The Time A Mob of Angry Carnies Attacked France’s Newest Amusement Park

And doomed it to failure

(By Mdkoch84 — Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4267324)

The late 1980s saw an explosion of new amusement parks in France. Three new French theme parks opened in the space of a decade, eventually being capped off with the opening of Disney’s new European park in Paris. The competition and interest in these new parks caused one French journalist to dub it “The War of the Theme Parks.” For the most part, this new interest in amusement parks in France was a financial disaster, with many of the parks hemorrhaging millions of dollars, including Disney Paris.

But there was one point in this “War of the Theme Parks” where things actually turned violent.

In order to help subsidize the building of Disney’s new park in Paris, France decided to lower their VAT (Value Added Tax) rate for amusement parks from 18% to 7%. However, in doing so, they did not include traditional fairgrounds and carnivals, which made up the lion’s share of the market at the time. The result enraged fairground workers and carnies across France who were afraid that they were being squeezed out in favor of large corporate parks.

This change to the tax code also happened to coincide with the opening of a new park by the name of Mirapolis, which aimed to be a French version of Disney World. The timing…