Far-right links and Putin praise: fears over £600m UK history theme park plan

French family behind project visited Kremlin in 2014 to discuss building ‘Tsarland’ in annexed Crimea. With its spectacular shows featuring Viking longboats, Roman charioteers and sword-wielding knights who perform death-defying stunts, Puy du Fou in France is consistently ranked among the world’s best theme parks. Each performance of its centrepiece Cinéscénie show, which depicts 700 years of French history, features more than 1,000 actors, hundreds of horses and about 800 fireworks.

Now the company has set its sights on bringing its brand of immersive history to the UK via a £600m investment to build its mock medieval castles, hotels and restaurants on farmland just off the M40 in Oxfordshire. It has asked the upmarket property firm Savills to help with its planning applications and is expected to look for British co-investors for a project that it says will create thousands of jobs.

Some who live near the site, however, are dismayed at the lack of attention given to what they see as the French company’s dark underbelly, including ties to the far right and a past flirtation with Vladimir Putin. They question who their prospective new neighbours really are and what version of British history they plan to tell.

The founder and patriarch of Puy du Fou is Philippe de Villiers, the scion of an aristocratic family who conceived the project in the 1970s after discovering a ruined and nettle-covered Renaissance castle in the Vendée region of western France. The park quickly flourished and now welcomes more than 2.8 million visitors a year, making it the second most popular theme park in France, after Disneyland Paris.

De Villiers has devoted his remaining time to politics and he founded his own party, Mouvement pour la France, in 1994. MPF’s manifesto included a ban on the construction of new mosques and a prohibition on gay marriage and same-sex adoption. De Villiers still has a weekly political television show, on which he regularly rails against immigration and Islam.

At the funeral last month of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s National Front party, De Villiers sat among the most prominent guests, who also included his longtime associate and friend, the far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour. A Paris court found Zemmour guilty of hate speech in 2022, his third such conviction, after a tirade against unaccompanied migrant children whom he described as thieves, rapists and murderers.

“What he defends is what I live for,” De Villiers said shortly after Zemmour made the remarks. “It’s what I suffer for, the defence of civilisation.”. Defending civilisation appears to have left De Villiers less time for Puy du Fou. These days it is his second son, Nicolas, who runs the park.

The younger De Villiers has focused on business rather than politics, but he did play a part in one of the more controversial episodes in Puy du Fou’s history. Father and son travelled to Moscow in 2014 where they met Putin in the Kremlin to discuss building two theme parks in Russia under the brand Tsargrad.

Putin’s tanks had rolled into Crimea earlier that year, annexing the territory in an act widely condemned by the international community. De Villiers Sr, however, declared himself a huge fan of his host and promised to help “promote the history of Crimea as a part of the long history of Russia” by building one of the two proposed parks in the region.

Puy du Fou’s local investment partner would have been Konstantin Malofeyev, a billionaire oligarch who had already been put under sanctions in the US, UK and EU over his financing of Russia-friendly separatists in Ukraine. Nicolas de Villiers may have sidestepped his father’s far-right views, but they stood shoulder to shoulder when it came to relations with Putin and Malofeyev. In an interview in the trade publication Attractions Management in 2015, De Villiers Jr described Putin as having “sweet eyes and sweet words”, and insisted the international community had misunderstood him.

He said sanctions would not affect plans to build a Crimean park, and Malofeyev was a man of “great moral power”. In the end, the two parks never materialised, but Philippe de Villiers’ politics and the family’s open flirtation with Putin have not gone down well in Oxfordshire.

A Puy du Fou spokesperson said the company was not alone in having explored investment in Russia at the time, but had been “caught off guard by the rapid deterioration of the geopolitical situation in Russia and Crimea”. “Quite properly we cancelled this initiative once the international sanctions regime was established,” they said. “Our Russia initiative never went beyond an outline concept. Once we had made the decision to withdraw from the project, we have had zero involvement in Russia since then.”.