Jean-Gaspard Deburau (; born Jan Kašpar Dvořák;. 31 July 1796 – 17 June 1846), sometimes erroneously called Debureau, was a Czech-French mime. He performed from 1816 to the year of his death at the Théâtre des Funambules, which was immortalized in Marcel Carné's poetic-realist film Children of Paradise (1945); Deburau appears in the film (under his stage-name, "Baptiste") as a major character. His most famous pantomimic creation was Pierrot—a character that served as the godfather of all the Pierrots of Romantic, Decadent, Symbolist, and early Modernist theater and art.
Life and career Born in Kolín, Bohemia (now Czech Republic), Deburau was the son of a Czech servant, Kateřina Králová (or Catherine Graff), and a former French soldier, Philippe-Germain Deburau, a native of Amiens.Rémy is Deburau's chief biographer. Jean-Gaspard became an actor and performed at the head of a nomadic troupe. In 1814 he took the company to Paris and they were hired in 1816 by the manager of the Théâtre des Funambules.Rémy, p. 3. The Funambules was a "minor" theater that didn't have the license to present plays with dialogue; consequently, to circumvent this restriction, it specialized in pantomimes.
Cast-lists indicate that he appeared as Pierrot right away, although it was not until 1825 that he became the sole actor to claim the role.Nye (2016), p. 18, n. 12. He attained a certain fame in 1828, when the influential writer Charles Nodier published a panegyric about him."Deburau", p. 2. The journalist Jules Janin published a book of effusive praise, entitled Deburau, histoire du Théâtre à Quatre Sous, in 1832. By the middle of the 1830s, Deburau was widely known. Théophile Gautier wrote of his talent with enthusiasm ("the most perfect actor who ever lived");La Presse, 25 January 1847; tr. Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, p. 102. Théodore de Banville dedicated poems and sketches to his Pierrot; Charles Baudelaire praised his style of acting.Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 127–151; Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, p. 104.
In 1832, when he took his pantomime to the Palais-Royal, he failed spectacularly. The occasion was a benefit performance of a pantomime performed earlier—with great success—at the Funambules.The pantomime was The Female Goblin; the evening opened with The Sylph and three other short pieces: see Péricaud, p. 110. Louis Péricaud, the chronicler of the Funambules, wrote that "never was there a greater disaster, a rout more complete for Deburau and his fellow-artists".Péricaud, p. 110. Deburau himself was hissed, and he vowed to play thereafter before no other public than those "naïfs and enthusiasts" who were habitués of the Boulevard du Crime.Péricaud, pp. 110, 111.
In 1836, Deburau was charged with murder after killing a boy who called him "Pierrot" on the street.
When he died, his son Jean-Charles (1829–1873) took over and later founded a "school" of pantomime, which flourished first in the south of France and then, at the end of the century, in Paris.On Charles Deburau's career, see Hugounet.
Jean-Gaspard Deburau is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris (see photo at right).
Pantomime Character roles Pierrot was not Baptiste's only creation. As Robert Storey has pointed out, Deburau performed in many pantomimes unconnected with the commedia dell'arte: He was probably the student-sailor Blanchot in Jack, l'orang-outang (1836), for example, and the farmhand Cruchon in Le Tonnelier et le somnambule ([The Cooper and the Sleepwalker] late 1838 or early 1839), and the goatherd Mazarillo in Fra-Diavolo, ou les Brigands de la Calabre ([Brother Devil, or The Brigands of Calabria] 1844). He was certainly the Jocrisse-like comique of Hurluberlu (1842) and the engagingly naïve recruit Pichonnot of Les Jolis Soldats ([The Handsome Soldiers] 1843).Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 10. Like Chaplin's various incarnations, all of whom bear some resemblance to the Tramp, these characters, though singular and independent creations, must undoubtedly have struck their audiences as Pierrot-like. For Deburau and Pierrot were synonymous in the Paris of post-Revolutionary France.Toepfer, The Rise and Fall of Pierrot: Pantomime in the Romantic Era, n.p. (pp. 588-590 in PDF download).
Pierrot
Deburau's Pierrot was more aggressive in his acrobatics (his "superabundance", in Péricaud's words, "of gestures, of leaps") than Baptiste's "placid" creation,Péricaud, p. 28. and much less aggressive in his audacity and daring. Deburau dispensed with Pierrot's coarseness and emphasized his cleverness. As theater historian Edward Nye writes, "Pierrot had somehow intellectually matured and learnt to moderate his worst excesses, or even to turn them into relative virtues."Nye (2014), p. 109. The poet Gautier reproached him for having "denaturalized" the character. Part of this may have been due to what Rémy calls the vindictiveness of Deburau's own personality; Deburau forged a role with a commanding stage presence.
The expressivity of his acting was abetted by his alterations in Pierrot's costume. His overlarge cotton blouse and trousers freed him from the constraints of the woolen dress of his predecessors, and his abandoning the frilled collar and hat gave prominence to his expressive face. A black skullcap, framing that face, was his only stark adornment.
But his real innovations came in the pantomime itself. His biographers, as well as the chroniclers of the Funambules, contend that his pantomimes were all alike. The "naive scenarios" that "limited" his acting, according to his Czech biographer, Jaroslav Švehla, "did little more than group together and repeat traditional, threadbare, primitive, and in many cases absurd situations and mimic gags (cascades), insulting to even a slightly refined taste."Švehla, pp. 22–23. And Adriane Despot, author of "Jean-Gaspard Deburau and the Pantomime at the Théâtre des Funambules", agrees: "most of the pantomimes are essentially the same; they share the atmosphere of light, small-scale, nonsensical adventures enlivened with comic dances, ridiculous battles, and confrontations placed in a domestic or otherwise commonplace setting."Despot, p. 366. But Despot was familiar only with a handful of the scenarios, those few in print; by far the greater number, which present a picture of the pantomime rather different from Despot's, are in manuscript in the Archives Nationales de France and in the library of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques.Despot bases her judgment on five scenarios reproduced in Péricaud and on the compilation by Emile Goby: Pantomimes de Gaspard et Ch. Deburau (1889). As Storey writes:The Goby collection, put together from what Deburau's son, Charles, had been able to recall of the pantomimes and reproducing (as Champfleury observes in his "Préface") only "a repertoire easy to perform in the course of many peregrinations through the provinces" (p. xi), is doubly unreliable: it omits the spectacular pantomime-féerie, the most numerous and most admired of Deburau's productions, and it represents the pantomime of Baptiste much less accurately than that of Charles himself. Comparison of the censor's copy [in manuscript] of Pierrot mitron with the Goby version, for example, reveals significant differences in both the conduct of the plot and the character of Pierrot; Goby's scenario for Le Billet de mille francs (1826) does not agree either with Auguste Bouquet's portrait of Deburau in that pantomime or with a remark by Gautier about a detail of its plot (in a review of Champfleury's Pantomime de l'avocat at the Fantaisies-Parisiennes: Le Moniteur Universel, December 4, 1865) [Pierrots on the stage, p. 11, n. 25].Storey provides a list of all of Deburau's pantomimes in manuscript at the Archives Nationales de France in his "Handlist of Pantomime Scenarios", and he summarizes a fair number of the scenarios in his text (Pierrots on the stage, pp. 317–319 and 9–31). Nye (2016) analyzes, in very illuminating detail, three scenarios from the collection in the library of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques. Besides the Goby collection, cited above, a useful compendium for readers of French is Baugé's volume of pantomimes. And Švehla is proceeding along misguided lines by assuming that Deburau "longed to represent a better character" than Pierrot:Švehla, p. 32. Deburau was apparently proud of his work at the Funambules, characterizing it to George Sand as an "art" (see next section below). "He loved it passionately", Sand wrote, "and spoke of it as of a grave thing."Histoire, cited and tr. in Maurice Sand .
The fact is that four distinct kinds of commedia-related pantomime held the stage at the Funambules, and for each Deburau created a now subtly, now dramatically different Pierrot.The discussion in Storey's Pierrots on the stage (pp. 12-24) provides the basis for this remark as well as for the summary that follows. The Rustic Pantomime: gesturing towards Pierrot's roots outside the commedia dell'arte, to the peasant Pierrot of bucolic tradition (such as Molière's Pierrot of Don Juan ), the action of these scenarios is set in a hamlet or village. Pierrot is the hero: he is honest, good-hearted, but poor (and egotistically, comically naïve). Through an act of courage, he is able to overcome the scruples of the father of his beloved—a Lisette, or Finetta, or Babette—and win her at the dénouement. Examples: The Cossacks, or The Farm Set Ablaze (1840); Pierrot's Wedding (1845).Les Cosaques, ou la Ferme incendiée, pantomime villageoise à spectacle en 4 tableaux: document F18 1085, MS 3035; Les Noces de Pierrot, pantomime villageoise en 5 changements: document F18 1088, MS 6650—Archives Nationales de France, Paris. Cited and described by Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 15-16. The Melo-Pantomime: finding their inspiration in the popular boulevard melodramas having no connection with the commedia dell'arte, these scenarios present Pierrot, not as a hero, but as a subaltern—often a soldier, sometimes a retainer working in the employ of the hero of the piece. They are set in exotic locales—Africa, America, Malta, China—and the action is (or is meant to be) thrillingly dramatic, fraught with villainous abductions, violent clashes, and spectacular rescues and reversals of fortune, often brought about by Pierrot's cleverness and daring. Examples: The Enchanted Pagoda (1845); The Algerian Corsaire, or The Heroine of Malta (1845).La Pagode enchantée, pantomime chinoise en 7 changements à vue: document F18 1088, MS 6974; Le Corsaire algérien, ou l'Héroïne de Malte, pantomime en 7 changements, mêlée de combats: document F18 1088, MS 7032—Archives Nationales de France, Paris. Cited and described by Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 16-18.