bolster their programming for young audiences.
One can only wonder what the screenwriters and producers in the 1950s and 1960s would have done had they been familiar with the medieval representations of Robin Hood. While they would have been enthusiastic about Robin’s depiction as a yeoman (a small independent landowner), they might have found Robin’s devotion to the Virgin Mary (for example in Robin Hood and the Monk) more difficult to feature. Most modern Robin Hood movies and TV series show him as a disinherited nobleman, a gentrification of the character begun by Anthony Munday’s influential Elizabethan plays, The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington (c. 1598-1601), both written to appeal to upper-class audiences.
Individual episodes of Thierry la Fronde are available on YouTube and on various streaming services. Sets of the individual seasons as well as the entire 52 episodes are available on DVD.
Richard Utz is Professor of Medievalism Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.
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