A circus is a troupe of artists, traditionally itinerant, which most often includes acrobats, offers training and animal taming acts and gives clown shows, juggling and magic tricks. More generally in the 21st century, the circus is a popular live performance organized around a circular stage. The term circus comes from the Latin circus, in reference to a circular enclosure.

Its characteristics have changed a lot over time. Today, the circus exists without its circular stage, indoors or in particular places, alongside plays, dances, etc. The name circus has been “reduced” to the sole practice of a circus discipline (acrobatics, aerial, balances, manipulation/juggling, etc.). With the appearance of circus schools in France and abroad at the end of the 20th century, circus artists emancipated themselves from the traditional family and very few of them are children of the ball. The name has also been a subject of contention since the 1970s between traditional circus purists and those who use the same word to practice an art that is ultimately very different.

Astley's Circus

The Western conception of the circus is inspired in one way or another by ancient Roman games as well as the jugglers and troubadours of the Middle Ages. The term circus comes from the Latin word circus, “circle” relating to the circular enclosure where ancient circus activities took place.

The first performance of a modern circus in London dates from April 7, 17681 and is the work of Philip Astley. A veteran returning from America, he decided to represent equestrian shows with acrobatic demonstrations in Philip Astley's riding school, an equestrian school in which the first circular track was built to be able to hold the horses from the center, at the end of the chamber (long-handled whips used by horse trainers) whose length determined the international dimension of the diameter of the track, 13.50 m2. The marriage of the military equestrian world and the fairground world around the circle was established when Astley brightened up his show with jugglers, pantomimes and other acrobats, adding seats and a conical roof to his ring in 17733. This new form of spectacle, based essentially on equestrian exercises, was then introduced to France in 1774 by Astley who opened the first stable and permanent circus establishment, the English Amphitheater, an establishment taken over in 1807 by Antonio Franconi and his descendants4. It was only in the 19th century during waves of colonization that the first wild animals were introduced into France and Germany, taming being created according to tradition in 1819 by the squire Henri Martin who subdued a tiger from the Van Aken menagerie in Bavaria and imagines a method combining violence and gentleness5. Already at the time Monsieur Loyal, master of the carousel and presenter of the circus show, a real common thread and reference point between the acts, was already present6.
Old-fashioned circus
Circus Franconi: riding exercises, Consulate period.

The liberal regime of the Third Republic in France favored the democratization of leisure. If the theater remained the most legitimate type of spectacle, the circus was then the subject of great enthusiasm because it reached two types of audiences: the aristocrats who recognized themselves in the squires embodying the aristocracy of the circus and the art equestrian, central element in the collective identity of the nobility since the Middle Ages, and the pe