Deeply offensive' Outcry at plan for history theme park over links to the far right

Spectacular shows with Viking longboats, Roman charioteers and sword-wielding knights have helped Le Puy du Fou to become the second-most popular theme park in France.

- Rob Davies

Now the company has set its sights on bringing its brand of immersive history to the UK via a £600m investment to build its mock medieval castles, hotels and restaurants on farmland just off the M40 in Oxfordshire.

It has asked the upmarket property firm Savills to help with its planning applications and is expected to look for British co-investors for a project that it says will create thousands of jobs.

Some near the site, however, are dismayed at the lack of attention to what they see as the French firm's dark underbelly, including ties to the far right and flirtation with Vladimir Putin.

They question who their prospective neighbours really are and what version of British history they plan to tell.

The founder and patriarch of Le Puy du Fou is Philippe de Villiers, the scion of an aristocratic family who conceived the project in the 1970s after discovering a ruined and nettle-covered Renaissance castle in the Vendée region of western France.

The park quickly flourished and now welcomes more than 2.8 million visitors a year, putting it second only to Disneyland Paris.

De Villiers has also devoted time to politics.

The party he founded in 1994, Mouvement pour la France, called for a ban on the construction of new mosques and a prohibition on gay marriage and same-sex adoption.

De Villiers still has a weekly political television show, on which he regularly rails against immigration and Islam.

At the funeral last month of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's Front National party, De Villiers sat among the most prominent guests, who also included his longtime associate and friend, the far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour.