Puy du Fou is a popular theme park occupying some 140 acres in a rural region of western France. Eschewing traditional amusement park rides in favor of elaborate historical stage shows and immersive “period villages,” the park attracted an astonishing three million visitors last year. The French newspaper Le Figaro has proclaimed it the best theme park in the world. But it might also be the most controversial, as Nat Segnit points out in his article for the May issue. Its shows promote a very specific vision of French history and heritage, one that venerates traditional village life, the Catholic Church, and longs for the lost monarchy. The “quasi-historical fantasia” on hand at Puy du Fou, allege its critics, is simply a means to “smuggle in reactionary propaganda under the cover of family entertainment.” It doesn’t help matters that the founder of Puy du Fou, the fulsomely named Philippe Marie Jean Joseph Le Jolis de Villiers de Saintignon, is a failed far-right presidential candidate who now rails regularly against Islam and European integration on his cable-television program, as well as in books like Populicide, his most recent hit.

But is it really worth getting so worked up about amusement-park politics? Last November, Segnit went to see the spectacle for himself, and found Puy du Fou’s charms difficult to resist, however objectionable he might find its agenda. I spoke to him recently about the qualities of theme-park propaganda, the international appetite for jingoism, and a hypothetical Winston Churchill musical.

Matthew Sherrill: I’ll confess to having never heard of Puy du Fou before. How did it first come to your attention? Is this a widely known attraction across Europe?

Nat Segnit: I have a friend in London who grew up near the park, so I was aware of it through her. My impression is that it is very widely known in France but considerably less so elsewhere in Europe. It’s a little odd, given how insanely popular Puy du Fou is in France, that so few people in the United Kingdom seem to have heard of it. Talking to friends about the piece I was writing, the response was generally along the lines of, Puy du what? This is likely to change. I’ve begun to notice a distinct uptick in Puy du Fou’s marketing efforts in London—posters on the Tube, that kind of thing—although this may just be an instance of the frequency illusion: my noticing it more because I’ve been spending so much time thinking about it.

Sherrill: How overt were the park’s the displays of far-right politics? The piece makes it sound like they’re not making much of an attempt to disguise the park’s ideological priorities, but neither do they seem to be bludgeoning the audience over the head. Put differently: exactly how talented are the park’s operators as propagandists?

Segnit: Not at all overt. It would be perfectly possible to leave the park thinking you’d had a weekend of lightly informative, exceptionally well-staged, family-oriented fun. Or you might, as I did, feel the park’s agenda creeping up on you. I was aware of the founder’s politics long before I visited the park for the first time, so, again, I need to be mindful of confirmation bias. But after my first day, as I retired to my cubiculum in the Gallo-Roman hotel complex, the feeling was, Well, that was entertaining, but I feel a bit weird. Perhaps “coerced” is the word. To the extent that the park’s politics are both utterly consistent and plausibly deniable, I’d say yes: the operators are propagandists of genius.

Sherrill: You spoke with a number of regular park-goers, and no one really seemed to be particularly bothered by Puy du Fou’s politics. Was your sense that the park just largely attracts like-minded visitors? Or that the polished bombast of the whole experience makes it that much easier to ignore whatever message they’re peddling?

Segnit: It’s hard to be categorical, but my sense is that Puy du Fou’s reputation as a beacon for the right is largely constructed negatively—that is, by those left-leaning Parisian sophisticates who the park’s president, Nicolas de Villiers, would likely dismiss asbien-pensantsnobs and who probably wouldn’t be caught dead in the place anyway. Of the forty-odd visitors I spoke to, none seemed to have come out of a burning sense of reactionary feeling. I suppose the significance of Puy du Fou is more that it helps define the coordinates of the Overton window, meaning what values it is currently allowable to espouse.

Sherrill: You’re not shy about admitting that you yourself had a fantastic time at the park. Were there any politically charged moments so egregious that they compromised your ability to regard it all as a bit of fun?

Segnit: No. The park’s politics affect you by stealth. It’s a bit like hanging out with an exceptionally charismatic and entertaining friend whose opinions only strike you as objectionable in retrospect. That’s what researching this piece was like: it induced a near-clinical level of esprit de l’escalier.

Sherrill: As you note in the piece, one Puy du Fou–affiliated park has opened in Spain, and plans are in the works, pending government approval, to open one in your native England. Your piece does a wonderful job of explaining why a fascist-leaning theme park might be able to take hold specifically in France, given its political climate. But I wonder if there’s a broader, more pan-European discontent it seems to be tapping into?

Segnit: I think that’s probably true, given that it’s hard to name a European or indeed Western country that remains immune to populism—although there are social, economic, and historical factors that individuate the French case in the general, global context of rising anti-liberal sentiment. Professor Sudhir Hazareesingh, whom I interviewed for the piece, is very good on this: the deeply pessimistic, anti-modernist strain in French thinking that surfaces at regular intervals and tends to improve the electoral prospects of the populist right. Still, yes: you’d reckon that a form of cultural production that rejects revisionist hand-wringing in favor of a celebratory nationalism is going to play well wherever people are disenchanted with the liberal consensus. I think the interesting thing, given the religiosity of the French park and its founder, is how Puy du Fou’s approach will adapt to a non-Catholic environment if the U.K. branch goes ahead as planned. I actually suspect it will adapt very well. However strong the religious element, it’s the jolly jingoism that sells, and that, somewhat paradoxically, is internationally applicable.

Sherrill: What do you expect, or even hope, to see at the Oxfordshire park?

Segnit: I’d like to see a fully staged Battle of Hastings with the Norman invasion presented as just the shot in the arm the decrepit Anglo-Saxon system needed. An immersive Tudor banquet with the sound of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn bickering in an adjacent room. Given the sensitivities, we might have to skip Waterloo. They’d be missing a trick if they omitted the Angels of Mons: a valiant Cockney private sinking to his knees as a host of spectral archers drives back the German advance. There’s also going to have to be some kind of Spitfire flypast and Churchill, big-time. Maybe some kind of mini-musical.

Sherrill: Do you think you’ll stop by?

Segnit: Much as I’d love to be there, the U.K. park is scheduled to open in 2029, just in time for Nigel Farage to be elected prime minister, so I will by then have moved my family to an underground complex on Kiribati.