Papin, Bernard <br/><br/>
When TV Drama Breaks Free of History: Denouements, Playful Twists, and Media Constraints 

 -  2015.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 52 
<br/><br/> In the final twist of a TV costume drama broadcast on France 2 in December 2009, Louis-Dominique Bourguignon, a.k.a Cartouche, “the magnificent outlaw” of France’s Régence period, miraculously—as regards what history tells us—escapes execution by breaking on the wheel and retires to the West Indies to live a happy, peaceful life. Has fiction, historical fiction at that, in the name of creative and design freedom, the right to disregard the path of a person’s life that shaped their personal fate? Is it possible to change the ending, to choose to alter the crucial conclusion that gives an entire life its meaning, for the simple sake of a happy ending? In principle, “the end of a historical narrative, planned externally, cannot be made up” (Claude Duchet). In that case, why and by what right, did director Henri Helman and his writers feel free from “the good old truth of plain facts” (Yannick Haenel)? Inevitably, questioning the strategy behind narrative endings necessarily entails raising a wide range of complex questions that cannot be disregarded—nor exhausted: what should the relationship between fiction and historical reality be? What does historical truth mean? How and for what purpose does one read or watch drama, particularly historical drama? Inspired by Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s research, this article proposes a “pragmatic” answer based on three major assumptions that we presented for the director’s consideration during a 2011 interview he was kind enough to give us about his and the channel’s intentions when devising the drama. First, we will look at the constraints in programming and format, in regard to the promises in terms of TV genre, that may have weighed in favor of this literally unheard-of denouement. This will lead to an assessment of TV productions “from the double point of view of their causal genealogy (how are they produced?) and their uses (how are they used and how do they work?),” and not just “testing them for their truth” (Jean-Marie Schaeffer).