About Giants

If Les Grandes Personnes parade with giant puppets rather than performing fleas, it’s not only because they are more visible, easier to display, more successful as sculptures on the scale of the city. It is also because they let us get back in touch with the giants of our legends, of all the legends of the world.
They are our predecessors on the planet; searchers when they discovered the first fossilised bones were fascinated by their extreme size and hardness and concluded that they belonged to prehistoric giants.
Titans, Cyclopes or ogres, they shaped the earth.

Just for fun, they threw mountain peaks into the Mediterranean and created islands. They precisely assembled enormous blocks to form the walls of the Mycenaean and the Tiryns. Elsewhere, dolmens and menhirs served as their gravestones or else tables and stools. They were perhaps also our ancestors. At any rate, the giant Er-Töshtürk engendered the Kirghiz, Soslan the Ossetians.
Their vitality is often thuggish, disorderly and even mutinous. They are not the type to be happy with little. Some like Briareos climbed the heavens to challenge the gods. Others robbed secrets: Prometheus stole those of fire and Gilgamesh that of immortality. Still others lived on volcanos where their immense strength was used to forge rings and shields.
Who incarnated so massively the desire to pace out immense spaces, to know everything that could be learned, to devour all that is offered? The perfect example is Rabelais’s Gargantua.
Of course, the gods took their vengeance… Bright little warriors, like Theseus, William and Arthur conquered the giants. But they did not erase their presence. They are still there, on the hillside of Cerne Abbas in England, in the names of streets and villages, in the carnivals of Europe and elsewhere.