Jean-Charles Deburau (; 15 February 1829– 19 December 1873) was an important French mime, the son and successor of the legendary Jean-Gaspard Deburau, who was immortalized as Baptiste the Pierrot in Marcel Carné's film Children of Paradise (1945). After his father's death in 1846, Charles kept alive his pantomimic legacy, first in Paris, at the Théâtre des Funambules, and then, beginning in the late 1850s, at theaters in Bordeaux and Marseille. He is routinely credited with founding a southern "school" of pantomime; indeed, he served as tutor to the Marseille mime Louis Rouffe, who, in turn, gave instruction to Séverin Cafferra, known simply as "Séverin". But their art was nourished by the work of other mimes, particularly of Charles's rival, Paul Legrand, and by earlier developments in nineteenth-century pantomime that were alien to the Deburaux' traditions.
Life and career Deburau père, feeling burdened by the hardships of the performer, discouraged Charles's taking a professional interest in the theater. He apprenticed him, when he reached maturity, first to a clock-maker, then to a firm that specialized in painting on porcelain. Charles was indifferent to both professions.Hugounet, p. 101. When Jean-Gaspard died, the director of the Funambules, Charles-Louis Billion, offered Charles his father's role, Pierrot, and, after tentative experiments in minor parts,He appeared, for example, as a warrior-pierrot in Jules Viard's Pierrot the Married Man and Polichinelle the Celibate (1847), according to Péricaud, p. 313. he made his formal début in November 1847.The published scenario of the pantomime in which he appeared, Les Trois Planètes, ou la Vie d'une rose (Paris: Gallet, 1847), notes on its titlepage that it was produced at the Funambules on 6 October 1847; but a letter from Billion to Théophile Gautier (now in the Bibliothèque Spoelberch de Lovenjoul as MS C491, f. 530) makes it clear that the premiere was postponed until November (see Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 59, n. 51). That début was in The Three Planets, or The Life of a Rose, a "grand pantomime-harlequinade-fairy play" in the old style of his father's day, with feuding supernatural agents, magic talismans, energetic mayhem, and Harlequin's triumphant conquest of Columbine.
Unfortunately, his début came at a time when another Pierrot at the Funambules, Paul Legrand, was just beginning to make a reputation for himself; Charles had been conscripted as his replacement, in fact, while Legrand fulfilled an engagement at the Adelphi in London.Hugounet, pp. 125-26. When he returned, he and Charles fell into a rivalry, which persisted until Legrand left the theater in 1853. Two years later, Charles accepted an engagement at the Délassements-Comiques, and he was not to return to the Funambules until 1862, when he appeared in its last two pantomimes, The Golden Bough and Pierrot's Memoirs, before the theater was demolished, a casualty of Haussmann's renovation of Paris.The Funambules reopened on the Boulevard de Strasbourg in 1867; ten years later, it was still producing pantomimes, though of a very impoverished kind (see Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 181, 320–321).
Charles did not prosper in the capital. According to Paul Hugounet, a contemporary of the mime and one of his earliest biographers, he left the Délassements-Comiques only a year after his engagement, a lawsuit pending between him and its director.Hugounet, pp. 107–108. In the following year, 1858, he opened the Salle Lacaze as the Théâtre Deburau, but the venture was a failure, and in 1859, to recover his debts, he left Paris on a tour of the provinces.Hugounet, p. 109. His last major attempt to win over audiences at the capital was in 1865, when he signed on at the Fantaisies-Parisiennes, then co-administered by the novelist and enthusiast of pantomime, Champfleury. Champfleury wrote his last pantomime, The Pantomime of the Attorney, for Deburau's début, and, though it was praised by the likes of Théophile Gautier,See Hugounet, pp. 115–117. Charles's engagement was cancelled not four months after its premiere. "The less-than-tepid reception till then accorded the pantomime", in the words of L.-Henry Lecomte, the chief historian of the theater, "convinced the administration of the Fantaisies-Parisiennes to abandon the genre at about this time".Lecomte, Histoire . . .: Les Fantaisies-Parisiennes, p. 18; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 63.
It was abroad—notably in Egypt for ten months (1860–61)—and in the provinces that Charles found admiring audiences.On Legrand's tours of both Egypt and the provinces, as well as his engagements in Bordeaux and Marseille, see Hugounet, pp. 109–114, 117–120. The Alcazar theaters in Bordeaux and Marseille were especially welcoming. He spent two years at the former after his Egyptian tour and assumed its directorship in 1870.Deburau célèbre mime. From 1867 to 1869, he played at the Alcazar in Marseille, and it was there that a young disciple of Pierrot, Louis Rouffe, first saw him perform, and was enchanted.On Rouffe's career, see especially Echinard. Rouffe, who had begun performing—first in comedy, then in pantomime—at the age of seventeen, was remarked by Charles as a burgeoning talent, and when Charles, sensing his own early death, accepted the directorship of the Alcazar du Quartier de La Bastide in Bordeaux, he summoned Rouffe to his side as his understudy. There Rouffe performed for one season after Charles's death in 1873; then he returned to Marseille, where he found loyal audiences for the next ten years before tuberculosis cut his own life short. With his success and subsequent tutelage of younger mimes was born the southern "school" of pantomime.On the developments of the pantomime in the south of France, see Séverin, pp. 36ff. Storey summarizes these developments (in English) in Pierrot: a critical history, pp. 115–116, and Pierrots on the stage, pp. 305–306.
Charles had always wished to be more than a performer. According to Hugounet, he dreamed of becoming a Professor of Mime at the Paris Conservatory or Opéra.Hugounet, p. 120. But he died too young to realize either of those ambitions.
Pantomime It was inevitable that, as a mime, he should be compared to his father. Gautier seemed to sum up the general consensus when he wrote, in 1858, that "the son recalls the father...but without servile imitation": The mask is the same in appearance, as it should be for a traditional character; yet a wholly original wit sends the grimaces wrinkling across it. Deburau is young, thin, elegant; his features are delicate and distinct, his eyes expressive—and his little mouth, which he knows how to distend to swallow the bigger morsels, has a kind of jeering disdain, an English "sneer", that is very piquant. A clown's agility animates this slender body, with its delicate limbs, on which the white blouse with its big buttons floats freely; he moves with ease, suppleness, and grace, marking without stressing the rhythm of the music....Le Moniteur Universel, August 30, 1858; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 59. Cf. note 20, below. His technique was universally praised, usually by unflattering reference to that of his rival, Legrand. In an article in Le Figaro of 1855, William Busnach was blunt in his assessment, calling Legrand, "as a mime, inferior to Debureau fils."2nd Year, #55 (1 April 1855). Gautier was more tactful, but the criticism was the same: "Deburau has the sharper mask, the cleaner technique, the livelier leg."La Presse, 10 December 1849; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 60, n. 52. Why then did Charles fail to find audiences in Paris? The answer seems to lie in the reasons for Legrand's success there. Legrand created a Pierrot wholly different from that of either of the Deburaux, père or fils. To the critic Taxïle Delord, writing in Le Charivari, Legrand's Pierrot seemed fashionably (if deplorably) "modern". "The old pantomime no longer exists", he declared; "now we have a...neo-Pierrotism, if such an expression is permissible": Pierrot is not content to rouse laughter: he also calls forth tears: the times demand it, we have become extremely sensitive, we want Pierrot to have an old mother, a sweet fiancée, a sister to rescue from the snares of a seducer. The egoistic, lazy, gluttonous, cowardly Pierrot of old offends the exquisite delicacy of the younger generations: they must have a Pierrot-Montyon.April 10, 1855; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 66. They find him, he wrote, in Legrand, and, through his Pierrot, "[t]he great marriage of the sublime and the grotesque of which Romanticism dreamed has now been realized....". For at Legrand's theater, the Folies-Nouvelles, "[o]ne oscillates by turns between sadness and joy; peals of laughter break from every breast; gentle tears moisten every barley-sugar stick."Le Charivari, 10 April 1855; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 66. Delord's reference to the "marriage of the sublime and the grotesque" is an allusion to Victor Hugo's preface to Cromwell (1827), in which it is announced that "the drama"—by which Hugo means the drama inspired by Shakespeare, where that marriage seemed to him most fully in evidence—is (or, rather, should be) the reigning art of the day.