Confessions d'Histoire (literally translated as Confessions of History) is a French YouTube-based Edutainment Show created and written by Ugo Bimar.
As the title implies, it consists in parodic interviews of historical characters who detail their life and/or the historical events they went through as if they were in a Reality TV show. Expect plenty of Black Comedy and Gallows Humor.
For the recap page, see here.
General tropes:
- Altar Diplomacy: As with Real Life, marriages among royal figures most often happen for diplomatic reasons.
- Anachronism Stew: The deliberate format, of course. And the vocabulary the characters use is very much modern-day like in keeping with the Confession Cam thing. Unless there are era-specific terms, in which cases they are always explained. Then there's the multiple Shout Outs to modern works.
- Anachronic Order: The episodes don't follow history in chronological order, the subject of an episode can go back a few centuries from the previous one.
- Black Comedy: Crushing and bloody battles, assassinations and deaths are generally treated in a humorous way.
- Boss Subtitles: Every important character starts with a subtitle under his/her name that laconically indicates his/her historical status. Then the subtitles funnily change with each of his/her appearances. Eleanor of Aquitaine for instance gets gossip magazine titles, Louis VII gets "Action Comics" for his retelling of an epic battle he took part in, and Richard the Lionheart and Philippe II Auguste get "Heckle and Jeckle".
- Butt-Monkey: Armenia is sort of this for the series, with conquests and massacres happening there regularly from the first century BC to the Crusades. And yes, there's a Call-Forward to the 1910s genocide at one point. And invasions/massacres happening there are always mentioned in addition to other unpleasant things happening on a bigger scale.
- Chromosome Casting:
- The first episode (about the Gallic Wars) features only male characters.
- Eleanor of Aquitaine (third episode) points out it was about time for a historical woman to be interviewed in the series (the Gallic Wars episode had no female character, and the two wives of Caliph Al-Mustazhir from the First Crusade episode are not interviewed).
- "The Beauty Tutorial of Agnès Sorel" features two women and no-one else.
- Creative Closing Credits: The closing credits mostly feature the episodes' actors interacting with the onset crew and still in character.
- Leitmotif: A duduk
music leitmotif is used whenever Armenia is talked about. - Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Battles are always talked about before and/or after they happened, but never shown.
- Parody: Of Confession Cam-based Reality TV shows, and of historical events and characters themselves.
- Shout-Out: There are multiple references to modern pop culture, including modern depictions of the interviewed historical characters.
- Special Guest: Some well known French actors have played roles in that web series such as Armelle Deutsch as Eleanor of Aquitaine, Amaury de Crayencour as Henry the Second, Zinedine Soualem as Saladin or Boris Rehlinger (a prominent voice actor, the French dub voice of Ben Affleck and Colin Farrell among others) as Kleitos the Black.
- Tagline: "L'Histoire racontée par ceux qui l'ont vécue." ("History told by those who lived it.")
