Le Petit Musée de Guignol
Puppet museum tracing a satirical folk character born from a street dentist's crowd-pulling act.
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About this audio guide
This guide to Le Petit Musee de Guignol in Lyon follows Laurent Mourguet, a Lyon silk worker who turned street dentist around 1804 and invented a puppet character to draw a crowd before pulling teeth. It traces how that puppet, later joined by the cobbler Gnafron and Guignol's wife Madelon, became a stand-in for a working city that mocked landlords, tax collectors and the police. By 1852, new decrees required every script to be submitted for approval before a show could open, and improvisation was banned outright.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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