Outside a castle, stunt riders were hanging upside down from galloping horses, jousters were charging, Joan of Arc was dressed in armour and invoking her faith to fight the English, flames shot from windows, soldiers dangled from ropes and the audience cheered and booed. “It’s about our history of France, but it’s also an entertaining fantasy,” said Eliane, a nurse from the south-west who was on her second annual coach trip to the French theme park Puy du Fou. “You don’t come here for pure history, it’s not a lesson, there’s something magic about it,” she said. Puy du Fou has been voted the best amusement park on Earth despite having no rides, just swashbuckling re-enactment shows with fireballs, sword fights, shipwrecks and chariot races that draw millions in France. But now the historical theme park where 2.5 million people this year have watched Vikings and Gauls face their various enemies in the woodland of western France is branching into cinema and increasing its global expansion despite criticism from some historians and leftwing politicians that its traditionalist framing of history is spurring rightwing culture wars. A row has grown in the French media since the theme park’s first historical feature film about counter-revolutionaries, Vaincre ou Mourir, was released in cinemas this year and on streaming sites this summer. Some politicians on the left accused Puy du Fou of a reactionary, pro-monarchy rewriting of the past steeped in Catholic traditionalism that they said served the far right. Alexis Corbière and Matthias Tavel of the radical left La France Insoumise party called it an “ideological enterprise of the ultraconservative right”. Puy du Fou, which is the second most-visited theme park in France after Disneyland Paris, and so popular it will be a stop-off point for the Olympic flame before the Paris games, argues that its only aim is to entertain and explore legends, not teach history. As it exports its blend of pyrotechnics, equestrian stunts and theatrical knowhow to China and the US, it is becoming one the world’s biggest brands of historical entertainment. Puy du Fou is seeking to open two theme parks worldwide by 2030, with the UK among several countries under consideration in Europe. A British version with re-enactment extravaganzas based on kings, queens and perhaps even Shakespeare is among potential ideas, but no final decision has been made. Puy du Fou opened a theme park in Spain in 2021, whose shows from medieval knights to Christopher Columbus are expected to exceed 1 million visitors this year. It also designed an open-air historical show in the UK in 2016 and one in the Netherlands. Next year, it expands to the US, working with the Cherokee Nation in the Great Smoky Mountains region to create a vast show about Cherokees who volunteered to fight in Europe during the first world war. A possible expansion to Russia was shelved when the EU imposed sanctions over the annexation of Crimea in 2014. In Le Monde, the writer Jérôme Gautheret called the theme park “a contemporary ideological weapon” and a political debate has begun about how far popular culture such as historical re-enactments or films can influence the public’s vision of the grandeur of France and by extension their beliefs and votes. Puy du Fou began in the 1970s as the ruined castle backdrop to an open-air country show by amateurs telling the brutal story of the Vendée civil war of 1793 to 1795, when insurgents resisted the bloody upheaval of the French revolution – a show that has grown to feature 2,500 volunteer actors and the biggest outdoor stage in the world, at 9 hectares (23 acres). It was the idea of Philippe de Villiers, who later became a secretary of state for culture under Jacques Chirac and ran twice for president. De Villiers, 74, has long represented traditionalist Catholic, Eurosceptic and national sovereignty politics. In 2016, Emmanuel Macron, then the economy minister, conscious of Puy du Fou’s popular appeal outside Paris, visited the park with De Villiers, praised its “incredible cultural and economic success” and drove a Roman chariot. De Villiers called Puy du Fou “the park of the history of France”. In 2022, De Villiers supported Éric Zemmour, the far-right candidate and former TV pundit who has convictions for incitement to racial hatred. The politician’s son, Nicolas de Villiers, now runs the park, pushing its international expansion. He is about to launch its newest innovation: a purpose-built Belle Epoque train that will take 30 passengers across France for 4,000km (2,500 miles) in a one-week journey that the park says will be the longest immersive show ever created. Nicolas de Villiers said the theme park – whose subject matter includes Clovis, king of the Franks, and a new €20m (£17m) show about the birth of modern cinema – was not about politics. He said: “What we want when an audience leaves our shows – which are works of art and were never history lessons – is to feel better and bigger, because the hero has brought some light into their hearts … Puy du Fou is more about legends than a history book.” He said the park’s trademark high-drama historical extravaganzas worked because, at a time of global crisis, people had a hunger to understand their roots and traditions. “The artistic language we invented corresponds to the era we live in. People have a thirst for their roots, a thirst to understand what made them what they are today, which means their civilisation. They want to understand what went before them.” He called it a “profound desire to rediscover who we are”. He added: “People who come here don’t have an ideology, they come here and say it’s beautiful, it’s good, I liked it.” Guillaume Lancereau, Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, was part of a group of historians who published the book Puy du Faux (Puy of Fakes), analysing the park’s take on history. They viewed the park as having a Catholic slant, questionable depictions of nobility and a presentation of rural peasants as unchanged through the ages. Lancereau did not question the park’s entertainment value. But he said: “Professional historians have repeatedly criticised the park for taking liberties with historical events and characters and, more importantly, for distorting the past to serve a nationalistic, religious and conservative political agenda. This raises important questions about the contemporary entanglement between entertainment, collective memory and politically oriented historical production … “At a time when increasing numbers of undergraduates are acquiring their historical knowledge from popular culture and historical reenactments, the Puy du Fou’s considerable expansion calls for further investigation of a phenomenon that appears to be influencing the making of historical memory in contemporary Europe.” Outside the park’s musketeers show, André, 76, had driven 650km (400 miles) from Burgundy with his wife and grandson. “We came because we’re interested in history,” he said. “The shows are technically brilliant and really make you think. You can tell it’s a bit on the right – the focus on war, warriors and anti-revolution – but I don’t think that matters.”